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.

GravitySpoiled, (edited )

Is there a public roadmap of some sort?

Maybe a blog post like “a year in review and what’s up for this year”

I’m not talking about bugs or minor tweaks. Just a general where are we, where are we coming from and where are we going to? What are important milestones?

Blaze, (edited )
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this thread

Edit: Leaving this here

OsrsNeedsF2P,

Something tells me you’re gonna be pasting this a lot 😄

sunaurus,
@sunaurus@lemm.ee avatar

It’s OK to post questions here:

Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

I stand corrected!

weeahnn,
@weeahnn@lemmy.world avatar

That would actually be nice.

aeharding,
@aeharding@lemmy.world avatar

I think a lemmy roadmap for the next year is hard, because scope and even individual features depend on funding (for example, nlnet funds specific features).

Maybe something like Mastodon’s roadmap would be possible though (with no specific timeline)? joinmastodon.org/roadmap

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f256050b-ec5e-4723-9ca6-2492315bd25a.png

Steve, (edited )

I wouldn’t put a timeline to it. Just a list of features, broad and specific. As time goes on, they can be marked as “in progress” or “included”. New things can be added over time, or made more specific. All without timetables. For now call it a wishlist.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Check the NLnet milestones in updated OP.

dessalines,

I’ve just updated the post body with some updates about this, but if we get approved for another year of funding from NLNet, the the two new devs will be working on these milestones in 2024 (still a draft at this point).

Being an open source project, we can afford to be less strict about a roadmap, as anyone (including ourselves) can take on any of the open issues on the issue tracker. Part of the fun of these is getting to pick which things you’d like to work on, and that you personally think are important.

Outside of maintenance-related tasks and merging PRs (which does take a significant chunk of our time) of course @nutomic and I both have things we’d like to prioritize this year. My main priorities are:

  • Getting Jerboa as fully functional as lemmy-ui.
  • Notifications (Unified push).
  • Working on lemmy-ui-leptos, our proposed replacement web UI for lemmy-ui written in Rust.
  • Performance improvements (DB, federation code)
  • Stabilizing the API
  • Becoming fully funded by donations, and growing our dev co-op.
GravitySpoiled,

Thx! Goodluck and enjoy the path

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?

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

What could be done to improve interoperability between federated platforms?
mainly talking about Mastodon since it is the biggest one.

I have seen the Peertube dev is quite nice and approachable. And willing to improve the experience cross-platform.

Have you tried to approach @Gargron? Is he willing to contribute? How could we get Mastodon to improve the user experience with federated content, eg. communities and article posts?

What about @dansup / @dansup and Pixelfed?

GravitySpoiled,

Very interesting question since mastodon introduced groups very recently which are a direct competitor to lemmy

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

TIL, I’ll have to have a look

GravitySpoiled, (edited )

fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse/

Of course not mature but mastodon can have groups without lemmy

Blaze, (edited )
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

Mastodon’s main dev isn’t really open. Have a look at the “Ego” part of this article: …medium.com/i-left-mastodon-yesterday-4c5796b0f54…

Misskey forks, whatever their names are today, seem more interesting

spaduf, (edited )

While I agree with the content of that article I don’t know if we should give up on Eugen just yet. The Mastodon team has not disclosed what their plan is regarding the groups rework currently on the mastodon roadmap. There is an old proposal here, but I think we have good reason to believe that implementation will be revisited. To that end, it is very important to advocate for the adoption of FEP-1b12 which is the standard that Lemmy uses.

It may also be a good idea to advocate for the adoption of FEP-d36d both here and on lemmy. This is a standard for group-to-group following. Effectively allowing communities to subscribe to other communities.

Here’s a slightly older but fairly comprehensive write-up of the situation: blog.erlend.sh/group-convergence

simple, (edited )

Mastodon’s main dev isn’t really open. Have a look at the “Ego” part of this article

That article was over 5 years ago now. I would expect that there has been massive change now that Mastodon is way more popular, and the project is way more involved. Also, blocks and mutes do work now.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

Quote posts are still not there, they are on Misskey forks

fedi.tips/why-cant-i-quote-other-posts-in-mastodo…

They are on the roadmap, but that doesn’t say much.

Omega_Haxors,

Ah 5 years ago? That explains it. Early mastodon was rough but they seem to have gotten their shit together pretty recently.

phiresky, (edited )

Interoperability is great, but sadly there isn’t really any organized group effort to standardize more aspects / extensions of ActivityPub. AP is really “thin” in that it barely prescribes anything. There’s not even a test suite to test whether software complies to the spec of AP.

So everyone kind of does their own thing, and fixes interoperability on a case-by-case basis. This makes it kinda frustrating to spend time on - lemmy already has special cases for many different softwares (peertube, mastodon, …) and every one increases the complexity.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

There are such efforts on SocialHub and on a W3C mailing list. However devs of major Fediverse projects are rarely active there, because they are all busy working on their own software.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

There have been lots of compatibility improvements with Mastodon from our side. However Mastodon seems to have almost no interest to make improvements from their side. I dont think there is much we can do about that, in the end project maintainers always care about their own users most.

With dansup there was some communication years ago, but it seems he lost interest 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.

OsrsNeedsF2P, (edited )

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”?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

dessalines, (edited )

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.

