My Love-Hate Relationship With Lemmy – Gavi's Blog
My Love-Hate Relationship With Lemmy – Gavi's Blog
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623718
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623713
I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.
I just want to add a counter-point to the argument that Lemmy devs are somehow opposed to contributions. In my experience, there has been no resistance to contributing any type of change (I have personally added niche features for running Lemmy in a distributed manner, optimizations, bug fixes, etc). In fact I would claim the complete opposite - I have received plenty of support and good code reviews from maintainers whenever I have wanted to contribute anything.
I think there is truth to the claim that Lemmy maintainers don’t have a lot of patience for people making demands and snarky comments, but that is very different from being opposed to contributions. Also, after running a big instance for a while now, I completely understand this lack of patience - when some of your users just keep being rude to you, it wears down your patience. It’s easy to patiently and kindly respond to the first 100 rude users, but at some point after that, it just becomes gradually more mentally exhausting, to the point where it’s basically impossible.
Even the example provided in the blog post: I don’t think snowe had bad intentions, but I do think they had clearly misinterpreted the situation with that issue, and their comments were needlessly condescending.
Gabe, a couple of weeks ago, nutomic was asking for ideas on a name for his federated wiki alternative project, I put forth my suggestion that I thought was better (also because I didn't want it to be named after the bin chicken), but he told me, pretty bluntly in fact, that he is sticking with his original choice.
Am I bummed about it? Of course.
But it would be silly of me if I kept pestering him because he didn't do exactly what I want, because at the end of the day, he doesn't owe me anything.
I can make suggestions to him, but he doesn't have to take them, I'm not his manager, and I can take no as an answer. (He could have let me down a little easier though.)
From reading your blog post, I get the impression that you are venting because 1. the Lemmy devs didn't prioritize on the "improved moderation tools" that you wanted and 2. you are unhappy with the way they are running their own instance, which is kind of the point of decentralization that instances are ran independently from development.
Let me ask you a follow-up question to think about (you don't have to answer me): You are putting weight into Sublinks right now, what's to say that you wouldn't have any disagreement with jgrim about the development priorities of Sublinks?
Lastly, sorry I never did the thing that I promised you to do a few months about moderating a comm on lit cafe, been kind of stressed and irritable recently and can't really find the energy to do much creative writing. Sorry.
Sorry I didnt mean to be rude to you, unfortunately its always tricky to convey the right meaning over text. I definitely appreciated your input for the naming!
That's not the case at all. I have had disagreements with jgrim and will continue in the future. The difference in that differing opinions are open for discussion and are not immediately met with hostility or completely shutdown.
The lemmy devs are blatantly lying under this post, and I'm not engaging for the reason that I have better things to do than to argue with them and convince them to accept criticism they are clearly never going to be willing to hear. There's more that goes beyond discussing and making github requests on this project, and a portion of this is based on interactions on the backend within matrix admin channels as well as watching interaction within the github repository itself as well. I have engaged heavily in the matrix chats amongst large lemmy instances on this stuff numerous times. My frustration is shared.
My issue isn't that they aren't doing what I want, it's that they have such opinionated development that they seem truly incapable of taking criticism or feedback from others. Everyone is wrong or the problem except for them. All of the criticism I have laid out has been dismissed under this post as "false criticism" which exemplifies the frustration held. I recognize that this is a large project that requires a lot of energy and time that is difficult for hobbyists to engage in, but they actively push away other hobbyists who try to work on the project with them. I am one of them. All passion and desire to engage in this project is gone.
I am truly despondent about lemmy as a platform and simply login and engage when I feel the random spurt of energy to do so. Outside of that, I just monitor and moderate in the background. This blog post simply explains why. Take with it what you will. 🤷
The lemmy devs are blatantly lying under this post, and I’m not engaging for the reason that I have better things to do than to argue with them and convince them to accept criticism they are clearly never going to be willing to hear.
Show us what they lie about. The devs have better things to do too btw.
There is a lot of misleading information in this post.
Something that I notice said consistently by those who have little experience in Lemmy admin spaces is “why not just contribute then?”And the answer people try. And this happens. This unfortunately leads into the next point that is the developer teams behavior.
