Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

Is there a public roadmap of some sort?
Maybe a blog post like "a year in review and what's up for this year"
I'm not talking about bugs or minor tweaks. Just a general where are we, where are we coming from and where are we going to? What are important milestones?
- I've just updated the post body with some updates about this, but if we get approved for another year of funding from NLNet, the the two new devs will be working on these milestones in 2024 (still a draft at this point).
  Being an open source project, we can afford to be less strict about a roadmap, as anyone (including ourselves) can take on any of the open issues on the issue tracker. Part of the fun of these is getting to pick which things you'd like to work on, and that you personally think are important.
  Outside of maintenance-related tasks and merging PRs (which does take a significant chunk of our time) of course @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I both have things we'd like to prioritize this year. My main priorities are:
  Getting Jerboa as fully functional as lemmy-ui.
  Notifications (Unified push).
  Working on lemmy-ui-leptos, our proposed replacement web UI for lemmy-ui written in Rust.
  Performance improvements (DB, federation code)
  Stabilizing the API
  Becoming fully funded by donations, and growing our dev co-op.
  
  Thx! Goodluck and enjoy the path
- I think a lemmy roadmap for the next year is hard, because scope and even individual features depend on funding (for example, nlnet funds specific features).
  Maybe something like Mastodon's roadmap would be possible though (with no specific timeline)? https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
  
  I wouldn't put a timeline to it. Just a list of features, broad and specific. As time goes on, they can be marked as "in progress" or "included". New things can be added over time, or made more specific. All without timetables. For now call it a wishlist.
- Check the NLnet milestones in updated OP.
- That would actually be nice.
- ~~The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it's not this thread~~
  Edit: Leaving this here
  
  It's OK to post questions here:
  Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
  
  "Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow."
  :)
  
  Something tells me you're gonna be pasting this a lot 😄

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?
- Nope, never.
  
  whats that thing where a company has a 'we have never been contacted by law enforement or have been forced to disclose data' sign on their website that theyll take down to implicitly inform users theyve received a request and a silencing order
- I'm pretty sure all user data is public already.
  PMs might be the only thing not everyone can see.
  
  IPs and access logs, plus email addresses aren't public and are the kind of thing law enforcement wants.

So many apps die before getting any users. For Lemmy however, when was the first time you really thought "Damn, this thing really might actually take off"?
- For me it was long before the reddit migration (which was ~7 months or so ago). I noticed lemmy slowly but surely gaining traction. It felt more dead than it does now, but the trend was slow and steady growth, which is always a great sign. People were using lemmy, liking it, and sticking around.
  At the same time, it was clear that we weren't making the mistake of all the other reddit alternatives, by promising to be a free speech haven for bigoted communities. Those people actively did our work for us by warning their communities to stay away from Lemmy and its tankie devs, thereby making Lemmy a much more enjoyable place from the very beginning. That was a crucial test: we were not willing to sacrifice our values for growth's sake.
  It's great to see that positivity confirmed by a researcher who did a qualitative and quantitative analysis about Lemmy migration, and finding that >90% of people saw themselves using Lemmy in the long term. We can all be very proud of that, and it means we have a bright future.
- Lemmy was meant to be a Reddit replacement from the beginning, so it was always supposed to take off. Even in the early days the tech was working quite smoothly and users were happy so there was no real doubt about it. The only thing missing were more users. However I had no idea how a real migration would actually look like, so it was really overwhelming when last year people started to flood in and everything got overloaded and broke down.

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?
- There have been lots of compatibility improvements with Mastodon from our side. However Mastodon seems to have almost no interest to make improvements from their side. I dont think there is much we can do about that, in the end project maintainers always care about their own users most.
  With dansup there was some communication years ago, but it seems he lost interest in Lemmy.
- Mastodon's main dev isn't really open. Have a look at the "Ego" part of this article: https://cassolotl.medium.com/i-left-mastodon-yesterday-4c5796b0f548
  Misskey forks, whatever their names are today, seem more interesting
  
  While I agree with the content of that article I don't know if we should give up on Eugen just yet. The Mastodon team has not disclosed what their plan is regarding the groups rework currently on the mastodon roadmap. There is an old proposal here, but I think we have good reason to believe that implementation will be revisited. To that end, it is very important to advocate for the adoption of FEP-1b12 which is the standard that Lemmy uses.
  It may also be a good idea to advocate for the adoption of FEP-d36d both here and on lemmy. This is a standard for group-to-group following. Effectively allowing communities to subscribe to other communities.
  Here's a slightly older but fairly comprehensive write-up of the situation: https://blog.erlend.sh/group-convergence
  
  I think there's a risk of lacking a coherent direction if decision-making is outsourced too much to the community. Furthermore, core developers might lose ownership of the project and then lose interest. As long as it's open source, I'm pretty happy to have the core maintainers develop projects according to their own vision, and the community fork it should this vision differ too much from their own. :)
  
  Mastodon’s main dev isn’t really open. Have a look at the “Ego” part of this article
  That article was over 5 years ago now. I would expect that there has been massive change now that Mastodon is way more popular, and the project is way more involved. Also, blocks and mutes do work now.
- Interoperability is great, but sadly there isn't really any organized group effort to standardize more aspects / extensions of ActivityPub. AP is really "thin" in that it barely prescribes anything. There's not even a test suite to test whether software complies to the spec of AP.
  So everyone kind of does their own thing, and fixes interoperability on a case-by-case basis. This makes it kinda frustrating to spend time on - lemmy already has special cases for many different softwares (peertube, mastodon, ...) and every one increases the complexity.
  
