Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.

NLNet Funding

First of all some good news: We are currently applying for new funding from NLnet and have reached the second round. If it gets approved then @phiresky and SleeplessOne will work on the paid milestones, while @dessalines and @nutomic will keep being funded by direct user donations. This will increase the number of paid Lemmy developers to four and allow for faster development.

You can see a preliminary draft for the milestones. This can give you a general idea what the development priorities will be over the next year or so. However the exact details will almost certainly change until the application process is finalized.

Development Update

@ismailkarsli added a community statistic for number of local subscribers.

@jmcharter added a view for denied Registration Applications.

@dullbananas made various improvements to database code, like batching insertions for better performance, SQL comments and support for backwards pagination.

@SleeplessOne1917 made a change that besides admins also allows community moderators to see who voted on posts. Additionally he made improvements to the 2FA modal and made it more obvious when a community is locked.

@nutomic completed the implementation of local only communities, which don’t federate and can only be seen by authenticated users. Additionally he finished the image proxy feature, which user IPs being exposed to external servers via embedded images. Admin purges of content are now federated. He also made a change which reduces the problem of instances being marked as dead.

@dessalines has been adding moderation abilities to Jerboa, including bans, locks, removes, featured posts, and vote viewing.

In other news there will soon be a security audit of the Lemmy federation code, thanks to Radically Open Security and NLnet.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

Has Lemmy.ml been contacted by law enforcement yet to hand over user data? If yes, when was it, and what did you hand over?

Steve,

I’m pretty sure all user data is public already.
PMs might be the only thing not everyone can see.

Deebster, (edited )
@Deebster@programming.dev avatar

IPs and access logs, plus email addresses aren’t public and are the kind of thing law enforcement wants.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Nope, never.

jackpot,
@jackpot@lemmy.ml avatar

whats that thing where a company has a ‘we have never been contacted by law enforement or have been forced to disclose data’ sign on their website that theyll take down to implicitly inform users theyve received a request and a silencing order

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Warrant canary. I doubt those really work because law enforcement could easily require you to keep updating it.

jackpot,
@jackpot@lemmy.ml avatar

could you try regardless?

deadlyremote,
@deadlyremote@lemmy.ml avatar

How did you feel when everyone was coming from Reddit to Lemmy?

phiresky,

Personally I came with them so I guess they are my people ;)

dessalines, (edited )

We pretty much all came from reddit, just at different times 😄

nutomic, (edited )
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Very excited, and then very overwhelmed because everything started breaking left and right.

dessalines,

Excited, but also extremely stressed out and exhausted. For about 2 months I was getting an average of 4 hours of consistent sleep a night after that happened. We were very happy when things calmed down.

CrypticCoffee,

Do you feel fully recharged now, or still catching up from the intensity of it all?

dessalines,

Mostly recharged from that now.

CrypticCoffee,

Good to hear. Thanks for the work you do on Lemmy. It’s nice to be free from the corporate machine that is Reddit.

dessalines,

No probs!

calavera,

Hi again,

1 - Now that there are multiple apps for lemmy, wouldn’t be better to handover jerboa to someone else and focus more on core lemmy?

2 - How was the inception moment for lemmy? When and how did you decided to leave reddit and create something new and how was the first couple months?

Thanks and come to Brazil ;)

dessalines,

Thx!

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
hendrik, (edited )

Since I read a few comments here… What is your oppinion on more democratic platforms? I mean something like electing moderators. (Or dropping them in a democratic process.) Or voting for other things in a community.

(This is more a hypothetical question. I guess with the architecture as is, it can easily be exploited. And there is no way to implement this properly without severe changes and consequences.)

dessalines,

We’ve talked about it elsewhere, on github and one of these Q and A’s, but the main thing is that these things can be easily gamed. IE: making a ton of fake users to vote for a malicious mod.

There’s a ton of ways that could be exploited that I can’t think of rn. I’d rather not stress test them in lemmy.

sunaurus,
@sunaurus@lemm.ee avatar

Do you think Lemmy is decentralized enough right now, or are you worried about some of the bigger instances growing too much?

possiblylinux127,

As someone who is on a medium sized instance, I can say its a little awkward when Lemmy[.]world goes down

interdimensionalmeme,

The big instances are bad enough but big communities are absolute killer of decentralisation

When you go to /c/books on your server, you don’t see an agglomeration of all /c/books on all servers of the fediverse. You only see that server’s /c/books, if it even has one.

