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.
Where is the best place to propose new features for Lemmy?
Edit: And as potential follow-up, where is the best place on Lemmy to propose new features for Lemmy? (Not every Lemmy user has or wants a GitHub account)
if you don’t want to make a github account, then probably !lemmy
but you can still search and read the github issues without making an account, so you could check if it already exists, or link the issue if you’re starting a lemmy discussion about it
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.
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?
Firstly, thank you so much for providing the means for me to cut Reddit out of my life, I feel like I’m engaging with content in a much more deliberate way since, and honestly it’s been a massive improvement to my mental health in a way that I was completely oblivious to there even being a problem before.
Anyway, the question—regarding things happening entirely out of your control, what would be the best and worst things that could happen to lemmy from your perspectives? And as an extension, what are your goals for it?
The best thing would be if Reddit goes the way of Digg. Seems that will happen sooner or later. The worst thing, maybe if funding stops and we are unable to keep working on Lemmy. But even then admins could still host Lemmy instances.
The best thing would be if Reddit goes the way of Digg.
Well, it has already. The only reason it hasn’t fully imploded & all the users deserted for another site, is because there wasn’t an equivalent place to go to.
They were sort of parallel in development but digg blew up and Reddit didn’t then Digg took a quick hard turn towards enshitification.
Reddit has done the enshitification but like a parasitic infected spider, it’s wandering about and most of the users haven’t realised yet that it’s an empty shell.
It’s slow demise would be better in the long run than a quick collapse like Diggs so it’s now putrid culture is not transmitted with an enmass exodus.
Thx! Its pretty wild to me how much these algorithms, and formats, affect our mental well-being. Those giant US tech companies employing Psychology PhDs to figure out how to keep people angry, engaged, and watching ads, is doing so much harm to so many people, not just in the US, but the whole world, and unfortunately very few countries are doing enough to protect their people from these companies (who also act as surveillance arms of the US state) by blocking facebook and the rest.
I’ve seen two professors I respected turn into angry children on twitter, in a way that would never happen in real life. Reddit, twitter, and Youtube platform reactionary rage-bait to get people trapped in a downward spiral of negativity. These companies do not care how much damage they do; all that matters to them is their profits.
We don’t have those same incentive structures, so we can and should be doing everything we can to make this a positive and enjoyable experience, not about arguing constantly, but about learning, laughing, and understanding.
what would be the best and worst things that could happen to lemmy from your perspectives? And as an extension, what are your goals for it?
The best thing would be that we continue our slow and steady growth. Every user that migrates away from big tech to the fediverse is victory, so while we shouldn’t emphasize growth at any cost, its still a good thing when we can get people away from all that negativity.
The biggest concern for me about Lemmy, would be a centralization onto one big server, that tries to replicate all the worst things and behaviors about reddit: its combativeness, xenophobia, bigotry, pro-US-foreign policy agendas, and advertising. There is a noticeable chunk of Lemmy’s users who don’t really see any problem with those things, they just want a reddit that lets them use 3rd party apps again.
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.
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 will there be default view agglomeration of posts sent to identically named communities. For example /c/books. The current setup cntralizes power into the hands of whoever gets traction first on the platform. If I go to /c/books on any server, all posts of all federated servers’ /c/books should be visible. This way no server owner gets the stranglehold on the community that they host.
If it is not the default and automatic, then lemmy is a pointless reddit clone.
You have to filter out what you don’t want because it is not possible to undelete what has already been deleted.
Users will just circulate ready made blacklists of spammer and thoughtcriminal communities to automatically remove them all from their feed.
The alternative is that only the biggest instance and the biggest community will matter and writing everywhere else is just a exercise in pointlessness
Don’t want to be ostracized because your user is registered on the wrong politic instance ? Join biggest instance instead.
There are plenty of politically neutral instance. Most of them are, actually, the only ones that come to mind as politically oriented are hexbear, lemmygrad and to an extend, lemmy.ml.
That leaves lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, all the feddit.country, discuss.tchncs.de, sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com, lemmy.zip as neutral alternatives
I think one thing you’re missing here is that under such a system the defaults would likely become your locally hosted /c/books rather than the largest one. Even still you’d probably see posts from the largest books communities because /c/books@your_instance follows multiple /c/books@big_instance. Community blocking would likely still work as it currently does so any books communities that you were not fond of could still be blocked.
There is still the issue of where do you post and I think the answer looks something like:
Post in /c/books@your_instance if you want to talk to your neighbors
Post in /c/books@big_instances if you want to talk to everybody
Which is more or less how most people would decide where to post book stuff anyway.
