This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.
Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.
How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?
Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named
!news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:This also isn’t unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.
Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.
There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.
Overall tho, I’m against the concept of “combining / merging communities” that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.
I’m gonna be asking hard questions, I think, sorry about that. I hope you consider it tough love considering our past interactions.
As an instance admin, I have some questions:
-
How are you doing? I know there was a lot of pressure when things blew up and it seems to be calming down a bit now.
-
How is Lemmy doing financially?
-
Considering past releases and their associated breaking bugs (including 0.18.3), what measures are you taking to help prevent that?
-
Can we consider the possibility of downgrades being supported?
-
Why are bugs affecting moderation not release blockers? Does anything block releases?
-
Are there plans to give instance administrators a voice in shaping the future of Lemmy’s development?
As someone who is trying to help with Lemmy’s development, I have some other questions:
- What do you think are the biggest problems with Lemmy as a software project and what are your priorities for Lemmy?
- Considering fairly low amounts of developers contributing to Lemmy, how are you working to help new people get into the project?
- Do you worry about the message it sends to potential contributors when the main developers are working on a different project which competes with the former? (Example: Lemmy-ui vs Lemmy-ui-Leptos)
- Considering most work is done voluntarily, how are you trying to organize and prioritize work?
- Do you believe you are stretching yourself too thin between Lemmy, Lemmy-ui, Lemmy-ui-leptos, Jerboa and Lemmy.ml? If so, what are you doing to help you focus?
Wow lots of questions here.
- Im doing well, its exciting to know that so many people like the software Ive worked on for the last years. The first month after the migration was really stressful, but by now its calmed down a lot. Plus there are many contributors now which are helping a lot.
- Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
- I think the “breaking bugs” were really minor considering how we had to constantly rush out performance and security fixes. This should get better as we dont need to make emergency fixes, and have more time to let the community test release candidates before making the full release.
- Supporting downgrades means that someone has to test them and report/fix problems. We dont have time for that, but feel free to do it.
- Like I said, our recent releases had urgent performance/security fixes so we didnt have enough time for testing. We also didnt find out about these problems until later. Part of the problem is that keeping up with issues is almost a full-time job on its own, so I rarely read them anymore. If you see something important reported, do let me know.
- No concrete plans, but I definitely think that admins are the main actors who should have a voice in development. Its impossible for us to listen to all the individual users, because there are too many and they often dont have the necessary technical knowledge. If you have some ideas how to facilitate communication between devs and admins, let me know.
Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.
Alright second part:
- The biggest problem is definitely that there are too many things to do, but only the two of us working on it fulltime. The day only has so many hours and its impossible to keep up with everything. Thats why community contributions are really important.
- The amount of contributors is very high compared to a few months ago, its not easy to keep up with all the pull requests. Its going to take some time for processes to adjust to the new scale, and for new contributors to learn how everything works.
- This is a question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml
- People work on whatever they are passionate about. Generally that works quite well.
- I am only working on Lemmy and thats already a lot. So another question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml
-
Any thoughts on adding emoji (or custom) reactions to posts? Might be a fun free alternative to Reddit’s award system. Might just add clutter.
Edit: nvm, found an open issue where you said you’d like to add it but there are lots of other things to do first: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2541
I generally like awards, but on Reddit I’ve completely ignored them on posts. It was just too many of them.
I liked the awards for comments though, as they helped pick out comments from the bottomless pit. Not really a problem on Lemmy yet…
Will you implement an sorting algorithm that would show more content from small, neglected, unknown communities/instances on the main /all/ timeline so that they are more discoverable and will be seen rather than only showing the most-liked posts from huge communities/instances?
Wish we could have the fediverse of instant messaging.
Fediverse instant messaging could work like email, just like how someone with gmail id can send mail to yahoo id.
username@whatsapp sending messages to username@telegram, that’s how it could work
Have a look at https://matrix.org
What’s your oppinion on lemmy being used by a few hundreds of people for quite some time and then recently exploding overnight with new instances and tens of thousands of new users. That certeinly changed some things…
Will lemmy users be able to interact with Mastodon users in future and is there a roadmap for lemmy?
Isn’t there already some interop between Mastodon and Lemmy? I’ve seen Mastodon users comment on my Lemmy posts. Maybe Mastodon posts that aren’t replies don’t appear in Lemmy.
They speak the same protocol, but afaik Lemmy doesn’t really have a concept of following Posts from a user instead of Posts to a community, so you won’t see Mastodon posts on Lemmy.
I asked in the other thread about GDPR.
Nobody thinks it’s very interesting but if instances don’t follow gdpr, the entire network is at risk of legal consequences.
So please bring this up, even though it’s not very fun.
Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don’t know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn’t do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.
We have a
Legalsection under admin settings, that’s an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We’d need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.You don’t have to bother with GDPR until you’re a certain size company
That’s what I thought too until I looked it up. It applies to individuals as well.
If an individual runs a web server and processes personal data of individuals within the European Union, then they are subject to the requirements of GDPR. GDPR applies to anyone, including individuals, who processes personal data of EU residents, regardless of whether they are operating as a business or on a personal basis. It’s important for the individual running the web server to comply with GDPR’s data protection principles and obligations to safeguard the personal data they process.
What does “processing” data mean though?
Basically, anything that involves the data being present somewhere in information systems that you control. Taking decisions based on it, displaying it on a webpage, make decisions based on it, even just storing it, all counts as processing under GDPR.
Why Unicode usernames aren’t supported yet? After all, a big part of the world’s population don’t use the Latin alphabet in their native languages.
Simple, no one has implemented it. Dessalines and I are busy with lots of things, so we rely on community contributions.