  There are such efforts on SocialHub and on a W3C mailing list. However devs of major Fediverse projects are rarely active there, because they are all busy working on their own software.
- Very interesting question since mastodon introduced groups very recently which are a direct competitor to lemmy
  
  TIL, I'll have to have a look

Do you think Lemmy is decentralized enough right now, or are you worried about some of the bigger instances growing too much?
- Its definitely a concern. IMO the lemmyverse is far too centralized at the moment. The big questions are:
  Is there a trend toward centralization, or away from it?
  How are people being introduced / onboarded onto lemmy?
  What can we do to combat centralization?
  (1) I'm honestly unsure, and I'd def appreciate if anyone has done a study of it. We've seen a big growth in single person / smaller topic-focused instances, which is a great thing, but if their communities aren't growing, we need to figure out how to reverse that trend. I'd have no problem with the current large instances, including this one, as long as the long-term-trend is away from them.
  (2) Is mostly word-of-mouth, join-lemmy.org, and apps / web-ui's which show an instance by default.
  We've made the sort for the join-lemmy.org instances page be by random active users, and tried to emphasize on that page that it doesn't matter which instance you join, since most federate, and can subscribe / connect to any community. I hope that helps, and we need to replicate that wherever we can.
  Apps and webUI's mostly just show lemmy.world rn, where they should show random instances. I'm guilty of this in Jerboa as well (showing lemmy.ml by default), and I've just opened up an issue that it should be showing a random server for anonymous users.
  But I think we need to do more, and I'd def appreciate yours and anyone else's ideas on how we can combat centralization. We need to get ahead of this problem before it gets worse.
  
  But I think we need to do more, and I’d def appreciate yours and anyone else’s ideas on how we can combat centralization.
  I am admin of the biggest Brazilian instance, but I am welcoming more local instances and talking to the admins we should spread the load. But what I notice is the users are concerned they will miss out if they are not in an instance that already have everything.
  Could we have an easier way to auto-federate every new communities from a given instance? Even an "auto-federate everything possible" option. as @nutomic@lemmy.ml said lemmy DB isn't too big, most instance owners could have it on their servers. And making it opt-in won't hurt the small instances.
  
  Maybe hide the big instances behind a few clicks? Like you could sort/filter for them, but you'd have to navigate a bit? The average user isn't going to bother. Like have a default sort that hides the big ones, and a default filter that filters out the top five or whatever.
- I think its totally normal that instance sizes follow a power law distribution. Its similar to many other things, for example there are few large cities, some medium cities and lots of small cities. The wiki article lists many other examples. So I think its fine as long as there are no intentional attempts to lock in users into large instances or limit federation.
- The big instances are bad enough but big communities are absolute killer of decentralisation
  When you go to /c/books on your server, you don't see an agglomeration of all /c/books on all servers of the fediverse. You only see that server's /c/books, if it even has one.
  This is a fatal flaw of lemmy which concentrates power enormously into the hands of the owners.
  The default view should be all /c/books on all federated servers, with an easy way to filter only local posts.
  Lemmy will turn into reddit if this is not quickly rectified.
  
  I kind of get where you're coming from, but to me it sounds like you're looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like "books"), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you're interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.
  I don't think it's fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, "ownerless" topics, instead, it's built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.
  IMO it's totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it's totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn't really seem like a useful feature, but that's kind of analogous to what you're suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.
  
  When you go to /c/books on your server, you don’t see an agglomeration of all /c/books on all servers of the fediverse. You only see that server’s /c/books, if it even has one.
  What prevents from visiting /c/books@anotherserver?
  Genuinely asking, because this is one of the core concepts of Lemmy and federation
  
  No, that defeats the entire point.
  
  maybe communities should be able to flag that they're the same community as one on another server, and if they mutually do so be combined into one metacommunity that people can search for
  
  I really don't hate this idea from a lemmy centric UX perspective but how do you handle federation with other platforms?
- As someone who is on a medium sized instance, I can say its a little awkward when Lemmy[.]world goes down

Not a question, just wanted to let you know I how much we appreciate and love you all for making Lemmy happen 🥰🥰
- Thank you! Its great that you have been around all these years.
- Thx a ton!