This is a fatal flaw of lemmy which concentrates power enormously into the hands of the owners.

The default view should be all /c/books on all federated servers, with an easy way to filter only local posts.

Lemmy will turn into reddit if this is not quickly rectified.

spaduf,

I really don’t hate this idea from a lemmy centric UX perspective but how do you handle federation with other platforms?

willya,
@willya@lemmyf.uk avatar

No, that defeats the entire point.

interdimensionalmeme,

What point ?

The point of becoming a moderator that decide what everyone can and can’t say ?

The point of “making another reddit but I’m /u/spez” ?

willya, (edited )
@willya@lemmyf.uk avatar

The point of me having my own control over my instance. The bad moderator thing will always be a problem.

interdimensionalmeme,

I don’t see how agglomerating vuew of all same name communities for the user impact you as a server owner ?

You still have totalitarian control over everything happening on your server.

You can still

Delete all post and comments

Change any text in any post or comment even if made by other users and without their notice

Ban any user

Ban any community

Even ban all users and all communities (whilte only model)

willya, (edited )
@willya@lemmyf.uk avatar

I must’ve read your comment wrong. Sounds like you just want a multi Reddit type feature? I agree that that should be implemented some apps have already did it. I don’t agree that the same word community should be lumped together universally and automatically.

interdimensionalmeme,

No multireddit cannot solve this problem.

They are not a default agglomeration view so they will never make a difference as most users never change their defaults.

Covered in more details here

lemmy.ml/comment/7734804

A community cannot escape the stranglehold of moderators with a multireddit, because most users will simply not have it the backup community setup in their multireddit. They will never see dissenters posting in the backuos. And that makes multireddit largely useless

willya,
@willya@lemmyf.uk avatar

Who are the moderators in this scenario you’re talking about?

interdimensionalmeme,

It’s an hypothetical community, so they’re hypothetical moderators/owners. I’m not sure how to respond to “who are they”.

They’re some bad hombrés…

willya, (edited )
@willya@lemmyf.uk avatar

Your argument through all of this is bad moderators controlling the largest communities so I’m wondering how what you’re saying fixes any of that.

interdimensionalmeme,

Makes communities other than the one big one visible to nonlogged and default users without extra steps.

In effect this makes all communities global by default.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

When you go to /c/books on your server, you don’t see an agglomeration of all /c/books on all servers of the fediverse. You only see that server’s /c/books, if it even has one.

What prevents from visiting /c/books@anotherserver?

Genuinely asking, because this is one of the core concepts of Lemmy and federation

interdimensionalmeme,

I already posted to anotherserver/c/books and no one ever saw it.

Posting anywhere but biggestinstance/c/biggestcommunity is functionally the same as not posting at all.

And of course, the owners of biggestinstance/c/biggestcommunity believe in everything you don’t believe in and they really don’t like you in particular.

Welcome to new reddit, same as old reddit

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

I already posted to anotherserver/c/books and no one ever saw it.

Did you promote that community on !newcommunities and other promotion communities? Did you actively post on your new community, to attract users to your new one?

I’m going to take two examples I personally had

  • I’m not a fan of having all discussions on LW, so even if !movies was the most active one, we decided with a few others to start animating !moviesandtv. It is now the most active community on that topic.
  • I like the show “the Office”. !dundermifflin is the historical community, but as some people are not fans of lemmy.ml, we moved to !dundermifflin, which is now the most active community on this topic.

I guess that shows that community takeover is possible, and does not need additional tools, just some time and dedication.

Inui, (edited )

I’ll say this is really clunky to do and often means being redirected to that instances site where you are no longer logged in. Mobile apps mostly solve this themselves, but its sometimes a pain on desktop. I’d like the ability to somehow group similar communities, but I’m fine if its like Multireddits or playlists on the user end.

interdimensionalmeme,

Yes, syntax link like /c/community@server is incompatible with http.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

Doesn’t !books and !books direct you to yourinstance.org/c/books@lemmy.ml and yourinstance.org/c/books@lemmy.world respectively?

