announcements

This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Ludrol, in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT
@Ludrol@szmer.info avatar

I didn’t ask early enough but I will shoot anyway.

What you intend to do with !anime? There isn’t an active mod there and community is unwilling to continue using it due to defederation with ani.social The problems with community will keep arise due to very nature of Japanese animation and differences in acceptable social norms in western world.

Grayox,
@Grayox@lemmy.ml avatar

Why did they defederate

Ludrol,
@Ludrol@szmer.info avatar

lemmy.ml/post/10284661

No clear reason stated.

ForumYesterday,

It’s a known pedophile instance.

hendrik, (edited ) in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

Since I read a few comments here… What is your oppinion on more democratic platforms? I mean something like electing moderators. (Or dropping them in a democratic process.) Or voting for other things in a community.

(This is more a hypothetical question. I guess with the architecture as is, it can easily be exploited. And there is no way to implement this properly without severe changes and consequences.)

dessalines,

We’ve talked about it elsewhere, on github and one of these Q and A’s, but the main thing is that these things can be easily gamed. IE: making a ton of fake users to vote for a malicious mod.

There’s a ton of ways that could be exploited that I can’t think of rn. I’d rather not stress test them in lemmy.

calavera, in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

Hi again,

1 - Now that there are multiple apps for lemmy, wouldn’t be better to handover jerboa to someone else and focus more on core lemmy?

2 - How was the inception moment for lemmy? When and how did you decided to leave reddit and create something new and how was the first couple months?

Thanks and come to Brazil ;)

dessalines,

Thx!

  1. Jerboa has another major contributor now besides me. But I’d also like to keep a hand in it, simply because I made it and its also the main app I use for lemmy. Besides a few other people, no one has stepped up to get involved with it enough that I’d. Plus I’d eventually like to add it to the LemmyNet repo, as it will soon implement all of the features in lemmy-ui, making it an “official” and native app.
  2. Reddit has been banning communist / leftist communities for a while, so a lot of us were looking at different reddit alternatives. I found that none of them had a great tech stack, none of them had federation, and a few were unwelcoming to contributions. It made sense to do a “what if reddit, but open source, made in rust, and self-hostable”. It was a great opportunity to teach myself rust also.
iso, in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT
@iso@lemy.lol avatar

Seeing my PR here made me feel good. 3 months and ~60 commits for only one lil field was too much 😅

It’s very nice and reassuring that all the commits are audited subtly though.

SovietReporter, in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

When are we getting polls in a similar format that Reddit does? I would love to have those!!

dessalines,

No specific time, but they are in the linked roadmap for this year.

0x2d,

nice!

SovietReporter, in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

Could the imperialist power take down lemmy if they really wanted to?

Alsephina,

Assuming this isn’t a bit they would most definitely try and probably succeed in taking down any platform that poses a real threat to Capital^TM^

But I doubt lemmy will get that massive anytime soon as cool as that would be lol

OnlyTakesLs, in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

Should there be a way for users to formally protest mods? Or admins?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

I dont know, should there?

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

I’m curious too, depending on the instance, users can general escalate to admins, and then leave the instance if necessary.

Alsephina,

Well right now a user can already just message the admins about any problematic mod and let them decide so…

SovietReporter, (edited )

Yes!!! Mods becoming crazy with power is a real thing!!

dessalines,

I don’t think we should bake in anything to the software, but instances having meta and feedback communities are a good idea.

diamat, (edited ) in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT
@diamat@lemmy.ml avatar

First of thanks a lot for the effort that you put into creating lemmy. You have created a really friendly and welcoming place!

I have a question regarding licenses. When you started developing lemmy, what were the reasons for your choice of the AGPL? As you are marxist-leninists, did you also look into other licenses like the the Anti-Capitalist Software License?

dessalines,

To me, AGPL is the most pragmatic choice. As a hard copy-left license, it enforces derivative works to adopt the same license, unlike the more open and “soft” copy-left licenses that let corporations capture and digitally enclose your labor as they see fit.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

AGPL was already used by most existing Fediverse platforms, and ensures that all code changes need to be published. Its basically an improvement over GPL which also takes effect when the software is hosted on a server, not running on the user’s computer.