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?
- Thx! Its pretty wild to me how much these algorithms, and formats, affect our mental well-being. Those giant US tech companies employing Psychology PhDs to figure out how to keep people angry, engaged, and watching ads, is doing so much harm to so many people, not just in the US, but the whole world, and unfortunately very few countries are doing enough to protect their people from these companies (who also act as surveillance arms of the US state) by blocking facebook and the rest.
  I've seen two professors I respected turn into angry children on twitter, in a way that would never happen in real life. Reddit, twitter, and Youtube platform reactionary rage-bait to get people trapped in a downward spiral of negativity. These companies do not care how much damage they do; all that matters to them is their profits.
  We don't have those same incentive structures, so we can and should be doing everything we can to make this a positive and enjoyable experience, not about arguing constantly, but about learning, laughing, and understanding.
  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?
  The best thing would be that we continue our slow and steady growth. Every user that migrates away from big tech to the fediverse is victory, so while we shouldn't emphasize growth at any cost, its still a good thing when we can get people away from all that negativity.
  The biggest concern for me about Lemmy, would be a centralization onto one big server, that tries to replicate all the worst things and behaviors about reddit: its combativeness, xenophobia, bigotry, pro-US-foreign policy agendas, and advertising. There is a noticeable chunk of Lemmy's users who don't really see any problem with those things, they just want a reddit that lets them use 3rd party apps again.
- The best thing would be if Reddit goes the way of Digg. Seems that will happen sooner or later. The worst thing, maybe if funding stops and we are unable to keep working on Lemmy. But even then admins could still host Lemmy instances.
  
  The best thing would be if Reddit goes the way of Digg.
  Well, it has already. The only reason it hasn't fully imploded & all the users deserted for another site, is because there wasn't an equivalent place to go to.
  They were sort of parallel in development but digg blew up and Reddit didn't then Digg took a quick hard turn towards enshitification.
  Reddit has done the enshitification but like a parasitic infected spider, it's wandering about and most of the users haven't realised yet that it's an empty shell.
  It's slow demise would be better in the long run than a quick collapse like Diggs so it's now putrid culture is not transmitted with an enmass exodus.
- Couldn't agree more. I'm still hopelessly addicted to the format but at leat now I'm sticking it to the man at the same time lol.

People, avoid to ask repeated questions and keeping it one question per comment is generally better.
- Yes thank you. Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming when there are 10+ questions in a single comment, and each of them requires a little essay.
- also people should search the issues on github, a few of these questions already have issues filed with discussions in them, put a thumbs up on a github issue if it's something you want

Were you ever approached by any kind of organization making some weird proposal regarding lemmy?
- Some company (dont know which) wanted to make a one-time donation of 500 Euros to get listed as donor on join-lemmy.org. Rejected because thats only for recurring donors. Does this count as weird?
- A few, mostly harmless tho, just about working on pet features they'd like to see in Lemmy. None panned out.
  I imagine the more parasitic companies avoid us as soon as they see the AGPLv3 license.

Back when the first Reddit exodus happened, there was a group heavily DDOSing many of the popular Lemmy instances. While it was a great opportunity to optimize Lemmy, did you ever find out who that attacker was?
- I don't think we found any specific groups of people attacking Lemmy. I personally just saw one or two what looked like individuals trying (and succeeding) to take Lemmy down with a few very simple requests that forced Lemmy to do lots of compute (something like fetching the next million posts from page 10000). The fixes for those were simple because it was just missing limits checking.
  I'm not sure if there actually was a larger organized attack. Lots of performance issues in Lemmy simply appeared simultaneously and compunded each other with a rapidly growing number of active users and posts.

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)?
- If you've been following our code commits / PRs, we've been adding a lot of mod tools improvements not just lately, but over lemmy's entire life. I would even go so far as to say we have the strongest mod tools of any project in the fediverse, all the more necessary for us because of the community-focus.
  The upcoming roadmap for 2024 includes some mod additions, such as mod warnings, attaching report counts to items, viewing mod actions for items, etc.
  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)?
  Instance admins are responsible for what content their users see, so if a troll is visible to their users and ruining their day, then it should be taken care of everywhere necessary.
- I've been wanting to change how the existing admin options are organized on the admin page for awhile now to be easier to understand. As for improvements beyond that, I'm open to suggestions from instance admins for improvements.
  Regarding your last point, even if an offending user is registered on another instance, banning them will prevent them from bothering users on your instance.
- I have seen this first hand. I think when someone hits report it needs to go to the moderator of the community. From there the mod should be able to forward it to where it needs to go.
  Instance admins should be able to intersect this process.
  
  There's some more context for this in this issue, and we each have different views on it, because there are tradeoffs no matter what.
  My personal view (based on experience modding and admin'ing), is that we should prioritize handling a report ASAP, by the first eyeballs that see it, rather than whose jurisdiction it is. On all but the largest communities, admins are generally more active, and more likely to see the report and take action on it.
  
  Problem is that reports don't go the mods if they are on another instance.
- ~~The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this thread~~
  Edit: Leaving this here cause why not
  
  But it says in the OP that this thread should be used for posting questions for the AMA?

