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, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky@lemmy.world 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@lemmy.world 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
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?
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@mastodon.social? 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@lemmy.ml / @dansup@mastodon.social and Pixelfed?
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?
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)?
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
What happened with the domain Lemmy.ml when Mali took back controls over its domains and some sites went offline? Are you confident that the .ml domain will be reliable in the future?
Thank you! Lemmy is a tremendous contribution to the wider Fediverse, and no amount of "thank yous" is ever enough for people like you writing free software and giving freely to the public domain.
I have been on Lemmy, and around the Fediverse on various accounts since ~2021, and a suggestion I have seen promoted countless times is for communities which federate across instances. e.g. posts to Linux@lemmy.ml will show on Linux@lemmy.world as long as lemmy.ml and lemmy.world federate with one another. If I remember correctly, each of you have previously opposed this idea for multiple reasons. If you do still oppose such a feature, will you please reiterate why you think this is the wrong direction for Lemmy? Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit's multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?
What are some cool "Lemmy Adjacent" projects you know of and want to share? (Things like LemmySchedule or Toast.ooo's Canvas)
There was a big time gap between 0.18.5 and 0.19. Have you considered adopting a release train model, similar to what Rust does? The Bevy game engine has also adopted the idea.
More frequent but smaller releases would probably cause less friction and make upgrading less of a "big thing" and "big things" are always where things go wrong.
Echoing the concern of @interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml, I want to ask about the issue of a lot of communities becoming big on different instances, to the point they consolidate the moderation and engagement power and ability for users. Posting to them is the only way to get ample engagement, even if same communities exist on other instances. This needs to be rectified.
Same communities across servers should be possible to engage with in a metacommunity format. This will be a game changer for Lemmy.
Will private messages ever be displayed in a threaded or grouped manner?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the current web interface is just a reverse chronological list of all sent and received messages. This can be confusing to follow if one is messaging multiple users over an extended period of time. I think the ability to group messages by user would be useful.
Looking forward to it. Hopefully people will stay respectful.
I post a fair amount of video edits. I've had quite a few people say that video playback is far from ideal for not just Lemmy, but the Fediverse as a whole. Is this mostly a 3rd party app thing, or a backend issue? I haven't had much issue myself, but enough people have mentioned it that there is likely an issue somewhere down the line.
First of thanks a lot for the effort that you put into creating lemmy. You have created a really friendly and welcoming place!
I have a question regarding licenses. When you started developing lemmy, what were the reasons for your choice of the AGPL? As you are marxist-leninists, did you also look into other licenses like the the Anti-Capitalist Software License?
Since I read a few comments here... What is your oppinion on more democratic platforms? I mean something like electing moderators. (Or dropping them in a democratic process.) Or voting for other things in a community.
(This is more a hypothetical question. I guess with the architecture as is, it can easily be exploited. And there is no way to implement this properly without severe changes and consequences.)
Will the source code ever move off of proprietary Microsoft GitHub where users need to have an account to contribute & search code—or certain users are blocked due to US sanctions? If the idea is wanting to stand up against centralized US-corpo-controlled social media for forums, why use that US-megacorpate-controlled code forge / social media platform?
What is currently in the works to help admins locate spammers and problematic users on their instance?
Right now I believe it relies heavily on users reporting and admins looking through a users history however I think that is really inefficient.
Are there any better visualization tools that could be made to aid admins?
Hi again,
1 - Now that there are multiple apps for lemmy, wouldn't be better to handover jerboa to someone else and focus more on core lemmy?
2 - How was the inception moment for lemmy? When and how did you decided to leave reddit and create something new and how was the first couple months?
Thanks and come to Brazil ;)
Is there any new p2p/decentral technology that is trying to advance beyond federation?
It would be cool to have a generic framework to make web resources that are inherently decentralized without the need for sponsor and hosting.
Like IPFS but as a social site. Everyone helps partially host content in exchange for access to all the content.
Sorry for taking up all the space :) But please skip the ones you wish.
- How old are you guys? Can be a range if you want e.g. 10-15, 15-20 :)
- Do you know each other IRL?
- Which region do you live in? Like America, Europe, Asia etc.
- If Lemmy had 100 million users, would you still try to remain anonymous?
- Is there an instance admin you hate but can't say?
- What percentage of users should ideally be in the largest Lemmy instance do you believe?
- If you had the chance to change the name Lemmy, would you?
When and how are you going to address the thousands of open issues in the Github repository, that contain UI bugs, missing error messages (something looks as if it was sent for example if you send a direct message with too many characters, but actually isn't), backend issues and other assorted bugs?
Is federated authentication being considered for the future? The federated model of the fediverse is great, but it runs into problems when instances “die”, you want to access different servers as they federate with different things, etc. leading to the need of having multiple accounts. If there were a decentralized network of auth servers, could use the same credentials everywhere.
What is your take on right wing subs like !conservative@lemm.ee ?
Should they get the boot? Good for growth? What do you think?
When do we get advanced moderation features? And for example the ability to block all users from a single instance to prevent for example brigading? I mean for the user, so we don't have to rely on defederation so much.
Are you planning to revamp defederation? I mean it's rather complicated the way it works and the triangle that is the user's instance, the other user's instance and the instance the community is located.
What about features like automatically kicking of moderators / revoking their ownership. In the early days of the Reddit exodus, some people reserved lots of communities just so they'd be the owner of the community, but they don't do anything with it. I think admins mostly already dealt with that. But there are ideas floating around to migitate for things like that and other common annoyances. I think good moderation is key (and the tools that go with that and the whole architecture of the platform should favor a good atmosphere.)
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.
Can there be an option to view deleted/removed comments? (this setting a user could configure in settings)
I can understand why mods want to remove comments, but being able to see the text that was removed could be very useful. At the moment, the only way to do this would be having each post uploaded to internet archive, and hope many other lemmy users do the same thing.
I didn't ask early enough but I will shoot anyway.
What you intend to do with !anime@lemmy.ml? There isn't an active mod there and community is unwilling to continue using it due to defederation with ani.social The problems with community will keep arise due to very nature of Japanese animation and differences in acceptable social norms in western world.