The Anti-Capitalist Software License is not an open source software license.

That alone rules it out.

hendrik, (edited ) in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

How’s development going? Do you have enough funds to pay your salaries? Did the EU fund run out? What’s your workload? Is the amount of full-time developers enough to work on new features? Or is it barely enough to keep up?

How do you like Lemmy and the people on it? (As of now)

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

We are getting about 4000 Euros per month which is not much to pay for two developers, so more donations would definitely be nice. From NLnet Dessalines and I still have a few milestones leftover from 2022 but those should be finished very soon. We could definitely use more developers, its impossible to keep up with all the issues so we have to try and prioritize the most important ones.

The people on Lemmy are generally very nice, so I cant complain.

Obi,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

I see you think in euros, where are you guys from?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Im from Germany, living in Spain.

Obi,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

Nice, hope you are enjoying the fair weather and delicious food :) keep up the good work. Guten tag!

hendrik, (edited ) in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

Have you put measures into place to assure the quality of future updates? In the past several updates have caused issues. And recently 0.19.x broke federation for the most of us. And it took weeks to fix it and make Lemmy usable again.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

We publish multiple release candidates and run them on lemmy.ml before the final release. That allows the community to test changes. We dont have a quality assurance team, and developers are notoriously bad at testing their own code, so I dont see what we can improve in this regard.

hendrik,

developers are notoriously bad at testing their own code, so I dont see what we can improve in this regard.

Sounds like software development… I mean automated tests help. But you’re developing a distributed/federated platform. Unit tests won’t do it. Maybe infrastructure that spins up a small fleet of instances and checks their ability to federate posts, delete comments and simulates interaction. That’d assure the most important aspects keep working. And I think there are tools for that available. But I get it. It’s complicated, there are real-world instances with special (niche) setups, you’re constrained, it has to be worth the effort and there are other important things to do.

Maybe just do your best not to break too many things and we (users) can complain and have another discussion only if it’s a reoccurring problem. 😉

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

We have lots of unit tests, and also a test suite which launches a couple of local lemmy instances and ensures that they federate as expected. But it’s not possible to cover every single functionality, at least not with our limited resources. The problems all happened with things that are difficult to test and had major breaking changes in this release. In the future we won’t need such breaking changes so there will be less problems.

Also keep in mind that Lemmy is provided for free and as is. We have no legal obligation to users. And you can always stay with an older version if you want more stability.

hendrik, (edited )

Thank you very much for explaining, and the whole AMA.

Concerning the “providing the project for free”… I think that’s too simplistic. I mean users have expectations anyways. And you must have some motivation to maintain an open source project. Otherwise you wouldn’t put it out there, engage with your users, fix their issues and incorporate their requests. Or you’d make that clear in the first line of the Readme as some people do.

I think open source is giving and taking. It’s not about legal obligations (we usually waive every responsibility in every open source license.) But perhaps ethically. I as a user feel obligated to honor and respect your work and the time you’ve put in. And I shouldn’t expect anything except for everyone abides by the license. But the devs aren’t the only one putting in time and effort. Downstream are admins who run the actual instances. There might be an ethical obligation to not waste their time either. And there are moderators and users who make the platform become alive. They also offer their time for free and are part of the ecosystem, like the developers are. And ethically it is correct to treat people nice who put in a few hours to prepare a proper pull request and work towards the same goal as core developers.

And there are a few unique circumstances. This is a social network/link aggregator. And as such it relies to some degree on the network effect. It won’t work without a certain amount of users and them being happy here. Lemmy devs seem (to me) invested in the project and not just coding something for money. So you want it to be successful and catering for users is part of the equation. Additionally the users of a social network trust the platform with their private data. You can’t take legal responsibility for that. But if you accept users doing that, it’s at least an ethical obligation to make good choices.

And the situation is: Since you have a few full-time developers… It’s not a hobby project anymore. So it’s a bit more complicated. And money might come with expectations. I personally differentiate between donations that are meant as a bounty, this money comes with obligations. And donations for the great work you’ve done so far. These come without.

