In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.
We’d also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What’s something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?
Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @dessalines and @nutomic, turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We’d like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.
We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides @dessalines and @nutomic, other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:
Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.
No questions right now. Just wanted to say thank you for your hard work.
I know y’all catch a lot of shit and get hammered with requests/demands, so I wanted to let you know that your work is greatly appreciated.
Thanks for dedicating your time and energy to making a non-corporate, federated social environment possible.
Being on Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air.
Just wanted to say I LOVE lemmy! It’s a really positive community, the atmosphere is great and I like how it’s unique but also familiar. I really appreciate your work on it. I know this is AMA… what’s your favourite animal?
Thanks a lot for the work you do! How do you get by with such a limited amount of funds? How sustainable is your financial situation if donations don’t pick up considerably?
Do you plan on moving away from GitHub to something else like Forgejo?
+1 on registration experience being the #1 issue.
Would also be cool if we could stop 404/500ing deleted posts and instead display some indication it has been deleted. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment.
Thanks for Lemmy! 💙
What’s something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?
One of the biggest issue at this point is probably the registration experience. There are quite a few occurrences on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com of users not sure whether their email has been validated or not, and at the moment they really need to look out for the toastify notification on their first try, later attempts won’t show it.
Most recent example: https://lemmy.ml/post/27607055?scrollToComments=true
If there could be a way to inform a user saying “your email address has been validated, please wait for an administrator to activate your account, you can reach out to them at xxx”, that would be great.
Youre right, I also noticed some other problems while testing registrations:
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5547
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5548#issue-2949361836
For the email validation it could also make sense to send out another email saying “your email has been validated”, so its not only shown on the website.
Thanks!
I’d need more detail here. If registration emails aren’t being sent out correctly, we need to handle that.
These two posts should provide more details
This generally goes against security best practices as it can be used for attempted user enumeration. A better version would be “we’ll send you an email with your account status if this user exists” but obviously that results in a fair amount more complexity (and cost) to implement
I am not suggesting users being able to enumerate other users, just that the unique link that is currently used for email verification would be more explicit than just the one time toastify notification
Enumerating users is not a security problem. It’s platform obscurantism to even suggest that it is.
I think I’ll trust owasp and my own over 20 years of experience building commercial software but you do you
That just opens the door for bots that can never be closed
the password/cookie should still work even when awaiting validation, password is set before the email is sent
How are you?
A bit tired because my whole family is half sick. Luckily the kids are still okay to go to school.
Otherwise Im excited for this AMA, because I rarely have such direct conversations with users about Lemmy. The discussions on Github are usually quite technical.
Not bad, the swiss chard and spinach I planted recently are sprouting, so that’s got me excited.
Spinach is a finicky bastard in my experience, take good care of it
Chilling in the morning before I start my day job.
- I have no idea how and which server I joined, is there any manial I can read better yet visually see how servers are connected that are federated? Thx. And when we search something does it search across all servers? Thanks.
How would you improve it?
a way to filter out posts that have no engagement or comments from others would be helpful since the larger instances flood my feed w hundreds/thousands of news links that flood out the discourse on lemmy.
Old user, haven’t been active recently. Where’d all this growth come from?? Another reddit refugee situation?
!reddit@lemmy.world started to ban people based on upvotes
!buyeuropean@feddit.uk movement has motivated people to look around for European alternatives to Reddit
Blaze means the website Reddit, not the community they linked
Oh indeed, giving the community can help people read more about it.
Thought you meant pre-2023 by old user
Do you plan to introduce some kind of post tags into Lemmy, preferably something that will behave like Hashtags on Mastodon and other activitypub platforms? I know that Lemmy has been embedding community name as a hashtag for a while now, though having tags that can be populated by users would help discovery greatly.
What have been the biggest challenges with the project over the years, both in terms of technical and non technical aspects. I’d be interesting to hear a bit of retrospective on how has the stack’s been working out, and what surprises you might’ve run into in terms of scaling and federation. What recommendations you’d make based on that and what you would’ve done differently knowing what you know now.
The stack is great, I wouldnt want to change anything. Postgres is very mature and performant, with a high focus on correctness. It can sometimes be difficult to optimize queries, but there are wizards like @dullbananas@lemmy.ca who know how to do that. Anyway there is no better alternative that I know of. Rust is also great, just like Postgres it is very performant and has a focus on correctness. Unlike most programming languages it is almost impossible to get any runtime crashes, which is very valuable for a webservice.