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?
- We're paid up on our current registrar for a few more years, but I honestly don't know how much that can be trusted. Its pretty difficult to get clear information on which ones are safe, and which ones aren't.
  If lemmy.ml goes down, it will be a major annoyance as we migrate domains, and will likely have a day or two of downtime. Even outside of DNS yanks, we do daily DB backups, and have our pictures backed up locally as well, so a full restore is possible, but federation would definitely have issues, and would probably need to do a lot of re-subscribes. Overall tho, it wouldn't destroy the lemmy project or anything, and if people migrate to smaller servers in the process, that would give us a lot more time to code 😄 .
  I apologize for that tho , it was something I didn't forsee and wasn't even thought of many years ago when I registered.
  
  Have you considered migrating while you still have control of the domain? You could at least make the domain redirect in that case. Though not sure if federation could somehow pick up that lemmy.ml has moved elsewhere.
  
  If lemmy.ml goes down, it will be a major annoyance as we migrate domains
  I recommend lemmy.su for obvious reasons if that ever happens lol
  
  I'd be very curious how you guys migrate to a new domain if you ever need to, maybe there will be an open source tool to help with it, and maybe some improvements inside Lemmy's code, like api calls from both domains to initiate the migration

A lot of people say there are a bunch of tankies on Lemmy which really begs the question: Where do you all keep your tanks and can I drive one?
- They stay in the bunker except for emergencies like facebooks threats.net . You get to drive one when you can recite the first section of the communist manifesto from memory.
  
  Thank you for being honest, most would deny the existence of the tanks. I'll get to work on that right away, I wanna drive the tankie tank.
- Maybe the real tankies are the comrades we made along the way

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
- Migrating accounts between instances
  Isn't that implemented in the 19.2 and later versions? I just migrated using that feature a few days back, worked quite well
  
  That would be awesome if true. It's progressing faster than I thought. I'm still just learning about the scaled sort and enjoying that new feature lol.
- For migration we recently added a feature to export your user data. But "real" migrating accounts is something I put on our "todo" list, though it probably also first needs a proposal to define how it should work exactly (should it still work when the original instance is down?) As soon as we start giving users more control over their private key issues start appearing like not having any infrastructure for key rotation / revocation. Without that it will only work when the original instance still exists.
  I'm not sure if by tagging users you mean linking / mentioning them? Or adding tags to them like you can tag posts / users on other platform. For tagging in general there's a pending proposal https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4 . So far it focuses on post tagging though to reduce the scope. I think the goal is going to be to start with one kind of tagging and add more kinds of tagging later.
  For improving cross-instance linking (both communities, posts, and users) we also have a open milestone. There's a few spitballing issues about it, but no real concrete proposal on how to build it yet.
- Can you add one to your list? Linking posts across instances? Like you can do !community@instance and the community will open viewed through your instance. But for linking posts there is no such equivalent. Like if I make an HTTP link it will be through my instance or possibly the one the community is hosted on which would be annoying for users of other instances.
  Also, linking communities across instances is possible already, but you can leave it up since it's confusing. I still see a lot of folks try to do the reddit approach if c/community
  
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987
  
  Turning the fediverse button into an "open on my instance" with similar functionality to subscribing may also be a solution here. Bonus points if it'll also open a comment on mastodon.
- As @phiresky@lemmy.world mentioned we have improvements coming down the pipe for linking content across instances.
  Community linking and user linking do work currently (for example I just linked phiresky above), and a community example would be !risa@startrek.website , but we could improve this by extending it to posts and comments, as well as creating a url link standard that would work across apps.

Is there an official roadmap for Lemmy?
What are the current needs of the project, if any? For instance, are you currently looking for skilled or financial contributions?
- Check the updated OP. We can definitely use more donations, at the moment we are getting around 4000 Euros per month which is not much for two fulltime devs. And code contributions are also helpful, there is an almost endless amount of open issues.
  
  Very interesting, thank you for this

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?
- Thx!
  I see why people think that's a problem, but in reality, its more of a feature. For example, take communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics, or locations, based on their instance:
  https://startrek.website/c/news
  https://starwars.website/c/news
  or
  https://hyderabad.website/c/news
  https://canberra.website/c/news
  These are all news communities, yet should stand on their own: each with their own creators, moderators, users, rules, posts, comments, culture, and topics. It makes no sense to combine or "merge" them given all these differences, in the same way that it makes no sense to "merge" two completely different users because they have the same name.
  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?
  Sure! Multi-Communities are an open issue, that I'm sure someone will take on eventually.
  
  Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !news@startrek.website
  
  Thank you for making it clear this is a conscious design decision. I very much disagree with it. Multicommunities, like multireddit do not adress this terrible problem. I think lemmy is now doomed to repeat reddit's mistake. Hopefully in 10-15 years the lemmy successor will see the light about this problem.
- There's also FEP-d36d which is a standard for group-to-group following. In Lemmy terms, a community could subscribe to another community.
  
  I think FEP-2100 is a much more promising approach because it makes communities more resilient in case an instance goes down.
  