I think you’re doing a good job. I especially like that Lemmy development doesn’t seem to be focused on growth above all. You could implement things differently and completely focus on not showing user-facing issues, in order to assure fast growth. Or write a Reddit clone like some people would like, including gamification, awards and stuff. But you don’t seem to be interested in that. And that aligns well with what I like. I want a nice place to engage with people. I don’t need another platform that is commercial and does things in order to be successful at the market.

I’m grateful. There are still bugs and a few more complicated annoyances I’d like to see being addressed. But I really enjoy spending some of my time here.

hendrik, (edited ) in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

When do we get advanced moderation features? And for example the ability to block all users from a single instance to prevent for example brigading? I mean for the user, so we don’t have to rely on defederation so much.

Are you planning to revamp defederation? I mean it’s rather complicated the way it works and the triangle that is the user’s instance, the other user’s instance and the instance the community is located.

What about features like automatically kicking of moderators / revoking their ownership. In the early days of the Reddit exodus, some people reserved lots of communities just so they’d be the owner of the community, but they don’t do anything with it. I think admins mostly already dealt with that. But there are ideas floating around to migitate for things like that and other common annoyances. I think good moderation is key (and the tools that go with that and the whole architecture of the platform should favor a good atmosphere.)

nutomic, (edited )
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

When do we get advanced moderation features? And for example the ability to block all users from a single instance to prevent for example brigading? I mean for the user, so we don’t have to rely on defederation so much.

This could be added to the existing instance block feature, but so far no one has even bothered to open an issue I think.

Are you planning to revamp defederation? I mean it’s rather complicated the way it works and the triangle that is the user’s instance, the other user’s instance and the instance the community is located.

Its very simple and effective in that in prevents all network connections to the blocked instance. So I dont think it makes sense to change that, but other tools can be added on top for more fine-grained restrictions (eg user-level instance blocks in 0.19).

hendrik, (edited ) in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

When and how are you going to address the thousands of open issues in the Github repository, that contain UI bugs, missing error messages (something looks as if it was sent for example if you send a direct message with too many characters, but actually isn’t), backend issues and other assorted bugs?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

When we have about a dozen more developers. So far only dessalines and i work on Lemmy fulltime, and besides solving issues we also have to review pull requests, prepare releases and much more. So its just not enough time to keep up with all the new issues let alone resolve the whole backlog.

hendrik, (edited )

Thank you. A follow-up question: You sound like most things have to be done by full-time developers. Is there a healthy open-source community around Lemmy development? Do people submit enough pull-requests to fix bugs? Do people from the community contribute a substancial amount? features?

dessalines, (edited )

We’re no different from 99% of open source projects: there are a lot of one-off contributors that just do a feature or two they’d like to have, but the vast majority of work is done by a handful of core devs. This is why you should always base your infrastructure and decisions to support those devs, rather than cater to one-off contributors.

hendrik, (edited )

I hope those wants and needs aren’t mutually exclusive. I think most open source projects do a good job in catering for both. I’m not involved in Lemmy development so I don’t really know what’s going on here. But I’ve sent one-off contribution to various projects, sometimes contributed single features or helped to sort something out. It always felt appreciated.

Sure, a drive-by commit every now and then and no responsibility is a completely different level than maintaining a (large) project and putting in that effort and dedication. I think a healthy open source project has both. Maintenance and the responsibility/decisions by a core team. And the community contributions make up by adding diversity, being close to what the user needs and adding manpower by a larger group of people, meaning the individual contributions might be smaller, but by many more people. Good communication between the devs and the community usually helps to get quality contributions.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Of course contributions by volunteers are also welcome. However there are very few of those who are consistently contributing (particularly phiresky and sleepless one mentioned in op). And because they have a fulltime job their contributions are much smaller than mine or dessalines’. After the Reddit migration lots of people opened pull requests to implement new features, but most of them were abandoned after noticing how much work it takes to address review comments and actually get the pr merged. So fulltime devs seem very much preferable because they can put their full attention to Lemmy, and get a lot more done.

glibg10b, in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

Please stop using time zone abbreviations. Everyone can read an offset (UTC +02:00 in this case). But almost everyone has to look up the abbreviation

dessalines,

I linked a timezone convert link (before I updated the post), which I think I’d have to do even if we used the UTC offset format. I must be just far away enough from UTC to not know what my offset is at any given time.

