This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.
Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.
How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?
Any plans for improving SEO? One of Reddit’s biggest strengths was being able to get very relevant results with a simple internet search. In time can you see something similar for Lemmy, even with its decentralized nature? I really you for doing this, thank you for your time!
deleted by creator
I’m gonna be asking hard questions, I think, sorry about that. I hope you consider it tough love considering our past interactions.
As an instance admin, I have some questions:
-
How are you doing? I know there was a lot of pressure when things blew up and it seems to be calming down a bit now.
-
How is Lemmy doing financially?
-
Considering past releases and their associated breaking bugs (including 0.18.3), what measures are you taking to help prevent that?
-
Can we consider the possibility of downgrades being supported?
-
Why are bugs affecting moderation not release blockers? Does anything block releases?
-
Are there plans to give instance administrators a voice in shaping the future of Lemmy’s development?
As someone who is trying to help with Lemmy’s development, I have some other questions:
- What do you think are the biggest problems with Lemmy as a software project and what are your priorities for Lemmy?
- Considering fairly low amounts of developers contributing to Lemmy, how are you working to help new people get into the project?
- Do you worry about the message it sends to potential contributors when the main developers are working on a different project which competes with the former? (Example: Lemmy-ui vs Lemmy-ui-Leptos)
- Considering most work is done voluntarily, how are you trying to organize and prioritize work?
- Do you believe you are stretching yourself too thin between Lemmy, Lemmy-ui, Lemmy-ui-leptos, Jerboa and Lemmy.ml? If so, what are you doing to help you focus?
Wow lots of questions here.
- Im doing well, its exciting to know that so many people like the software Ive worked on for the last years. The first month after the migration was really stressful, but by now its calmed down a lot. Plus there are many contributors now which are helping a lot.
- Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
- I think the “breaking bugs” were really minor considering how we had to constantly rush out performance and security fixes. This should get better as we dont need to make emergency fixes, and have more time to let the community test release candidates before making the full release.
- Supporting downgrades means that someone has to test them and report/fix problems. We dont have time for that, but feel free to do it.
- Like I said, our recent releases had urgent performance/security fixes so we didnt have enough time for testing. We also didnt find out about these problems until later. Part of the problem is that keeping up with issues is almost a full-time job on its own, so I rarely read them anymore. If you see something important reported, do let me know.
- No concrete plans, but I definitely think that admins are the main actors who should have a voice in development. Its impossible for us to listen to all the individual users, because there are too many and they often dont have the necessary technical knowledge. If you have some ideas how to facilitate communication between devs and admins, let me know.
Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.
Alright second part:
- The biggest problem is definitely that there are too many things to do, but only the two of us working on it fulltime. The day only has so many hours and its impossible to keep up with everything. Thats why community contributions are really important.
- The amount of contributors is very high compared to a few months ago, its not easy to keep up with all the pull requests. Its going to take some time for processes to adjust to the new scale, and for new contributors to learn how everything works.
- This is a question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml
- People work on whatever they are passionate about. Generally that works quite well.
- I am only working on Lemmy and thats already a lot. So another question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml
-
Hope multiples are ok …
- As platform developers, do you have any thoughts about ActivityPub? Positive/negative critiques, needed developments (in your opinions), usage gripes or tips for other platform devs, future predictions?
- As devs of (now) the second largest platform next to mastodon (by some metrics), which are probably as distinct platforms can be in terms of format, do you have any views on interoperability between platfroms over ActivityPub, where a common critique (AFAIK), from *diaspora devs for example, is that sharing posts/information of different formats just doesn’t work well over AtivityPub and so is one of its major flaws?
- Arguably the fediverse has so far sought to replicate the corporate big-social platforms … should new design evolution occur now and if so how?
- Much has been made by some of how the lack of user-friendliness of the fediverse really isn’t anything to celebrate and should be taken more seriously by users and devs alike (see, eg, Erin Kissane who focuses on mastodon). However much this applies to lemmy (where issues of user mobility probably do apply), do you think the fediverse needs a better story around catering to user needs?
- Do you have any thoughts on the server-based architecture of the fediverse (where all user accounts are bound to a particular user) and whether alternative architectures have a future or could be better (p2p, more single-user based for instance)?
- Should lemmy and the fediverse seek to grow with any and all users or seek to stay relatively small and limited to ensure a healthy cutlure?
- Journalism and journalists … should they be on the fediverse (like the BBC recently with their own mastodon instance) … and if so, how?
- What are the biggest or proudest moments you’ve had with Lemmy so far, and the worst or most embarrassing?
- How does it feel to have so many users using and developing against your software?!
I’m not asking anything because I’m a potato when it comes to software. I just wanted to drop by and say: thank you both for Lemmy. The platform is amazing, and it’s clear that you guys are pouring some heavy love (and labour hours) in it, as it’s improving at an amazing pace.
Thanks! We’re glad ppl are finding Lemmy useful, and enjoying using it!
I asked this in the original thread but I’ll repeat it here:
-
Are there any limitations with the ActivityPub protocol you find limiting? Do you have recommendations for future versions of the protocol?