  In Lemmy terms, a community could subscribe to another community.
  In this case, why not merge?
  
  ooooh I like it!
- I'm not aware of philosophical disagreements with that feature, I can just think of logical and technical issues. Like how moderation would federate, etc. If all the mods come to an agreement then the mods on one instance could lock their community and link to the other one. If the mods disagree, then moderation is going to be chaos in any case, no?
  I think multi-community views would be a great idea.

What are some cool "Lemmy Adjacent" projects you know of and want to share? (Things like LemmySchedule or Toast.ooo's Canvas)
- One that I can think of rn, is @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml 's lemmy-bot, as well as ridoukousage's TLDR bot.
  With the web being so ad-infested and completely owned by google, people have noted how the TLDR bot means they often don't have to leave their lemmy app at all, and can stay behind its privacy shield.
  While of course I do think we can code a lot of functionality directly in to lemmy in a way that we couldn't with reddit, there's undeniably a lot of potential with bots that can do different things for us.

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.
- 0.19 was a bit of a special case because there was a set of breaking updates that had to be done at some point, and trickle releasing breaking changes isn't really great either. Usually hopefully the breaking changes are rare, so releases can be more frequent.
  
  Yes once we reach 1.0 there will be way fewer breaking changes and then it will be easier to do more frequent releases.
  
  For sure. Releasing breaking changes frequently would be much worse for stability than increased time between releases.
- They normally do have smaller releases (18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 18.4, 18.5) but going from 18 to 19 was a big update that also required a database upgrade. Rust releases don't have database upgrades or anything that is not backwards compatible, so it's not really comparable.

Will Lemmy ever have another source of income like official merch or will it rely on donations for the foreseeable future?
- Would people really pay for Lemmy merch?
  
  I think they would, it would be super cool to do art competitions and have the community pick the designs, could do it once a quarter to help boost funding.
  
  There might need to be a revamp of the logo to make it a bit more appealing.
  What I could definitely see happening would be instance-based merch, especially if the community feeling is strong.
  
  Personally maybe with some better art, not with the plain mouse logo
  
  I’d be down for an enamel pin. I’m sure you guys are familiar with the Apollo app (RIP), but in his merch store he had enamel pins made in the style of some of his app icons.
  
  Lemmy merch could be really cool especially if there was competitions/events for designing the merch
  
  I definitely would
- To add, recurring donations, no matter how small, help us plan for the future, as we can then reliably estimate how many developers we can support off them. One-offs donations and merch sales wouldn't help us out in that regard.
- Maybe canvas event posters?

Please stop using time zone abbreviations. Everyone can read an offset (UTC +02:00 in this case). But almost everyone has to look up the abbreviation

Do you have any estimate of how much storage (in GB) all the posts ever posted across Lemmy have taken up, to date? (Excluding media)
- Something tells me lemmynsfw has the largest disks. :)
  
  I was told it’s not about the size of the disk but how it’s used that really matters.
  
  I should donate to them. I mean... lemmynsfw, what's that?
  
  They call me Bigdisk Johnson.
  
  I think they have the smallest dopamine receptors
- The SQL table for posts is 1.6 GB on lemmy.ml, and 5.7 GB for comments. That probably accounts for a majority of content on the Lemmyverse.
  
  To add, lemmy.ml's entire DB compressed as a xz with -0 strength is about 3.7 GB. But that also includes the activity tables which aren't vital.
  
  1.6GB is impressively small for anything by modern internet standards
- I don't think it's that large. Text is very small and compressible compared to images. Well it depends on if you mean the actual database storage (uncompressed, with indexes) or a compressed copy of all the posts. You can see the post number in the URL, which on lemmy.world for this post is 11169622. That means there's around 11 million posts total in lemmy.world's database. If you assume each of them takes 0.5kB of storage that would be only ~ 5 GB of posts.
  
  ... is 11169622 ...
  Maybe 9 post out of 10 are deleted by the few checks I made manually ...or am I missing something ?

How did you feel when everyone was coming from Reddit to Lemmy?
- Very excited, and then very overwhelmed because everything started breaking left and right.
- Excited, but also extremely stressed out and exhausted. For about 2 months I was getting an average of 4 hours of consistent sleep a night after that happened. We were very happy when things calmed down.
  
  Do you feel fully recharged now, or still catching up from the intensity of it all?
- Personally I came with them so I guess they are my people ;)
  
  We pretty much all came from reddit, just at different times 😄
- Joy, but also panic.

How's development going? Do you have enough funds to pay your salaries? Did the EU fund run out? What's your workload? Is the amount of full-time developers enough to work on new features? Or is it barely enough to keep up?
How do you like Lemmy and the people on it? (As of now)

- So basically Oauth support? Theres an open PR for that.
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4238

Looking forward to it. Hopefully people will stay respectful.

