Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT
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, @[email protected] , SleeplessOne , or @[email protected] 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 @[email protected] 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.
- Liberapay (preferred option)
- Open Collective
- Patreon
- Cryptocurrency
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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.
Then who would moderate this? And what if lemmygrad.ml/c/books wants to have different discussions from lemmy.world/c/books?
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
As I understand your suggestion this would mean one super community might get moderated from 5 different instances and 5 rule sets. It is definitely the right direction but not that easy to design..
Posts are moderated by the delegates of the owner of the hard drive who stores them.
Rule sets are irrelevent make belief justifucation for censors.
I just had a comment deleted "bevayse if rule 3".
I hope you can see with this farcical example that rules do not matter , never have mattered and will never matter. It just the powerful telling you "because I told you so" with extra steps and while giving them the feeling that they are not a bad person.
I think this is interesting but should not be an automatic feature.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meet the new boss, same as old boss.
Who's Lemmy's spez?
- The Lemmy devs operate lemmy.ml, but it's far from being the most active one (it's currently the 5th): https://lemmyverse.net/?order=active_day
- Large instances admins? The most active communities are spread across dbzer0, lemmy.world, programming.dev, lemm.ee, feddit.de, etc.: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
The main difference of Lemmy compared to Reddit is the ability that communities have to walk away, as I explained in another comment: https://discuss.online/comment/5393546
The problem is communities could just as easily walk away from reddit as they do lemmy. Yet they don't. Lemmy has the same issue with critical mass of users.
The communities should be fediverse wide, not under the grips on one mod team.
I just had an issue that might be interesting in your case. You can read it up on [email protected], but long story short, the mod of a community wasn't happy with the way I wanted to bring some meta discussion into the community.
The main difference in this kind of situation between Lemmy and Reddit is that
- the modlog (https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863) is public, allowing everyone to see what the mod did
- it's very easy to open another community, explain what went wrong with the other one, and keep things going.
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
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.
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
I'd like that. I think some other platforms/projects have features like this. And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for your work or this reply. However I do not believe a multireddit analog can solve this issue. As it would not be the default, anyone "escaping" with a multireddit would still find themselves invisible to the larger community who does not use it or even know multicommunities exist or remember to use it for that specific community.
Only a system that shows it all, that user then filter out with shared blacklists, can break the tyranny of moderators.
It becomes a much more acceptable tyranny of the majority, which is only optionnally followed by members.