It’s great to see that positivity confirmed by a researcher who did a qualitative and quantitative analysis about Lemmy migration, and finding that >90% of people saw themselves using Lemmy in the long term. We can all be very proud of that, and it means we have a bright future.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

Not a question, just wanted to let you know I how much we appreciate and love you all for making Lemmy happen 🥰🥰

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Thank you! Its great that you have been around all these years.

dessalines,

Thx a ton!

pocketman_stuck,

People, avoid to ask repeated questions and keeping it one question per comment is generally better.

dessalines,

Yes thank you. Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming when there are 10+ questions in a single comment, and each of them requires a little essay.

Die4Ever,

also people should search the issues on github, a few of these questions already have issues filed with discussions in them, put a thumbs up on a github issue if it’s something you want

9point6,

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?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

Tangentism, (edited )

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.

can,

Couldn’t agree more. I’m still hopelessly addicted to the format but at leat now I’m sticking it to the man at the same time lol.

dessalines, (edited )

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.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

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?

phiresky,

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.

mrmanager, (edited )
@mrmanager@lemmy.today avatar

What are the plans around admin tools?

Instance owners currently gets notified when someone has reported a user for spamming or trolling, but frequently it’s a user that is not on his instance, so he can’t do anything about it. Wouldn’t it be better if instance owners got notified only when they can take actual action (like the user being registered on their instance)?

possiblylinux127,

I have seen this first hand. I think when someone hits report it needs to go to the moderator of the community. From there the mod should be able to forward it to where it needs to go.

Instance admins should be able to intersect this process.

OnlyTakesLs,

Problem is that reports don’t go the mods if they are on another instance.

dessalines,

There’s some more context for this in this issue, and we each have different views on it, because there are tradeoffs no matter what.

My personal view (based on experience modding and admin’ing), is that we should prioritize handling a report ASAP, by the first eyeballs that see it, rather than whose jurisdiction it is. On all but the largest communities, admins are generally more active, and more likely to see the report and take action on it.

possiblylinux127,

Maybe make it go to everyone?

dessalines,

That’s what we currently do ( as in the report goes to both mods of that community, and instance admins).

Blaze, (edited )
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this thread

Edit: Leaving this here cause why not

mrmanager,
@mrmanager@lemmy.today avatar

But it says in the OP that this thread should be used for posting questions for the AMA?

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

I stand corrected!

mrmanager,
@mrmanager@lemmy.today avatar

No worries :)

dessalines, (edited )

If you’ve been following our code commits / PRs, we’ve been adding a lot of mod tools improvements not just lately, but over lemmy’s entire life. I would even go so far as to say we have the strongest mod tools of any project in the fediverse, all the more necessary for us because of the community-focus.

The upcoming roadmap for 2024 includes some mod additions, such as mod warnings, attaching report counts to items, viewing mod actions for items, etc.

Instance owners currently gets notified when someone has reported a user for spamming or trolling, but frequently it’s a user that is not on his instance, so he can’t do anything about it. Wouldn’t it be better if instance owners got notified only when they can take actual action (like the user being registered on their instance)?

Instance admins are responsible for what content their users see, so if a troll is visible to their users and ruining their day, then it should be taken care of everywhere necessary.

calavera,

Were you ever approached by any kind of organization making some weird proposal regarding lemmy?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

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?

dessalines, (edited )

A few, mostly harmless tho, just about working on pet features they’d like to see in Lemmy. None panned out.

I imagine the more parasitic companies avoid us as soon as they see the AGPLv3 license.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

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:

  • Migrating accounts between instances
  • Tagging users across instances
  • Linking communities across instances
  • Finding communities across instances
Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

Migrating accounts between instances

Isn’t that implemented in the 19.2 and later versions? I just migrated using that feature a few days back, worked quite well

WanderingVentra, (edited )

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.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

I’m pretty sure it is there, you can export and import your subscriptions in the settings

can,

It’s only subscriptions, blocks, and user settings iirc. Your posts and comments don’t migrate for example.

WanderingVentra, (edited )

Still that’s not bad. Wish they could get saved posts to transfer, too. That would be useful.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

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.

docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

Yes, that’s what I meant by security risk, that’s like a DoS feature.

JackbyDev,

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

spaduf, (edited )

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.

Die4Ever,

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2318

spaduf,

Yup that’d be sick

Die4Ever,

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987

spaduf, (edited )

Really like your protocol handlers contribution here. Seems tough to square with multiple accounts though.

phiresky, (edited )

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.

dessalines,

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.

treadful,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

Is there an official roadmap for Lemmy?

What are the current needs of the project, if any? For instance, are you currently looking for skilled or financial contributions?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Check the updated OP. We can definitely use more donations, at the moment we are getting around 4000 Euros per month which is not much for two fulltime devs. And code contributions are also helpful, there is an almost endless amount of open issues.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.online avatar

Very interesting, thank you for this

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

A lot of people say there are a bunch of tankies on Lemmy which really begs the question: Where do you all keep your tanks and can I drive one?

davel,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

Maybe the real tankies are the comrades we made along the way soviet-bashful

dessalines,

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.

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

Thank you for being honest, most would deny the existence of the tanks. I’ll get to work on that right away, I wanna drive the tankie tank.

OsrsNeedsF2P, (edited )

What are some cool “Lemmy Adjacent” projects you know of and want to share? (Things like LemmySchedule or Toast.ooo’s Canvas)

dessalines,

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.

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