Tbh I think the display names as they currently work are dangerous. What would prevent me from setting my display name to
nutomic@lemmy.ml? Most front-ends would not show that I’m actually not you at first glance.Edit: Misread the question as being about display names. Full unicode support for usernames would be even more dangerous, basically opening the door to unicode homograph spoofing on that level too.
The display name would stick out like a sore thumb. Either it’s the only one with an @instance.name on it, or it’s the only one with 2 @instance.names.
Which front end would show both names? On (mobile and desktop) web and in Jerboa I only see the display name if it’s set. And the only limitation seems to be that a leading @ is not allowed.
Any thoughts on the “federated community” discussion? I find both positions to have merit, but I think I’m leaning towards community aggregation as an option.
Interested in this as well. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work as described by the pro-aggregation side of the discussions.
My thoughts as a user first, dev way later:
-
All links should be fully qualified by default. This way, sharing a post or community is straightforward.
-
The default view of a community /c/foo should be the aggregation of all the posts of all the linked instances’ /c/foo communities.
(If you only allow trusted linked instances, moderation should not be a big issue in the beginning. Because a rogue instance with potential spam wouldn’t be linked, right?) -
The default view of your frontpage should probably also be All instead of Local. Because it’s just less confusing for a new user. I suspect you first want to read and see what’s going on - before you want to settle yourself in a community …
What are your thoughts?
-
Is there any limitations with the database (postgres)?. I know postgres is one of the best (maybe even best) monolith database (running on one node) at the moment, but will the space be enough? With this in mind, has there been any consideration of migrating to a distributed database like ScyllaDB or CassanraDB to alleviate potential space constraints? On the other hand, if Lemmy doesn’t intend to store data for long periods, maybe the capacity of Postgres would suffice. Any thoughts or plans on this? I appreciate your insights on this matter.
will uploading audio files become a thing? as a musician i need it
One of the biggest burdens on people running lemmy servers, is the disk space taken up by images. Currently the internet has a massive problem with image (and other data in general) duplication: images get posted to 9 different platforms, copied everywhere, with none of them sharing any of the hosting costs.
The static data distribution problem, is actually a completely solved problem: via torrents. The user experience of this tho, needs to be improved across the board in apps and web UIs. Lemmy’s markdown fields do support torrent links, but there’s no easy “upload audio” or “upload video” button, which ideally should hook in to an in-browser or system-wide torrent app.
I’d love to see comment trees of audio and video replies, but to me this isn’t doable, and would explode server costs, unless someone devotes time to the solution above. In the meantime, people will just have to use other services to upload their audio / video content and link to it, or ideally, create torrents and share magnet links.
This is interesting, I’ve never considered torrents for this exact case before. Has anyone done any groundwork to figure out what this would look like from a systems level? I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the big picture - where the seeders come from, what are the incentives to keep certain kinds of data resilient, how to keep complexity away from the clients, etc.
The thing that came to my mind is to have all torrent links in some kind of blockchain, where new torrent links can be added all the time and if someone wants to help the community they can just download all the torrent links from the blockchain and help seeding the torrents. These can be images, videos, audios or whatever else. The problem hereby is it can get really big really fast. This could be prevented by adding size limits for specific file types and also removing torrents from the blockchain, which werent used by a user for a long time. Effectively we would have to add a counter for visits in the last 6months and also the last viewed date from a user for each torrent. That way old, not frequentely accessed data would be deleted and prevent the size to get too big.
This general approach would prevent data loss but also help decentralize data. Of course this is just a concept which just came to my mind but it should be possible to implement i think
Right now, instances with transphobic and racist content like exploding-heads are still listed on join-lemmy.org. Are you planning to implement a Server Convenant like on joinmastodon.org? To be listed on joinmastodon.org, an instance needs “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.
Wasnt free speech all about being able to express your opinion without getting banned?
The instance list is fine as is. Think about it like this: do you want racists to join a single instance so they are all in one place? Or do you want them to spread across all different instances, causing moderation problems everywhere?
i would rather want the racists to not be able to go anywhere at all
It doesnt really matter what you want. The software is open source so anyone can use the software freely. No way to prevent it.
yea sure there will always be racist instances but they shouldn’t be promoted on sites like join-lemmy.org
It’s possible that anti-racist, queer or any other serious organisations might not want to link to join-lemmy.org because of it.
Thats fine, they can provide their own list of instances where users can choose from.
They are on your list (which is seen as the official one by many and has most visits) to guide transphobes and fascists to their fitting community?? Exploding-heads is not labeled as transphobe and fascist on join-lemmy. So that does’t make sense.
Yes, I think it would be best if they would all gather on one instance that can get defederated. Right now they attract users on join-lemmy with “Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable”, no other info.
And if the racist is here to cause problems rather than commiserate with fellow racists, they now know exactly which community to avoid, thus restoring moderation problems everywhere. I don’t think anyone is asking you to moderate every instance to ensure they are sticking to your TOS or your viewpoints, but it’s a very minor ask to not showcase off the racists and transphobes and bigots on the ‘join this platform’ page.
There are plenty of other instance lists across the internet. So its not even a real solution for your theoretical problem.
I don’t think the people raising this as a concern are trying to solve the problem of bigots on the internet; they are just asking for you to change the advertising you provide to remove the bigots from a place of visibility.
And then we should block lemmygrad, lemmy.world, hexbear and hundreds of other instances? Thats not gonna happen. If you want to block instances, do that on the beehaw side.
I’m not here to proselytize about what we decide to block or not. I’m explaining what the person above is requesting - not a block, but a conscious decision about what shows up on the join-lemmy list.
Sorry, no question, only: Thank you for your hard work :)
Do you aim for Lemmy to become GDPR-compatible in the future ( see https://gdpr-info.eu/ for details)?
