Check the updated OP. We can definitely use more donations, at the moment we are getting around 4000 Euros per month which is not much for two fulltime devs. And code contributions are also helpful, there is an almost endless amount of open issues.
I’m not sure if this will entirely make sense, but do you believe there could be some kind of feature to authenticate with a specific instance, but make your ‘home’ instance another?
In other words, to create your account on lemmy.ml, but visit lemmy.world and be signed into your account, effectively changing what your home page and ‘local’ looks like without needing to subscribe to all communities on another instance if you’re interested in having them curate your feed? Piped has something like this, where you auth with one server, but proxy video through another.
The reason I ask is that this helps to get around tricky defederation situations and can improve privacy. Perhaps I want to auth from a server I trust more with my data, but I want to make .world or .ml my home page because they have more content that is relevant to me and that helps me discover it. Or I want to auth from lemmy.ml so I have access to instances that were defederated from .world, meaning I can still use them as my ‘home page’ without needing to actually make an account there.
Some company (dont know which) wanted to make a one-time donation of 500 Euros to get listed as donor on join-lemmy.org. Rejected because thats only for recurring donors. Does this count as weird?
Are there any plans on adding features that enable easier interaction with other federated platforms like mastodon and peertube (for example being able to comment/interact with peertube videos and mastodon posts)?
You can already interact with Peertube videos and follow their channels. Thats possible because Peertube also federates groups (communities). With Mastodon thats not possible because it doesnt have groups, and Lemmy doesnt support content outside of communities. At least not without a full rewrite, which doesnt make sense considering that KBin and dozens of different microblogging platforms already exist.
So many apps die before getting any users. For Lemmy however, when was the first time you really thought “Damn, this thing really might actually take off”?
Lemmy was meant to be a Reddit replacement from the beginning, so it was always supposed to take off. Even in the early days the tech was working quite smoothly and users were happy so there was no real doubt about it. The only thing missing were more users. However I had no idea how a real migration would actually look like, so it was really overwhelming when last year people started to flood in and everything got overloaded and broke down.
For me it was long before the reddit migration (which was ~7 months or so ago). I noticed lemmy slowly but surely gaining traction. It felt more dead than it does now, but the trend was slow and steady growth, which is always a great sign. People were using lemmy, liking it, and sticking around.
At the same time, it was clear that we weren’t making the mistake of all the other reddit alternatives, by promising to be a free speech haven for bigoted communities. Those people actively did our work for us by warning their communities to stay away from Lemmy and its tankie devs, thereby making Lemmy a much more enjoyable place from the very beginning. That was a crucial test: we were not willing to sacrifice our values for growth’s sake.
Regarding server architecture - How many users can the Lemmy network, or the fediverse as a total scale to, assuming the average person posts once per day and reads ~50 comments/posts a day?
Lemmy supports horizontal scaling, so in theory it is only limited by the amount of servers you can afford. Of course there are always unpredictable bottlenecks which need to be fixed, but no inherent limitation.
The ActivityPub protocol lemmy uses is (in my opinion) really bad wrt scalability. For example, if you press one upvote, your instance has to make 3000 HTTP requests (one to every instance that cares).
But on the other hand, I recently rewrote the federation queue. Looking at reddit, it has around 100 actions per second. The new queue should be able to handle that amount of requests, and PostgreSQL can handle it (the incoming side) as well.
The problem right now is more that people running instances don’t have infinite money, so even if you could in theory host hundreds of millions of users most instances are limited by having a budget of 10-100$ per month.
In the future it could make sense to make a protocol extension to send multiple activities in a single HTTP connection. But for now its probably not worth the effort, considering that it would break compatibility with other Fediverse platforms.
Maybe a blog post like “a year in review and what’s up for this year”
I’m not talking about bugs or minor tweaks. Just a general where are we, where are we coming from and where are we going to? What are important milestones?
I think a lemmy roadmap for the next year is hard, because scope and even individual features depend on funding (for example, nlnet funds specific features).
Maybe something like Mastodon’s roadmap would be possible though (with no specific timeline)? joinmastodon.org/roadmap
I wouldn’t put a timeline to it. Just a list of features, broad and specific. As time goes on, they can be marked as “in progress” or “included”. New things can be added over time, or made more specific. All without timetables. For now call it a wishlist.
I’ve just updated the post body with some updates about this, but if we get approved for another year of funding from NLNet, the the two new devs will be working on these milestones in 2024 (still a draft at this point).
Being an open source project, we can afford to be less strict about a roadmap, as anyone (including ourselves) can take on any of the open issues on the issue tracker. Part of the fun of these is getting to pick which things you’d like to work on, and that you personally think are important.
Outside of maintenance-related tasks and merging PRs (which does take a significant chunk of our time) of course @nutomic and I both have things we’d like to prioritize this year. My main priorities are:
I think flairs would be the same as user-tagging. There’s an open proposal for post-tagging github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4 and the discussion there was so far to add tagging for one type of thing and then later expand to others (like user tagging).
It’s a bit of a complicated feature because it needs decision who can tag whom, and what is the scope (who is it federated two), and how does it transfer / interact with other ActivityPub software.
Back when the first Reddit exodus happened, there was a group heavily DDOSing many of the popular Lemmy instances. While it was a great opportunity to optimize Lemmy, did you ever find out who that attacker was?
I don’t think we found any specific groups of people attacking Lemmy. I personally just saw one or two what looked like individuals trying (and succeeding) to take Lemmy down with a few very simple requests that forced Lemmy to do lots of compute (something like fetching the next million posts from page 10000). The fixes for those were simple because it was just missing limits checking.
I’m not sure if there actually was a larger organized attack. Lots of performance issues in Lemmy simply appeared simultaneously and compunded each other with a rapidly growing number of active users and posts.
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