Yes, the majority of content would still come from bigcommunity/c/books, the crucial difference in that system is that posting in otherserver/c/books would get the same probabibility of being viewed by random and non logged users.
I cannot emphasize enough how important that is. It is the only way to break the stranglehold that bigcommunity/c/books will always have over almist every lemmy users.
Without this, this is just reddit all over again. Meet the new boss, same as old boss.
The Lemmy devs operate lemmy.ml, but it’s far from being the most active one (it’s currently the 5th): lemmyverse.net/?order=active_day
Large instances admins? The most active communities are spread across dbzer0, lemmy.world, programming.dev, lemm.ee, feddit.de, etc.: lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
The main difference of Lemmy compared to Reddit is the ability that communities have to walk away, as I explained in another comment: discuss.online/comment/5393546
And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw
Are they not allowed to?
Beehaw exists for people who wanted a heavily-moderated space, and they seem to be doing well activity-wise. Do you want to force them with the rest of the instances?
Sure, that’s not the point at all. But wouldn’t it be great if the knitting community (for example) on beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and feddit.de would be merged for me into one entity for a better browsing experience? And people wouldn’t post the same breaking news 3 times and the cross-posts always showed up 3 times in my timeline? (And sometimes it’s the same 30 people anyways that are subscribed to all of them so the cross-posting doesn’t add anything?)
I currently don’t have a good idea for a UI design for that. But I think a feature like that would add to federated platforms (if done right.) But nobody said you’re not allowed or it’s bad to open a dozen communities with the same name and topic on different servers. That’s perfectly alright. In the real world we also sometimes discuss the same topic with different people at different locations.
But wouldn’t it be great if the knitting community (for example) on beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and feddit.de would be merged for me into one entity for a better browsing experience?
Why wouldn’t they merge on one instance? Seems easier, and can be done today compared to having to ask the developers to implement a complex feature.
Is there a client that does that? Sorry I lost track of the different clients. But I’d like to try. I know Eternity (which I use on my Android phone) and the default webui can’t do that. But I haven’t tried all the options.
I don’t quite get your wording. If you mean similar communities should be merged in all cases, I think I’d disagree. People might want to subscribe to a specific community. And it’d be complex to figure out moderation etc, since the root of the platform is a federated architecture and this somewhat goes against that. I think it’d be more a UI / client feature, tied into a cross-posting mechanism.
Lemmygrad still can send all the kulaks to the gulags. But only when the discussion happening inside their hard drive. Aka “I take my ball and go home”
They do not get to silence the rest of the fediverse/c/books
Do you think the problem with Reddit was that they removed the_Donald?
Regardless, this should be an instance decisions and others are free to defederate with any instance hosting content they don’t want to see. Just like what happened to exploding heads.
How do you see this playing out? Instances are free to set and enforce their own rules and standards. You can’t force them to host content they don’t want to.
Whether there should be right wing comms is up to an instance’s admins, and whether other instances should federate with it is up to the admins of other instances.
The USian obsession with free speech comes from the over-application of a first amendment right. That freedom is in fact a restriction on the State to abridge speech, and not a restriction on Lemmy mods or admins.
What’s wrong with a “right-wing” community? I’m not right wing but I’m definitely not afraid of them. Anything can be solved with education. Why would you censor based on what side of the political spectrum you’re on?
Because it signals to actual neo-nazis that it’s safe to set up here, and of course they take their pedophilia and toxicity with them. Remember all those CSAM attacks that were happening? They were all coming from those instances with a reputation for being soft on the right.
They treat passive tolerance as active acceptance, and then throw disastrous temper tantrums when they find out that isn’t actually the case.
Conservativism isn’t a political view, it’s a crime against humanity. They have exactly one ““legitimate”” claim (lower taxes) and the rest is shit like “lets make child marriage legal”, “lets murder people for crossing the border”, “lets dogwhistle neofascist hatred” and “lets roll back every human right known to man” and that’s before you get into the MAGA shit which is every form of outright nazism stuffed into a trenchcoat.
Instances with conservative /c are all full of notoriously toxic and anticommunist users who go around making the federation way shittier.
You’ve probably better things to do than to go into this, but maybe someone else here can showcase the flaws in my reasoning. All I have to go off of is my own personal experiences and what I see is a direct translation of right-acceptance converting directly into right-wing toxicity.
Just to be clear, being conservative is very much a political view. No one is making you agree with there views and no one is making you spend time on conservative communities.
Additionally you are complaining about them being anti communist but you are very anti conservative. Maybe we should just keep those two ideas in there respective communities. I certainly don’t care for people posting about communism or conservative ideas on random posts.