Jumuta,

maybe communities should be able to flag that they’re the same community as one on another server, and if they mutually do so be combined into one metacommunity that people can search for

interdimensionalmeme,

If it requires the owner’s consent, it defeats the purposeof my proposal.

It is expressly to disempower the owners in favour of the users.

sunaurus,
@sunaurus@lemm.ee avatar

I kind of get where you’re coming from, but to me it sounds like you’re looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like “books”), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you’re interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.

I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, “ownerless” topics, instead, it’s built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.

IMO it’s totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it’s totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn’t really seem like a useful feature, but that’s kind of analogous to what you’re suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.

interdimensionalmeme,

Thst makes lemmy , a reddit with many /u/spez , but in practice it will end up like the actual internet of today, where only 5-10 sites control everything.

This process is already far along on lemmy, already very centralized and all the incentives are in place to make it even more centralized.

I expect the settlement of the defederation war, will create 2-3 cliques of the largest servers that each silence the rest of the lemmyverse on their property.

Give it a little time and they’ll probably make themselves fully private cliques.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

I think its totally normal that instance sizes follow a power law distribution. Its similar to many other things, for example there are few large cities, some medium cities and lots of small cities. The wiki article lists many other examples. So I think its fine as long as there are no intentional attempts to lock in users into large instances or limit federation.

dessalines, (edited )

Its definitely a concern. IMO the lemmyverse is far too centralized at the moment. The big questions are:

  1. Is there a trend toward centralization, or away from it?
  2. How are people being introduced / onboarded onto lemmy?
  3. What can we do to combat centralization?

(1) I’m honestly unsure, and I’d def appreciate if anyone has done a study of it. We’ve seen a big growth in single person / smaller topic-focused instances, which is a great thing, but if their communities aren’t growing, we need to figure out how to reverse that trend. I’d have no problem with the current large instances, including this one, as long as the long-term-trend is away from them.

(2) Is mostly word-of-mouth, join-lemmy.org, and apps / web-ui’s which show an instance by default.

We’ve made the sort for the join-lemmy.org instances page be by random active users, and tried to emphasize on that page that it doesn’t matter which instance you join, since most federate, and can subscribe / connect to any community. I hope that helps, and we need to replicate that wherever we can.

Apps and webUI’s mostly just show lemmy.world rn, where they should show random instances. I’m guilty of this in Jerboa as well (showing lemmy.ml by default), and I’ve just opened up an issue that it should be showing a random server for anonymous users.

But I think we need to do more, and I’d def appreciate yours and anyone else’s ideas on how we can combat centralization. We need to get ahead of this problem before it gets worse.

OnlyTakesLs,

Maybe hide the big instances behind a few clicks? Like you could sort/filter for them, but you’d have to navigate a bit? The average user isn’t going to bother. Like have a default sort that hides the big ones, and a default filter that filters out the top five or whatever.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

People join lemmy.world because it gets linked directly on Reddit and other places, they dont even go through join-lemmy.

ademir, (edited )
@ademir@lemmy.eco.br avatar

But I think we need to do more, and I’d def appreciate yours and anyone else’s ideas on how we can combat centralization.

I am admin of the biggest Brazilian instance, but I am welcoming more local instances and talking to the admins we should spread the load. But what I notice is the users are concerned they will miss out if they are not in an instance that already have everything.

Could we have an easier way to auto-federate every new communities from a given instance? Even an “auto-federate everything possible” option. as @nutomic said lemmy DB isn’t too big, most instance owners could have it on their servers. And making it opt-in won’t hurt the small instances.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

It would be relatively easy to write a script/bot which fetches the list of communities from a given instance, and then subscribes to all of them from another instance. In fact I heard something like this already exists, but dont know the name.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

Lemmy Community Feeder? github.com/Fmstrat/lcs

syd,
@syd@lemy.lol avatar

boost.lemy.lol?

CrypticCoffee, (edited )

I think it’s worth bringing a solution in house. A recommended migration route. If you want people to feel confident to pick any instance, you have to give them the confidence to move easily and not fear picking a small instance that might die when their owner gets bored. A simple setting option to migrate from, then you select the account and either (through communities accessible, or through automated request, pull that data and subscribe to communities. Maybe blocks etc also.

MBM,

I know lemmings.world has a bot that subscribes to the most popular communities to make sure those are federated

dessalines,

Maybe not auto-federate / auto-subscribe, but we do have an issue to federate a lightweight list of communities among servers, that could help with this.