Dessalines and I had some discussion whether the linked issue should be closed or not. Anyway we decided to leave it open in the end. Then some weeks later a user came along and made a completely offtopic complaint that this decision making process is somehow wrong. I admit that I overreacted by giving a temporary ban for this, but mistakes happen and its completely disingenious to spin this as some sort of general toxic behaviour from our side.
There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.
This is your opinion and I doubt it is as widespread as you think.
Another aspect of this is that the Lemmy devs run two instances: lemmy.ml & lemmygrad.ml
What makes you believe this? I can only speak for myself, and I am not involved with lemmygrad in any way.
The biggest piece that broke all confidence in the Lemmy developers amongst many admins including myself is that during the CSAM spam attacks there was complete radio silence. The developers made no statement on the matter. And when Github requests were made to try and propose ideas about how to fix what happened, the developers explicitly stated they didn’t have time to focus on that. No dialogue.
Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.
As well, when a post was made about Sublinks (A project I will touch a bit more on, and am involved in due to the reasons I have highlighted above) the comments that were made by Lemmy’s lead developers were extremely petty. This lessens peoples confidence in your project, not improves it.
Why do you consider it petty? Its a fact that jgrim never opened any issue for the features he wanted, not did he attempt to contribute with a pull request. Its also true that it took multiple years of fulltime work to get Lemmy ready for production, and I dont see how Sublinks can be any faster when it has only volunteer contributors. That doesnt mean I wish for Sublinks to fail, in fact I hope it will be successful so that admins and users have more choices available, and to improve resilience through independent codebases and development teams.
Generally you seem to have an extremely entitled attitude. Lemmy is an open source project that is provided for free. I would also love to fix all the problems that users report, and implement all those features. But unlike Reddit we are not a billion dollar company with thousands of employees. We are just two individuals funded by donations and working from our homes. There is only a limited number of hours in each day and only so much work we can finish in that time. If you are unhappy with Lemmy then by all means switch to a different platform, because we dont get any direct benefit from having more users.
“Anyways they would have taken too long to implement” seems like a very odd take considering this is an ongoing issue that is pretty damn important. Some features that should be available is for instances to wipe images from certain dates, “muting” instances to prevent storing any images from instances that are not on an approve list and prevent users outside this list from uploading images to your instance, and an option to prevent any user outside your instance from uploading images to your instance.
Theres many mod tools like these that need priority right now but it seems like they keep getting pushed away
Sorry but i have to rant.
There is a lot of misleading information in this post.
Not misleading, straight to the point, on things no one else wanted to point out.Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.
Yes we were put just aside because the feature we recommended was "pictrs" stuff.
There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.
Thats true and so far many instances ( i dont want to say who, because they should come out if they want to be known ) i and the lemmy.world team have many reports from users, admins that they want a better replacement for lemmy. ( e.g. Sublinks ).
The moderation is TERRIBLE after 0.19, the sorting totally wrong unchangeable, every "resolve" leads to page refresh ( have fun finding your report you left on ). New reports are just never seen again, because you cant sort by new. The "All" view is terrible in reports and private messages. Marking Private Messages as "read" just refreshes the page and on the ui doesnt change anything, but after refresh it is marked as read.
On 0.19 there are some occasions of untested things, like "Remove an admin" is not correctly translated. Something THAT primitive.
We / Jgrim never opened a feature request because we already got enough by seeing in the history of feature requests of others.
The ui gets just worse and worse, untested features goes to prod and not getting even a "Warning Untested feature" flag.
We know you are just some guys in their free time. But then why not take your time, test it, make sure everything works, then release it.
Quality is the key for a thriving software, not pushing versions like its a tournament on how many versions can someone push to prod.
You are not a big corpo that can deploy fast fixes that fix any issues that could block instances, so quality is here even a higher priority.It is unfortunate that this is what you have decided to take away from the blog post instead of reflecting on the criticism I have provided. Instead of reflecting on my list of legitimate criticism you have decided to call me entitled and hone in on small aspects of the blog post in attempt to dismiss it completely. Per usual, it is everyone else that seems to be the problem but you. I outlined my own issues with lemmy after a LOT of patience and goodwill. That's lost, and this comment solidifies further why I will switch away from lemmy as soon as I get the chance. Whether you decide to accept the points I have made is on you but ultimately your refusal to recognize the issues I have outlined will cause this project to fade away completely. And that's really sad. I love lemmy as a project and an idea.
