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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Will Lemmy ever become more of an organization? I’m slightly concerned about hostile take overs and or major changes that could be driven by personal views or bias.
Also a organization could facilitate cooperation and organize events.
If Lemmy does become more of an organization, it would be nice to have a level of public assurance over any control exerted by the organization. A lot of people see that the lead developers of Lemmy are communist and shy away from it based merely on that. I have one of the oldest accounts on Lemmy, I’ve seen plenty of them, and my impression is that they have conducted themselves with only the utmost ethics. However, it can still help newcomers who don’t want to feel like someone might be breathing down their neck.
Lemmy is somewhat protected by being an AGPL-licensed project, preventing proprietarization. If there’s ever a relicensing effort, ba fearful.
I’m not sure what exactly becoming a organization would entail, but so far I’d say the development part is not really large enough? For me I would start being suspicious when a significant amount of dev power came from compan(ies), but so far no company has shown any interest afaik.
There’s already been a few forks, for example lemmynsfw has made some changes on their side, which nutomic is now looking to integrate back into lemmy.
As a multi-national open source dev team, it would only complicate our lives to try to set up a more formal legal structure.
I wouldn’t be too afraid of hostile takeovers: this is a dev-run-and-controlled project. People will go where the development is, and the federated nature of lemmy protects against the kind of attacks its possible to make against centralized entities.
So far it doesn’t seem like any company actually wants to compete in this space (longer-form somewhat text-focused communities). Even reddit is trying to become more twitter and less reddit.
First, thx for working on LemmyNade! The ecosystem of apps growing up around lemmy, learning from and benefitting each other, is really great to see.
The main thing would be to get involved with lemmy’s back-end code. Even if you’re not a back-end developer, its still useful to us to learn from devs about wanted features, API improvements, and bugs. Many app devs have suggested features that I’ve tried to implement based on their usefulness, because it used to be just myself who was the one requesting and adding things on both sides.
Go through the issue tracker for lemmy or lemmy-ui and look for some simple bug or minor feature that you care about. Then look for the relevant part of the code and try to fix it. You can also make a comment or post in the dev chat on matrix if you need help. Honestly there are so many issues which could be solved in less than an hour, especially in lemmy-ui. That way you can make Lemmy better and also get familiar with the code to make larger changes in the future.
A long time ago, @Dessalines made Jerboa as an Android Native client for Lemmy as an alternative to Boost for Reddit. How happy are you that the OG Boost developer came and made a Lemmy client?
Strengths are federation, comment threads, mod tools, app ecosystem.
Weaknesses are lack of notifications, DB code, and lack of funding / donations. We need to support much more that just one or two devs if we want to take on reddit, which is a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of employees.
I post a fair amount of video edits. I’ve had quite a few people say that video playback is far from ideal for not just Lemmy, but the Fediverse as a whole. Is this mostly a 3rd party app thing, or a backend issue? I haven’t had much issue myself, but enough people have mentioned it that there is likely an issue somewhere down the line.
I hope they’re not too against it. I know they’re extremely left wing, which scared a lot of the centrists on Reddit. If they allow even right wing instances, then it emphasizes the project’s lakc of political bent, and encourages more mainstream people to join. The politics can be up to each individual instance to decide whether to defederate with those other instances or not.
But that’s just my opinion, I’m also curious how the devs will answer.
I’m sure they’re probably not okay with it but also there’s not much they can do about it other than defederate .ml - such is the nature of open source software.
Not that I’m suggesting it, but they could hardcode the defederation of those instances on the code and most admins wouldn’t bother to fork lemmy to remove it. Like in the past they had a hardcoded slur filter, but I think they disabled it because many slurs in English were regular words in other languages
They were posting spicy memes but thats how the internet works. If you dont like it then dont visit there, just like you wouldnt visit 4chan. Lemmy is open source so anyone can use it for any purpose.
I very much dislike it obviously, and I’m happy that one shut down. There have been others, but for the most part they’ve stayed away from Lemmy as “that software made by tankies.”
Outside of making sure that we don’t platform them anywhere, there isn’t much we can do. Lemmy is open-source software after all, and a tool can be used for good or ill. As @CannotSleep420 mentioned, coordinating on adding them to our blocklists and isolating them is the best option.
Will private messages ever be displayed in a threaded or grouped manner?
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the current web interface is just a reverse chronological list of all sent and received messages. This can be confusing to follow if one is messaging multiple users over an extended period of time. I think the ability to group messages by user would be useful.