The high performance means that less hardware is required to host a given number of users, compared to something like NodeJS or PHP. For example when kbin.social was popular, I remember it had to run on multiple beefy servers. Meanwhile lemmy.ml is still running on a single dedicated server, with much more active users. Or Mastodon having to handle incoming federation activities in background tasks which makes the code more complicated, while Lemmy can process them directly in the HTTP handler.
Nevertheless, scaling for more users always has its surprises. I remember very early in development, Lemmy wasnt able to handle more than a dozen requests per second. Turns out we only used a single database connection instead of a connection pool, so each db query was running after that last one was finished, which of course is very slow. It seems obvious in retrospect, but you never notice this problem until there are a dozen or so users active at the same time.
With the Reddit migration two years ago a lot of performance problems came up, as active users on Lemmy suddenly grew around 70 times. You can see some of that in the 0.18.x release announcements. One part of the solution was to add missing database indexes. Another was to remove websocket support, which was keeping a connection open for each user. That works fine with 100 users, but completely breaks down with 1000 or more.
After all there is nothing I would do different really. It would have been good to know about these scaling problems earlier, but thats impossible. In fact for my project Ibis (federated wiki) Im using the exact same architecture as Lemmy.
It’s great to hear things mostly worked out. Stuff like scaling bottlenecks is definitely tricky to catch until you have serious loads on the system, but sounds like the fixes very mostly trivial validating overall design. It also looks like you managed to get a way with a fairly simple stack by leveraging Postgres and Rust. I’ve had really good experience with using pg myself, and really don’t see a point in using anything else now. You can use it both as a relation db and a document store, so it’s extremely flexible on top of being highly performant. Keeping the stack simple tends to be underappreciated, and projects often just keep adding moving pieces which end up adding a lot of overhead and complexity in the end.
2nding @nutomic, that I’m really happy with the stack.
The one that seems really magical to me, is diesel. With it we get a compile-time-checked database, that’s tightly integrated to the rust objects / code.
Every single join, select, insert, etc is checked before lemmy is even run, and it eliminates a whole category of errors resulting from mismaps.
Its made adding columns, and changing our data structures so much less error-prone than when I lived in the java-world.
Whenever we find that we’d want to do things differently, we usually do a refactor ASAP so as not to keep rolling spaghetti code. We’ve had to do this many times for the federation and DB code, and even have 2 major refactors that also add features ongoing. But luckily we’ve been able to stay in the rust eco-system for that.
As for UI, leptos didn’t exist when I built lemmy-ui, so I went with a fast react-like alternative, inferno. Its showing its age now, so @sleepless1917 is working on lemmy-ui-leptos, which hopefully will supercede lemmy-ui.
I briefly worked with Hasura which does this sort of magic to produce GraphQL API on top of Postgres. Incidentally, also written in Rust. I do like Leptos approach, it sounds similar to HTMX approach where you just treat the DOM as a dumb terminal.
The stack is overall amazing, but not perfect. Waiting for the Rust code to compile is sometimes very annoying, but I wouldn’t want to use a different language. And we had to implement somewhat complicated things that existing Rust libraries did not do. For example, I made the “i_love_jesus” library so Lemmy could have cursor pagination that uses indexes well and allows bringing back the “back” button, we have a few custom QueryFragment impls because of diesel’s limitations, and we have a custom migration runner to do fancy stuff (see crates/db_schema/src/schema_setup.rs).
I made the “i_love_jesus” library so Lemmy
Could I ask if there’s any meaning behind that name?
Nothing related to the library. I love Jesus. I’m Catholic and a little silly. Also my GitHub profile picture is Jesus.
I don’t know what I expected lol. Cheers.
Edit: I don’t mean this disrespectfully, it was just a very direct and obvious answer.
Being a Lisper, the idea of waiting for the compiler is very jarring. :)
Oh, to be able to develop Lemmy with something like SLIME or Geiser, now that would be a dream. Too bad the CL’s library ecosystem is so much worse than Rust’s.
Clojure has a lot better story in that regard living on the JVM, but the overhead of using the JVM is a downside of its own. It’s a good platform, but definitely not what you’d call lightweight.
Yeah, if I was building something production ready in Lisp, Clojure would be my choice even though I prefer CL. Ecosystem is ultimately king.
For sure, having mature and battle tested libraries is really hard to beat.
When will anyone be able to click the following /c/books And see an agglomeration of all “books” communities on all federated server? I don’t mean multireddits Thanks!!
When will users be able to frictionlessly migrate between instances without losing their posts, their comments, their history, their relationships, their reputation etc? (Without requiring the consent of the exiting instance owner, or that this server still even exists, as they sometimes don’t)
What Is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
