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.
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?
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.
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
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.
I don’t think it’s that large. Text is very small and compressible compared to images. Well it depends on if you mean the actual database storage (uncompressed, with indexes) or a compressed copy of all the posts. You can see the post number in the URL, which on lemmy.world for this post is 11169622. That means there’s around 11 million posts total in lemmy.world’s database. If you assume each of them takes 0.5kB of storage that would be only ~ 5 GB of posts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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