In your opinion, what are the top strengths and weaknesses of Lemmy at this point in time?
- Strengths are federation, comment threads, mod tools, app ecosystem.
  Weaknesses are lack of notifications, DB code, and lack of funding / donations. We need to support much more that just one or two devs if we want to take on reddit, which is a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of employees.
  I discuss more things I'm going to work on this year in this comment
- Strengths: Its open source, decentralized and working quite reliably
  Weaknesses: Theres not enough funding/developers to keep up with all the issues

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.
- There can definitely be improvements, but I agree that they're low priority. I'm hesitant to put too much work into Lemmy's private messages or its interface, as they're inherently insecure and not E2EE (we even have warnings in the lemmy-ui interface about this).
  Its best to rely on messaging apps like matrix and xmpp that were made for that job, which you can add to your profile. We also added a specific matrix_id field to your user settings, which enables a "Send secure message" button.
- This is already possible in many Lemmy apps. I built the Quiblr web app and messages are more similar to a messaging app. Many Lemmy apps probably do similar as it's just a front-end change.
  
  Cool! I haven't tried out web apps, but many mobile apps have this feature as well. Would be nice to see this feature merged into the native web interface.
- Maybe, if someone implements it. Basically the same answer as all other low-priority feature requests.
- I'm personally annoyed with how the default UI shows messages and mostly work on the frontend, so changing that is definitely on my agenda.

Seeing my PR here made me feel good. 3 months and ~60 commits for only one lil field was too much 😅
It's very nice and reassuring that all the commits are audited subtly though.

As developers, what can we do (or not do) to best support Lemmy’s vision and goals right now?
- Go through the issue tracker for lemmy or lemmy-ui and look for some simple bug or minor feature that you care about. Then look for the relevant part of the code and try to fix it. You can also make a comment or post in the dev chat on matrix if you need help. Honestly there are so many issues which could be solved in less than an hour, especially in lemmy-ui. That way you can make Lemmy better and also get familiar with the code to make larger changes in the future.
- First, thx for working on LemmyNade! The ecosystem of apps growing up around lemmy, learning from and benefitting each other, is really great to see.
  The main thing would be to get involved with lemmy's back-end code. Even if you're not a back-end developer, its still useful to us to learn from devs about wanted features, API improvements, and bugs. Many app devs have suggested features that I've tried to implement based on their usefulness, because it used to be just myself who was the one requesting and adding things on both sides.

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?

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.
- It works pretty well on Peertube, only lacks users and quality content.
  
  I'm sure. However, I am not in a position to self host and videos are huge unless you post them as webm which some people might even report you for.
- I have ambitious plans about how to turn lemmy into a true Youtube / Spotify killer. But that might not be what you're asking, which might just be simple browser / app video support (IE mp4s, webm, etc).
  If that app / web UI has trouble with videos, you might need to open up an issue there.
- but the Fediverse as a whole.
  FWIW video playback on Mastodon has been seamless for me.

Any words for Zuck and Threads?
Edit: on a more serious note, has Meta reached out to the Lemmy developers at all?
- We also blocked threats here already, and encourage other servers to do the same. FB is a rabid wolf that would love to be let inside the fediverse.
- No, I guess they only care about Mastodon. I will just wait and see how that goes.
- So far it doesn't seem like any company actually wants to compete in this space (longer-form somewhat text-focused communities). Even reddit is trying to become more twitter and less reddit.
- I think Lemmy is a tiny blip size wise.

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.)

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?
- How would you suggest to make it more efficient?
  
  Well I am not 100% sure on what the best method would be.
  I think the addition of letting moderators see who is voting on what posts is a nice addition since they would tend to be closer to where the content is.
  More generally I was thinking about creating a dashboard that gave the admins statistics about that user.
  Similar to how we as users can see how many comments and posts any user makes, it might be useful to allow admins to see statistics about which communities the user interacts with or some rudimentary similarity score with other users?
  These are some ideas I thought of on the fly and have not thought about the implications but the gist is something that allows the admins to get a better understanding of what is going on from like a bird eye's view.
  Edit: and where -> on what posts
- Registration applications, and user reports are the best way to handle trolls. The first stops 90% of them, the second means we can ban and remove all their spam at the click of a button.
  I don't see how you could prematurely know about spammers or trolls until someone reports them. We don't plan on adding any text-analyzing AI or anything like that into lemmy's codebase.
  
  I don’t see how you could prematurely know about spammers or trolls until someone reports them.
  I don't think you can. My suggestion was more focused on how admins make decisions after a report. Right now they have to do a manual scan of the person's comment history and that is the part I find inefficient. If it was possible to just show extra high level information on the user it might make it easier for the admin to make a decision.
  We don’t plan on adding any text-analyzing AI or anything like that into lemmy’s codebase.
  Yeah using AI to try and analyze comments would be overkill and probably prone to manipulation anyways.
  Edit: I'm sorta talking more specifically towards banning a user or seeing if what a user is doing is a repeated pattern.

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?
- So far these problems are mostly theoretical, in practice Github works fine. But once Forgejo gets federation working we will probably migrate to a selfhosted instance.
  
  I'd also be in favor of moving to Forgejo once federation gets fully functioning, and reliable.
- I agree that it's not ideal to be hosted on a platform controlled by Microsoft, but it's just a fact that you lose 90+% of contributors if you are anywhere else (there's an article where someone compared, can't find it right now). It's not great that that's how it is, but you need to choose your battles.
  I'm not really very concerned, since git itself is decentralized, and if Github starts causing visible problems moving somewhere else is not a huge problem. Also VPNs exist.
  
  I've seen projects shed significant numbers of contributors by moving off GitHub. RIP
  
  Yeah, tbh the worst vendor lock-in part of Github (edit: other than the aformentioned social aspect) is Github Releases. And Lemmy doesn't really use them.
- Its unfortunate that we (and it seems like 99% of other Rust projects), do their issue tracking on github. We have multiple mirrors set up for Lemmy, so the code is safe from takedowns, but the issue tracker is a concern.
  The main issue I've had is: if we migrate, I want that migration to be permanent, and for me a requirement for that is federated collaboration. I've had codeberg remove a torrent project of mine to comply with German law, and gitlab has most of the same problems of github. Self-hosted gitea instances work, but many people just don't contribute to them when they have to make an account on each one.
  You'll see below that Lemmy's two main devs are in favor of migrating our issue tracking to forgejo, once federation gets reliably up and running.
- This is a good idea. There are currently mirrors on codeberg and a gitea instance, but I could see picking one of those platforms as the main place to host and making the github one a mirror. The main hurdle I can see for this sort of migration is that all the open issues are currently on github.
- The took down youtube-dl since record labels cried while allow ICE repositories. Whatever pleases the corporate & political interest is what they will do.
- I think it's fine. You won't influence anything about US by using a worse collaboration platform. If Lemmy becomes more and more popular, it may eventually become a real alternative for the masses. That's what the goal should be - not avoiding github.
  It's better to be smart here.
  
  Some alternative forges offer better features (or less social cruft) & are faster (some are not even limited to Git!)… what you will get is the ability to own the code & community along with set the terms instead of letting Microsoft set them for your community & be the gatekeeper for who gets to have access. If you wanted a corporate, centralized, proprietary forum go back to Reddit/Twitter; if you think that’s a terrible recommendation, in the same spirit you should leave behind corporate, centralized, proprietary code forges.

How do you feel about extreme right-wing instances like the late Wolfballs using Lemmy to promote and spread hate?
- They were posting spicy memes but thats how the internet works. If you dont like it then dont visit there, just like you wouldnt visit 4chan. Lemmy is open source so anyone can use it for any purpose.
- I very much dislike it obviously, and I'm happy that one shut down. There have been others, but for the most part they've stayed away from Lemmy as "that software made by tankies."
  Outside of making sure that we don't platform them anywhere, there isn't much we can do. Lemmy is open-source software after all, and a tool can be used for good or ill. As @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml mentioned, coordinating on adding them to our blocklists and isolating them is the best option.
- Not much that can be done to prevent them from using it. Mitigation on the maintainers' part would be omitting them from suggested instances. The best way to combat it, I think, would be instance admins coordinating defederating from offending instances.
- I hope they're not too against it. I know they're extremely left wing, which scared a lot of the centrists on Reddit. If they allow even right wing instances, then it emphasizes the project's lakc of political bent, and encourages more mainstream people to join. The politics can be up to each individual instance to decide whether to defederate with those other instances or not.
  But that's just my opinion, I'm also curious how the devs will answer.
  
  I'm sure they're probably not okay with it but also there's not much they can do about it other than defederate .ml - such is the nature of open source software.
- I think you should be careful with political hate. Its a slippery slope and should not be handled by a developer.
  Maybe we could simply focus on having clear rules for each community.
- Wolfballs? Was it straight up hate or just run of the mill GOP talking points?
  
  Wasn't here back when it happened, but from what I know, it was straight up white supremacy shit. It got defed to death.

Have you put measures into place to assure the quality of future updates? In the past several updates have caused issues. And recently 0.19.x broke federation for the most of us. And it took weeks to fix it and make Lemmy usable again.

A long time ago, @Dessalines@lemmy.ml made Jerboa as an Android Native client for Lemmy as an alternative to Boost for Reddit. How happy are you that the OG Boost developer came and made a Lemmy client?
- Its a great thing, and its exciting to have @rmayayo@lemmy.world creating an app for Lemmy.
- He did? That's awesome. I've been using Jerboa and Sync mostly. How does the Boost app compare to those? Sorry if too unrelated lol.
  
  Feel free to have a look at all the others: https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/

This is for all Lemmy devs:
Talk a bit about yourself, likes and dislikes.
Musical taste, movies, whatever, just willing to know a lil more about you as persons
- I mainly like Hip-hop, but also good music from other genres. I like all sorts of movies if they are well made, but especially adventure and comedy. Since the quality of Hollywood movies has gone steeply downhill, I mainly watch movies from different countries across the world, and older movies from the 70s or so. I also like video games, at the moment Im playing Baldurs Gate 3 as everyone was praising it on Lemmy (and they were right its a great game).