-
Do you have any thoughts on the AT Protocol (a potential competitor to AP)?
-
Do you think ‘normies’ (people with very very little technical knowledge/experience) will be able to come to a decentralized platform like lemmy? Can a platform be successful long term (especially in niche areas) without that super huge low effort part of the user base?
Maybe I’m completely misremembering things, but at some point wasn’t there a hotfix to Lemmy that hard-limited how many comments a thread could have? Does anyone know if there’s a maximum and if so how many?
Just wondering, cause uh, I could see this one having a lot of comments.
Have you considered a feature like “sibling community”?
What I mean is, for example, car community on server 1 marks itself as a sibling community to a car community on server 2. Similarly server 2 marks itself as a sibling community to server 1, ie it is two-way.
When communities have been linked bi-directionally, any post and comment are shared between the two sibling communities.
This would allow bigger communities to form out of smaller communities, thereby preventing discussions from being fragmented and showing the true size of Lemmy, across servers.
We have an open issue for collections of communities, but not for any complicated trees of communities. Creating and linking community trees sounds really complicated, and I don’t know how all that would work.
I don’t know how the code is currently working, but I like this feature idea and would suggest to start very simple and proceed from there.
For example you could: a) Make a list of communities that are siblings with their id and instance b) add a toggle to view sister community posts yes /no c) query all communities, list the last x posts from each with time constraints, e.g. not older than 1 day or hour depending on the community post frequency d) list them sorted by time of x , depending on what was chosen
The biggest issue I see with this simple approach, besides others, is that different communities are different in terms of activity / post frequency. So ideally the better, but more effort, way would be to let each community instance communicate their posts themselves via a query with activity metric parameters. Basically the amount of returned posts would depend on common parameters set by the most active instance.
It’s not yet thought out, but just getting an mvp started and test the waters would probably be better than having it perfect right away while working on it for months
Since you’re very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?Thanks for your work, it’s projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive.
The free software movement is actually inherently political. Much of modern digital infrastructure is built using tools / software that embodies collectivist ideologies. I would be very surprised if the Lemmy developers even claimed that they created Lemmy in some sort of apolitical clean room (not that it is even possible).
Any public action can be considered politics and I’m not asking for complete neutrality. The free software movement has freedom of the user in it’s core philosophy. This is not necessarily the case of some radical left movements. So I’m hoping that the free software philosophy prevrails in the case of Lemmy’s development.
What kind of political preferences are you referring to?
They are communists, you can find the thoughts of Dessalines here: https://github.com/dessalines/essays
Che Guevara and Mao on his profile.deleted by creator
The devs are openly tankies. Pro-CPP/Russia, anti anything US or western in general.
Thanks for both of your work on Lemmy, join-lemmy, lemmy-ui and Jerboa.
- Can you tell us about any upcoming major features/issue resolutions in development currently, if there are any?
- Will Lemmy have any form of cross-instance community/post grouping, similar to multi-reddits, hashtags, “alliances” or categories? Although some Lemmy apps have implemented something along those lines, it could be more fully-implemented in the official backend/frontend. I’ve been thinking Lemmy has desparately needed it to help solve some of the fragmentation problems across instances. It would also help avoid one instance necessarily having all the content, ballooning in both running costs and control.
Hi! This isn’t really a question, but I was a former admin on Lemmy.ml and I just want to say that I really appreciated the opportunity to be on your team and it was a really valuable experience for me! I’m no longer an admin due to inactivity and personal life events causing me to no longer have the time to serve such a role, but I enjoyed the time I was and I really hope I was able to make a positive contribution to the instance!
Thank you for your continued work developing this project and running your instance comrades! This is still by far my favourite fediverse platform, actually, favourite social media in general. I intend to continue using both Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad and I hope I can continue to contribute by using Lemmy when I have the chance!
Thanks for your help :)
It was my pleasure! Thank you for the opportunity!
I appreciate you a ton comrade, you’ve been such a great help in getting this instance off the ground. Personal stuff should always be more important, so I hope all goes well. If you ever decide you want to admin again, lmk!
Thank you so much comrade! I loved working with you and the other admins and am very grateful for the experience!
- What is the best Linux distribution?
- Favorite instance outside of lemmy.ml?
- Best and worst Lemmy client?
- Arch.
- startrek.website
- Jerboa (biased obvi, but I like boost’s UI and Jerboa’s is mostly inspired from that)
- Manjaro for me.
- Impossible to choose, there are too many.
- I didnt have the time or motivation to try different clients yet. The web ui works just fine for me.
What was your first reaction to the massive exodus from Reddit during the blackout? Was it something you were expecting?
It was
On the negative side, for about 2 months, I got an average of 5 hours sleep a night, got 12k+ notifications on github alone, and every day was a new stressful emergency.
But it also helped us expose a bunch of security issues, and help expose and optimize some of our DB issues, so in that sense a reddit-sized stress-test was of long-term benefit to the project.
Luckily things have calmed down now, and we’re able to cope with things a bit better.
Congratulations on surviving to this !