Well that’s just the thing, they don’t keep to themselves. I’ve no problem with people having different views to my own. That changes when they start harassing anyone who expresses views distasteful to them. Maybe that’s justifiable in cases where the “other side” are actual nazis, but it’s a lot harder to make that same justification when it’s the other way around. What I care most about is freedom of speech which doesn’t just turn into “oops all nazism” because you can get that nearly everywhere these days and i’m already starting to see traces of that taking root here too, at least on some instances.
I think the instance admins should handle that. Lemmy itself should be a open and agnostic platform. Admins should use defederation and block specific communities.
(My oppinion, I’m not associated with Lemmy development.)
Lemmy is licensed under AGPL which states that everyone can use it, there are no restrictions based on politics. Besides, “right wing” is not the same as “evil”, the real world is much more complicated than that. If you ask me, the whole right-left classification is way too simplistic and doesnt make sense anymore (if it ever did).
I’m not a Lemmy dev but I’m interested in this question so I’m commenting so I remember to check up on this one.
I subscribe to that sub because I feel like it’s important to engage with people that I don’t agree with. Even though the two main contributors to that sub are peculiar in their views, I haven’t seen them break any rules of lemm.ee or post outright hate to any group but democrats.
I know sh.it.justworks had their own drama with a the_donald popup community which led to calls for defederation before the community was banned but if people are posting within the rules and properly moderate their own; we ought to let them post their politics even if we don’t agree.
They stay in the bunker except for emergencies like facebooks threats.net . You get to drive one when you can recite the first section of the communist manifesto from memory.
Overkill for me, but to me Motorhead’s also one of those singles-type bands where the songs kind of stand individually great on their own, rather than the album. So I usually just relisten to a ~40 song greatest hits of theirs.
Looking at my most playeds: Radiohead, Bjork, NIN, Sigur Ros, GYBE, the War on Drugs, Soundgarden, Smiths / Morrissey, Blondie, Calexico, Talk Talk, Aimee Mann, Public Enemy, RATM, M83, Pavement, Explosions in the Sky, Sufjan, Pumpkins, Tallest Man on Earth, Andrew Bird, Massive attack, Soda Stereo, Yes.
I think they would, it would be super cool to do art competitions and have the community pick the designs, could do it once a quarter to help boost funding.
I’d be down for an enamel pin. I’m sure you guys are familiar with the Apollo app (RIP), but in his merch store he had enamel pins made in the style of some of his app icons.
To add, recurring donations, no matter how small, help us plan for the future, as we can then reliably estimate how many developers we can support off them. One-offs donations and merch sales wouldn’t help us out in that regard.
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.
There are different software that could help this happen but I’m not sure how they’d handle all of lemmy’s content
There is Gun.js and OrbitDB (OrbitDB runs on IPFS using Helia)
and there is FreeNet which allows hosting of freesites on their network if you have something downloaded to your computer.
Some of the problems could be mitigated by volunteers running relay nodes hosting the kind of content they want to stay up (this would work with Gun.js and OrbitDB since it allows subscribing to specific data) or just general relay nodes that gives the network more capacity (this would be the method if you are working with FreeNet)
Again not sure how easy or hard this would be so I hope the developers share their thoughts.
Edit: When I say relay nodes hosting I don’t mean they have control over the data but instead keeps the data online. The data is still stored on the users own device and is shared between users if both are online at the same time.
There is a ton of decentralized projects that no one has really ever heard of, new ones pop up all the time (I was watching multiple of them in the past). Sadly in most cases it seems like most authors stop working on their projects after a while.
The same ideas have existed for a long time but both decade old projects (ever heard of Freenet? Probably no) and new ones . Many of them are very ambitious and try to replace huge swaths of things (not just file storage but also social aspects, web of trust, etc) but then collapse under the complexity. IPFS is the most well known new project and (good imo) has limited its scope, but sadly (still) suffers from huge scalability issues, some of which are deep in the design.
I think it’s really hard to align incentives there - the nicer it is the harder it is to make money with it. So either these projects tend towards control by one entity or they tend towards death.
Really the only one that seems to have a long lasting life so far is torrents. Which are amazing. And Email if you want to count that.
Torrents are truly one of the best inventions of the internet.
They’ve fully solved the static data distribution problem, in a way that’s resilient and practical. I do a few torrent-related side projects, and I’m also super-interested in how we could integrate them into lemmy UIs and apps in order to take on YouTube.
I’m fed up to shit with youtube’s bullshit. Between their excessive advertising, unmoderated comments and far-right bias I want so bad to leave that shit and never come back.
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