Its true that the disk space required isn’t too big a deal, but it would unecessarily increase the CPU and network requests by auto-federating the entire lemmyverse, rather than using explicit subscribes.

interdimensionalmeme,

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.

ademir,
@ademir@lemmy.eco.br avatar

I think this is interesting but should not be an automatic feature.

interdimensionalmeme,

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

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

The current setup cntralizes power into the hands of whoever gets traction first on the platform.

There are other factors at hand, such as the moderation and the instance politics

interdimensionalmeme,

Which is another centralization incentive.

Don’t want to be ostracized because your user is registered on the wrong politic instance ? Join biggest instance instead.

Going to the biggest local community of the biggest instance is always the way of least resistance.

And that’s how you make a worse reddit with extra steps.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

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

spaduf,

Another option here is FEP-d36d which is a standard for group-to-group following. This looks to me like a slightly more organic and opt-in approach.

interdimensionalmeme,

Any opt-in approach will be irrelevant. Most user never change the defaults.

Example are “multireddit” feature. Statistically speaking, nobody used them and they never mattered.

Imagine a combination of /r/books /r/books2 and /r/books3

Owner of /r/books goes mad with power (as tgey all do) abd sells out the community.

So you post in /r/books2 because you use the multireddit, and if everyone else did, the defective owner would be transparently bypassed.

But what actually happens ?

To 99% if users in /r/books, you have simply ceased to exist. New users still to biggest /r/books and never know of the alternatives.

Multireddits are socially irrelevant.

The default MUST whole fediverse aggloneration which the users filters out what they don’t like out of

By manual removal of individual communities

By including or subscribing to circulating blacklists of communities (think spamfilter lists)

And by the owner of their instance defederating from other servers.

spaduf, (edited )

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.

interdimensionalmeme,

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.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

Meet the new boss, same as old boss.

Who’s Lemmy’s spez?

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

hendrik, (edited )

I’d like that. I think some other platforms/projects have features like this. And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

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?

hendrik, (edited )

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.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

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.

hendrik, (edited )

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.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Then who would moderate this? And what if lemmygrad.ml/c/books wants to have different discussions from lemmy.world/c/books?

interdimensionalmeme,

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

dessalines,

See here.

Die4Ever,

see github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

Ludrol,
@Ludrol@szmer.info avatar

I didn’t ask early enough but I will shoot anyway.

What you intend to do with !anime? There isn’t an active mod there and community is unwilling to continue using it due to defederation with ani.social The problems with community will keep arise due to very nature of Japanese animation and differences in acceptable social norms in western world.

Grayox,
@Grayox@lemmy.ml avatar

Why did they defederate

Ludrol,
@Ludrol@szmer.info avatar

lemmy.ml/post/10284661

No clear reason stated.

ForumYesterday,

It’s a known pedophile instance.

glibg10b,

Please stop using time zone abbreviations. Everyone can read an offset (UTC +02:00 in this case). But almost everyone has to look up the abbreviation

dessalines,

I linked a timezone convert link (before I updated the post), which I think I’d have to do even if we used the UTC offset format. I must be just far away enough from UTC to not know what my offset is at any given time.

Microw,

No, I can not read an offset. Because we have summer time and winter time here, and I dont instantly know what the offset is for which one.

toastal,

Developing countries still catching up to the no-DST of the rest of the world. Asia, Africa, Central/South America 💪

davidgro, (edited )

Time math gets a bit difficult far enough from UTC. Where I live virtually any event in Europe or Asia will be happening on a different day there than here, so it’s not fun to try and figure in one’s head.

The only universal solution is to link to a converter site.

Personally I wish everything supported the automaticly-converting timestamps I’ve seen in Discord which just show up in local time or as a countdown.

Pacrat173,

Will Lemmy ever have another source of income like official merch or will it rely on donations for the foreseeable future?

possiblylinux127,

May canvas event posters?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Would people really pay for Lemmy merch?

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

There might need to be a revamp of the logo to make it a bit more appealing.

What I could definitely see happening would be instance-based merch, especially if the community feeling is strong.

Grayox,
@Grayox@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

aeharding,
@aeharding@lemmy.world avatar

Personally maybe with some better art, not with the plain mouse logo

Oha,

I definitely would

veeesix,
@veeesix@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

dessalines,

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.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

What other ideas do you have to increasing funding for Lemmy development?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Wait for Reddit to implode, more users to migrate and donations to increase. It worked last year :D

syd,
@syd@lemy.lol avatar

lol

dessalines,

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.

Ludrol,
@Ludrol@szmer.info avatar

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.

A_A, (edited )
@A_A@lemmy.world avatar

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.

SubArcticTundra, (edited )
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

Do you have any estimate of how much storage (in GB) all the posts ever posted across Lemmy have taken up, to date? (Excluding media)

1984,
@1984@lemmy.today avatar

Something tells me lemmynsfw has the largest disks. :)

Omega_Haxors,

They call me Bigdisk Johnson.

WanderingVentra,

I should donate to them. I mean… lemmynsfw, what’s that?

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

The porn instance

morrowind,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

*A porn instance

WanderingVentra,

I’m just playing dumb. I know what it is lol

JaymesRS,

I was told it’s not about the size of the disk but how it’s used that really matters.

1984,
@1984@lemmy.today avatar

Yeah we are told a lot… :)

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

The SQL table for posts is 1.6 GB on lemmy.ml, and 5.7 GB for comments. That probably accounts for a majority of content on the Lemmyverse.

SubArcticTundra,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

1.6GB is impressively small for anything by modern internet standards

dessalines,

To add, lemmy.ml’s entire DB compressed as a xz with -0 strength is about 3.7 GB. But that also includes the activity tables which aren’t vital.

phiresky,

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.

A_A,
@A_A@lemmy.world avatar

… is 11169622 …

Maybe 9 post out of 10 are deleted by the few checks I made manually …or am I missing something ?

Kaboom,

What is your take on right wing subs like !conservative ?

Should they get the boot? Good for growth? What do you think?

soviettaters,

Why should there not be right wing subs? Would we not just be becoming like Reddit by banning them?

Inui,

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.

OnlyTakesLs,

Not soviet, but that removal was unpopular for a reason.

soviettaters,

I don’t think it should be an instance decision. The best part about the fediverse is that we can pick and choose what we want to see.

Inui,

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.

davel,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

The way it plays out is bugs-no

I don’t know what mental model someone is working from to draw such a conclusion. A free speech absolutist one? A consumer rights one? 🤷

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

important context: Lemm ee has a conservative c/ run by a pedophile who the admin of that instance protects.

davel, (edited )
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

As for freeze-peach absolutism, consider the paradox of tolerance.

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.

whoisearth,
@whoisearth@lemmy.ca avatar

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?

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

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.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Remember all those CSAM attacks that were happening? They were all coming from those instances with a reputation for being soft on the right.

Is this your opinion or do you have actual evidence for this?

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

I’ve done a little investigation in the matter but as the admin for lemmy you should have a way better information on the subject.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

So you are making factual statements with zero facts to support them. Got it.

Omega_Haxors,

I apologize.

possiblylinux127,

I would hope we aren’t going to start kicking people out because of there political views.

davel,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

Perhaps you are not aware that some instances already do, and that some—for example hexbear & lemmygrad—have done so since their inception.

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

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.

Kaboom, (edited )

So to summarize, you don’t think women, minorities, and the poor should be able to arm themselves? Got it, thanks.

Omega_Haxors,

Conservativism is when guns

Kaboom,

Communism is when you hurt women, minorities, and the poor.

Omega_Haxors,

actually it’s when vuvuzela 9 gorillian dead & no iphone

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

This is so ridiculous I dont even know where to start.

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

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.

possiblylinux127,

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.

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

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.

hendrik, (edited )

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.)

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

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).

TORFdot0,

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.

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

of course sh.itholefor.nazis had a T_d community. I’m not even fucking surprised. This is what happens when you go soft on nazism.

hendrik, (edited )

Have you put measures into place to assure the quality of future updates? In the past several updates have caused issues. And recently 0.19.x broke federation for the most of us. And it took weeks to fix it and make Lemmy usable again.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

We publish multiple release candidates and run them on lemmy.ml before the final release. That allows the community to test changes. We dont have a quality assurance team, and developers are notoriously bad at testing their own code, so I dont see what we can improve in this regard.

hendrik,

developers are notoriously bad at testing their own code, so I dont see what we can improve in this regard.

Sounds like software development… I mean automated tests help. But you’re developing a distributed/federated platform. Unit tests won’t do it. Maybe infrastructure that spins up a small fleet of instances and checks their ability to federate posts, delete comments and simulates interaction. That’d assure the most important aspects keep working. And I think there are tools for that available. But I get it. It’s complicated, there are real-world instances with special (niche) setups, you’re constrained, it has to be worth the effort and there are other important things to do.

Maybe just do your best not to break too many things and we (users) can complain and have another discussion only if it’s a reoccurring problem. 😉

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

We have lots of unit tests, and also a test suite which launches a couple of local lemmy instances and ensures that they federate as expected. But it’s not possible to cover every single functionality, at least not with our limited resources. The problems all happened with things that are difficult to test and had major breaking changes in this release. In the future we won’t need such breaking changes so there will be less problems.

Also keep in mind that Lemmy is provided for free and as is. We have no legal obligation to users. And you can always stay with an older version if you want more stability.

hendrik, (edited )

Thank you very much for explaining, and the whole AMA.

Concerning the “providing the project for free”… I think that’s too simplistic. I mean users have expectations anyways. And you must have some motivation to maintain an open source project. Otherwise you wouldn’t put it out there, engage with your users, fix their issues and incorporate their requests. Or you’d make that clear in the first line of the Readme as some people do.

I think open source is giving and taking. It’s not about legal obligations (we usually waive every responsibility in every open source license.) But perhaps ethically. I as a user feel obligated to honor and respect your work and the time you’ve put in. And I shouldn’t expect anything except for everyone abides by the license. But the devs aren’t the only one putting in time and effort. Downstream are admins who run the actual instances. There might be an ethical obligation to not waste their time either. And there are moderators and users who make the platform become alive. They also offer their time for free and are part of the ecosystem, like the developers are. And ethically it is correct to treat people nice who put in a few hours to prepare a proper pull request and work towards the same goal as core developers.

And there are a few unique circumstances. This is a social network/link aggregator. And as such it relies to some degree on the network effect. It won’t work without a certain amount of users and them being happy here. Lemmy devs seem (to me) invested in the project and not just coding something for money. So you want it to be successful and catering for users is part of the equation. Additionally the users of a social network trust the platform with their private data. You can’t take legal responsibility for that. But if you accept users doing that, it’s at least an ethical obligation to make good choices.

And the situation is: Since you have a few full-time developers… It’s not a hobby project anymore. So it’s a bit more complicated. And money might come with expectations. I personally differentiate between donations that are meant as a bounty, this money comes with obligations. And donations for the great work you’ve done so far. These come without.

I think you’re doing a good job. I especially like that Lemmy development doesn’t seem to be focused on growth above all. You could implement things differently and completely focus on not showing user-facing issues, in order to assure fast growth. Or write a Reddit clone like some people would like, including gamification, awards and stuff. But you don’t seem to be interested in that. And that aligns well with what I like. I want a nice place to engage with people. I don’t need another platform that is commercial and does things in order to be successful at the market.

I’m grateful. There are still bugs and a few more complicated annoyances I’d like to see being addressed. But I really enjoy spending some of my time here.

SovietReporter,

When are we getting polls in a similar format that Reddit does? I would love to have those!!

dessalines,

No specific time, but they are in the linked roadmap for this year.

0x2d,

nice!

hendrik, (edited )

How’s development going? Do you have enough funds to pay your salaries? Did the EU fund run out? What’s your workload? Is the amount of full-time developers enough to work on new features? Or is it barely enough to keep up?

How do you like Lemmy and the people on it? (As of now)

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

We are getting about 4000 Euros per month which is not much to pay for two developers, so more donations would definitely be nice. From NLnet Dessalines and I still have a few milestones leftover from 2022 but those should be finished very soon. We could definitely use more developers, its impossible to keep up with all the issues so we have to try and prioritize the most important ones.

The people on Lemmy are generally very nice, so I cant complain.

Obi,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

I see you think in euros, where are you guys from?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Im from Germany, living in Spain.

Obi,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

Nice, hope you are enjoying the fair weather and delicious food :) keep up the good work. Guten tag!

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