Microw,

No, I can not read an offset. Because we have summer time and winter time here, and I dont instantly know what the offset is for which one.

toastal,

Developing countries still catching up to the no-DST of the rest of the world. Asia, Africa, Central/South America 💪

davidgro, (edited )

Time math gets a bit difficult far enough from UTC. Where I live virtually any event in Europe or Asia will be happening on a different day there than here, so it’s not fun to try and figure in one’s head.

The only universal solution is to link to a converter site.

Personally I wish everything supported the automaticly-converting timestamps I’ve seen in Discord which just show up in local time or as a countdown.

InfiniteFlow, in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT
@InfiniteFlow@lemmy.world avatar

Is federated authentication being considered for the future? The federated model of the fediverse is great, but it runs into problems when instances “die”, you want to access different servers as they federate with different things, etc. leading to the need of having multiple accounts. If there were a decentralized network of auth servers, could use the same credentials everywhere.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Then your (hashed) password would have to be copied to all servers, and the email as well for password reset. Seems very problematic for security.

dessalines, (edited )

No, Activitypub isn’t based on a migrating authentication / single-sign-on model, but on server-to-server communication.

Instances with many users already on them dying should be a rare occurrence, and its unfortunate that it happens not just for us, but in the whole fediverse.

toastal, (edited ) in Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

Will the source code ever move off of proprietary Microsoft GitHub where users need to have an account to contribute & search code—or certain users are blocked due to US sanctions? If the idea is wanting to stand up against centralized US-corpo-controlled social media for forums, why use that US-megacorpate-controlled code forge / social media platform?

1984, (edited )
@1984@lemmy.today avatar

I think it’s fine. You won’t influence anything about US by using a worse collaboration platform. If Lemmy becomes more and more popular, it may eventually become a real alternative for the masses. That’s what the goal should be - not avoiding github.

It’s better to be smart here.

toastal,

Some alternative forges offer better features (or less social cruft) & are faster (some are not even limited to Git!)… what you will get is the ability to own the code & community along with set the terms instead of letting Microsoft set them for your community & be the gatekeeper for who gets to have access. If you wanted a corporate, centralized, proprietary forum go back to Reddit/Twitter; if you think that’s a terrible recommendation, in the same spirit you should leave behind corporate, centralized, proprietary code forges.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

So far these problems are mostly theoretical, in practice Github works fine. But once Forgejo gets federation working we will probably migrate to a selfhosted instance.

dessalines,

I’d also be in favor of moving to Forgejo once federation gets fully functioning, and reliable.

phiresky,

I agree that it’s not ideal to be hosted on a platform controlled by Microsoft, but it’s just a fact that you lose 90+% of contributors if you are anywhere else (there’s an article where someone compared, can’t find it right now). It’s not great that that’s how it is, but you need to choose your battles.

I’m not really very concerned, since git itself is decentralized, and if Github starts causing visible problems moving somewhere else is not a huge problem. Also VPNs exist.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

I’ve seen projects shed significant numbers of contributors by moving off GitHub. RIP

aeharding, (edited )
@aeharding@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, tbh the worst vendor lock-in part of Github (edit: other than the aformentioned social aspect) is Github Releases. And Lemmy doesn’t really use them.

dessalines,

Its unfortunate that we (and it seems like 99% of other Rust projects), do their issue tracking on github. We have multiple mirrors set up for Lemmy, so the code is safe from takedowns, but the issue tracker is a concern.

The main issue I’ve had is: if we migrate, I want that migration to be permanent, and for me a requirement for that is federated collaboration. I’ve had codeberg remove a torrent project of mine to comply with German law, and gitlab has most of the same problems of github. Self-hosted gitea instances work, but many people just don’t contribute to them when they have to make an account on each one.

You’ll see below that Lemmy’s two main devs are in favor of migrating our issue tracking to forgejo, once federation gets reliably up and running.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • announcements@lemmy.ml
  • localhost
  • All magazines
  • Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #