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.

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.

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.

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