This is already possible in many Lemmy apps. I built the Quiblr web app and messages are more similar to a messaging app. Many Lemmy apps probably do similar as it’s just a front-end change.
Cool! I haven’t tried out web apps, but many mobile apps have this feature as well. Would be nice to see this feature merged into the native web interface.
There can definitely be improvements, but I agree that they’re low priority. I’m hesitant to put too much work into Lemmy’s private messages or its interface, as they’re inherently insecure and not E2EE (we even have warnings in the lemmy-ui interface about this).
Its best to rely on messaging apps like matrix and xmpp that were made for that job, which you can add to your profile. We also added a specific matrix_id field to your user settings, which enables a “Send secure message” button.
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.)
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).
There was a big time gap between 0.18.5 and 0.19. Have you considered adopting a release train model, similar to what Rust does? The Bevy game engine has also adopted the idea.
More frequent but smaller releases would probably cause less friction and make upgrading less of a “big thing” and “big things” are always where things go wrong.
They normally do have smaller releases (18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 18.4, 18.5) but going from 18 to 19 was a big update that also required a database upgrade. Rust releases don’t have database upgrades or anything that is not backwards compatible, so it’s not really comparable.
0.19 was a bit of a special case because there was a set of breaking updates that had to be done at some point, and trickle releasing breaking changes isn’t really great either. Usually hopefully the breaking changes are rare, so releases can be more frequent.
I mainly like Hip-hop, but also good music from other genres. I like all sorts of movies if they are well made, but especially adventure and comedy. Since the quality of Hollywood movies has gone steeply downhill, I mainly watch movies from different countries across the world, and older movies from the 70s or so. I also like video games, at the moment Im playing Baldurs Gate 3 as everyone was praising it on Lemmy (and they were right its a great game).
First, I want to say thank you for the incredible job you already have done in this area. However, do you have any thoughts on further improving some fundamental Lemmy UX painpoints? Examples such as:
That would be awesome if true. It’s progressing faster than I thought. I’m still just learning about the scaled sort and enjoying that new feature lol.
Importing posts and comments could cause a security risk if someone would to abuse that function.
Even Mastodon doesn’t support it
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.
More importantly it would make exports extremely large and would cause a lot of server load to import/export. Plus you would end up with duplicate posts and comments which seems like a bad idea.
Can you add one to your list? Linking posts across instances? Like you can do !community@instance and the community will open viewed through your instance. But for linking posts there is no such equivalent. Like if I make an HTTP link it will be through my instance or possibly the one the community is hosted on which would be annoying for users of other instances.
Also, linking communities across instances is possible already, but you can leave it up since it’s confusing. I still see a lot of folks try to do the reddit approach if c/community
Turning the fediverse button into an “open on my instance” with similar functionality to subscribing may also be a solution here. Bonus points if it’ll also open a comment on mastodon.
For migration we recently added a feature to export your user data. But “real” migrating accounts is something I put on our “todo” list, though it probably also first needs a proposal to define how it should work exactly (should it still work when the original instance is down?) As soon as we start giving users more control over their private key issues start appearing like not having any infrastructure for key rotation / revocation. Without that it will only work when the original instance still exists.
I’m not sure if by tagging users you mean linking / mentioning them? Or adding tags to them like you can tag posts / users on other platform. For tagging in general there’s a pending proposal github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4 . So far it focuses on post tagging though to reduce the scope. I think the goal is going to be to start with one kind of tagging and add more kinds of tagging later.
For improving cross-instance linking (both communities, posts, and users) we also have a open milestone. There’s a few spitballing issues about it, but no real concrete proposal on how to build it yet.
As @phiresky mentioned we have improvements coming down the pipe for linking content across instances.
Community linking and user linking do work currently (for example I just linked phiresky above), and a community example would be !risa , but we could improve this by extending it to posts and comments, as well as creating a url link standard that would work across apps.
One that I can think of rn, is @CannotSleep420 's lemmy-bot, as well as ridoukousage’s TLDR bot.
With the web being so ad-infested and completely owned by google, people have noted how the TLDR bot means they often don’t have to leave their lemmy app at all, and can stay behind its privacy shield.
While of course I do think we can code a lot of functionality directly in to lemmy in a way that we couldn’t with reddit, there’s undeniably a lot of potential with bots that can do different things for us.
announcements
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.