Responding to false criticism is important. For example you were under the mistaken impression that we reject pull requests or issues, or don't care about moderation? All of those are provably false. Look at all the moderation PRs I've closed in the past MONTH alone. This is all easily verifiable if you go to our github accounts and see what we're working on.
You also heard second hand that the sublinks developer is making sublinks because they got a bad reception from us, or were told that we'd reject features? They've never opened a single issue or PR.
Your post seems to mostly be 2nd-hand rumors from people who already don't like us, and not from any people that are actually working on Lemmy. That's perfectly fine, but it'd be wrong to not address these false criticisms.
Entitlement in open source is a real thing, and you would know our pain if you ran a codebase currently in use by > 40k people monthly. To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person. It'd be like if I criticized my grandmother's free meal for it not being to my liking, and demanded she make it my way.
It is unfortunate that this is what you have decided to take away from the blog post instead of reflecting on the criticism I have provided.
This is a serious problem across Lemmy(and elsewhere). Someone makes a reasonable argument and the responses will all pile on either something in the users comment history or one sentence in 5 paragraphs that they disagree with.
It's quite exciting to have a similar link aggregation as an option, hope it will federate well with lemmy and the rest of the fediverse. If it can fully federate with mastodon(like able to follow user like a community or something) it will be super. Not sure i understand why open modlog is an issue but to each its own.
Terribly unsearchable name though.
Your frustration is palpable and that's disappointing. Lemmy has improved a lot since we all arrived while the software experience is a lot smoother, admins have been clamouring for moderation tools the whole time. Ultimately there needs to be more contribution to do everything that everyone wants, but moderation needs to be a higher priority for sure.
I will say this though. I know you dislike developers discussing, disagreeing or even arguing, but I actually think it's nice to see things in the open.
Whether you find happiness here or elsewhere in the fediverse, I wish you the best of success and not just because you host one of my communities 😂
I like it here too.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
I am one of the Beehaw admins.
I, personally, have not had negative experiences with you or anyone else associated with the Lemmy software platform.
I appreciate that everyone here, in this thread, has been able to vocalize their praises and constructive criticisms.
I believe that it is very important, for the further development of the fediverse, to keep these conversations open to everyone involved.
Please, let us all reflect on the reasons that we are invested in the fediverse.
Personally, I believe that the fediverse has an enormous potential to replace all of the corporate-run social media platforms.
I am invested in Beehaw and the fediverse for the sake of the people.
I appreciate it, Thank you. It can seem pretty thankless to put so much time into something that you hope is making the world a (slightly) better place, only to have a few people get angry that this free public good you're providing, isn't up to their high standards (and they're not willing to help fix it).
Feels like a lot of recent complaints about lemmy come down to a funding issue; the main reason things aren't accepted is the devs are too busy.
Yes, but also that moderation tooling is largely an UI issue, and the official frontend (lemmy-ui) is semi-abandoned in favour of the leptos rewrite and other alternative frontends. Not wanting to implement complex moderation features in a messy legacy code-base is IMHO understandable, if it is soon to be replaced anyways.
Personally I think the best would be for an alternative frontend to really push into the direction of having great mod tools. Photon already does that to some extend, but I am sure the single developer could use some help with that.
Thanks for sharing about Sublinks. It still has the mouse(?) Lemmy icon BTW. Hopefully, they'll keep the Federation issues in priority. E.g. this (see pic) - I can never see what pic/video is posted on a Lemmy instance. Just this attachment icon and a 'blank'.
sublinks.org should have the icon for the project
Once it reaches parity next on the milestones is moderation features and then federation. All of the currently planned tasks are available for viewing on the github https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1
Im still heavily designing a bunch of the UI for sublinks that will eventually be used instead of the current demo (current one is just showing it has lemmy api compatibility) but if you want a very early sneak peek
The front end is a work in progress but making significant headway. The lemmy frontend it has on the demo instance is just a placeholder, but the work has been progressing rapidly. I've thankfully been able to be there for it and provide input as I can.
Good to hear. All the best!
Am I the only one who cannot read the blog post? When I click on it, from the blog or from the link posted on Lemmy, I only obtain a visualization of a JSON file. By looking at the comments, people seem to have been able to read it, but how?
You aren't, it's a weird issue with the activitypub plugin I am having. I'm contemplating removing the plugin itself due to this.