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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well I am not 100% sure on what the best method would be.
I think the addition of letting moderators see who is voting on what posts is a nice addition since they would tend to be closer to where the content is.
More generally I was thinking about creating a dashboard that gave the admins statistics about that user.
Similar to how we as users can see how many comments and posts any user makes, it might be useful to allow admins to see statistics about which communities the user interacts with or some rudimentary similarity score with other users?
These are some ideas I thought of on the fly and have not thought about the implications but the gist is something that allows the admins to get a better understanding of what is going on from like a bird eye’s view.
Hrm… I remember my time as a reddit mod, community statistics were very useful in making mod decisions. But that was only because reddit hosts so many vile communities, which isn’t a problem we really have at the moment.
Registration applications, and user reports are the best way to handle trolls. The first stops 90% of them, the second means we can ban and remove all their spam at the click of a button.
I don’t see how you could prematurely know about spammers or trolls until someone reports them. We don’t plan on adding any text-analyzing AI or anything like that into lemmy’s codebase.
I don’t see how you could prematurely know about spammers or trolls until someone reports them.
I don’t think you can. My suggestion was more focused on how admins make decisions after a report. Right now they have to do a manual scan of the person’s comment history and that is the part I find inefficient. If it was possible to just show extra high level information on the user it might make it easier for the admin to make a decision.
We don’t plan on adding any text-analyzing AI or anything like that into lemmy’s codebase.
Yeah using AI to try and analyze comments would be overkill and probably prone to manipulation anyways.
Edit: I’m sorta talking more specifically towards banning a user or seeing if what a user is doing is a repeated pattern.
I don’t think there’s a way you could avoid going into their history. I do that as an admin to verify that the account in question is indeed repeatedly breaking rules. I’m open to suggestions tho.
We could definitely use some help with ideas there. Lemmy currently has ~40k active users, and it should be able to support more than ~1 average dev salary, especially if we want to take on a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of employees like reddit.
I think short event or campaign with push for donations with a pop up that you actually can dismiss. An ad like banner. The biggest problem would be community organization as Lemmy isn’t only decentralized horizontally but also vertically. Different front ends, different apps different instances. Most of them wouldn’t want to implement an ad that wouldn’t benefit them directly. They also have costs with running their piece of lemmy. So some cut for them should be included.
I think a dedicated trustworthy person should be responsible for organizing this campaign as developer time is best spent elsewhere.
Wikipedia, about once a year, has those donation pledge boxes at the top of every article …they must be somewhat effective since they come back year after year …better keep them small though to avoid disheartening users. Maybe start small like this trending community line at the top of the user feed.
P.S. : Since we don’t want the user to get habituated it’s better if it’s just a few days once a year.
When I saw LemmyMl was down I went to sleep and had a dream where I was eating extremely large fries that that were labeled on the fryholder “Sadistically Large” (chicken fries as well as potato fries) and drinking probiotic shakes so dangerous they literally had to be bundled with a free antibiotic shake by law which of course I took one sip of in front of the clerk to calm them down before guzzling the other shake down with impunity. Woke up before I found find out what the burger was. Maybe those anti-woke types are on to something.
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.
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.
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.
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
The fact that there is no boss telling me what to work on. Instead I get to decide myself whats most important. Last year before the Reddit migration I was temporarily working for a company, and it was extremely demotivating to be told how to do every little thing as if I were a junior developer.
As a software dev, mainly that people enjoy using it.
99% of the proprietary software work I did for companies was work that was societally useless, and eventually thrown in the trash. Here I get to make software that improves peoples lives in a tiny way, and is a form of social media that hopefully 🤞 doesn’t destroy people’s mental well-being: is easy to put down, and enjoyable to use.
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
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.
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.
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