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.
- There is a ton of decentralized projects that no one has really ever heard of, new ones pop up all the time (I was watching multiple of them in the past). Sadly in most cases it seems like most authors stop working on their projects after a while.
  The same ideas have existed for a long time but both decade old projects (ever heard of Freenet? Probably no) and new ones . Many of them are very ambitious and try to replace huge swaths of things (not just file storage but also social aspects, web of trust, etc) but then collapse under the complexity. IPFS is the most well known new project and (good imo) has limited its scope, but sadly (still) suffers from huge scalability issues, some of which are deep in the design.
  I think it's really hard to align incentives there - the nicer it is the harder it is to make money with it. So either these projects tend towards control by one entity or they tend towards death.
  Really the only one that seems to have a long lasting life so far is torrents. Which are amazing. And Email if you want to count that.
  
  Torrents are truly one of the best inventions of the internet.
  They've fully solved the static data distribution problem, in a way that's resilient and practical. I do a few torrent-related side projects, and I'm also super-interested in how we could integrate them into lemmy UIs and apps in order to take on YouTube.
- There are different software that could help this happen but I'm not sure how they'd handle all of lemmy's content
  There is Gun.js and OrbitDB (OrbitDB runs on IPFS using Helia)
  and there is FreeNet which allows hosting of freesites on their network if you have something downloaded to your computer.
  Some of the problems could be mitigated by volunteers running relay nodes hosting the kind of content they want to stay up (this would work with Gun.js and OrbitDB since it allows subscribing to specific data) or just general relay nodes that gives the network more capacity (this would be the method if you are working with FreeNet)
  Again not sure how easy or hard this would be so I hope the developers share their thoughts.
  Edit: When I say relay nodes hosting I don't mean they have control over the data but instead keeps the data online. The data is still stored on the users own device and is shared between users if both are online at the same time.

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?
- Im 31
  Not yet, hopefully that will change in the future
  North of Spain
  Im not really anonymous, it would just feel weird to post here with my full name
  No
  Maybe less than 50%
  Im terrible with names so no
- Late 20s
  No
  Burgerland
  I'd try but probably fail. I'm not big on getting public attention.
  No
  33%ish at the absolute max.
  No, I like the name
- I'd hope that they are at least 18

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?

Will there be flairs?
- I think flairs would be the same as user-tagging. There's an open proposal for post-tagging https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4 and the discussion there was so far to add tagging for one type of thing and then later expand to others (like user tagging).
  It's a bit of a complicated feature because it needs decision who can tag whom, and what is the scope (who is it federated two), and how does it transfer / interact with other ActivityPub software.

What other ideas do you have to increasing funding for Lemmy development?
- Wait for Reddit to implode, more users to migrate and donations to increase. It worked last year :D
  
  lol
- We could definitely use some help with ideas there. Lemmy currently has _{40k active users, and it should be able to support more than [}1 average dev salary](https://join-lemmy.org/donate), especially if we want to take on a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of employees like reddit.
  
  I think short event or campaign with push for donations with a pop up that you actually can dismiss. An ad like banner. The biggest problem would be community organization as Lemmy isn't only decentralized horizontally but also vertically. Different front ends, different apps different instances. Most of them wouldn't want to implement an ad that wouldn't benefit them directly. They also have costs with running their piece of lemmy. So some cut for them should be included.
  I think a dedicated trustworthy person should be responsible for organizing this campaign as developer time is best spent elsewhere.
  
  Wikipedia, about once a year, has those donation pledge boxes at the top of every article ...they must be somewhat effective since they come back year after year ...better keep them small though to avoid disheartening users. Maybe start small like this trending community line at the top of the user feed.
  P.S. : Since we don't want the user to get habituated it's better if it's just a few days once a year.

Where is the best place to propose new features for Lemmy?
Edit: And as potential follow-up, where is the best place on Lemmy to propose new features for Lemmy? (Not every Lemmy user has or wants a GitHub account)
- I'm not sur eif it's bad form to answer these questions but for this one I think the github issue page is the answer.
  
  This is correct, its our issue tracker and its what we work from to close issues.
- if you don't want to make a github account, then probably !lemmy@lemmy.ml
  but you can still search and read the github issues without making an account, so you could check if it already exists, or link the issue if you're starting a lemmy discussion about it

Are there any plans on adding features that enable easier interaction with other federated platforms like mastodon and peertube (for example being able to comment/interact with peertube videos and mastodon posts)?
- You can already interact with Peertube videos and follow their channels. Thats possible because Peertube also federates groups (communities). With Mastodon thats not possible because it doesnt have groups, and Lemmy doesnt support content outside of communities. At least not without a full rewrite, which doesnt make sense considering that KBin and dozens of different microblogging platforms already exist.

What has been the most rewarding part of working on Lemmy for you guys?
- The fact that there is no boss telling me what to work on. Instead I get to decide myself whats most important. Last year before the Reddit migration I was temporarily working for a company, and it was extremely demotivating to be told how to do every little thing as if I were a junior developer.
- As a software dev, mainly that people enjoy using it.
  99% of the proprietary software work I did for companies was work that was societally useless, and eventually thrown in the trash. Here I get to make software that improves peoples lives in a tiny way, and is a form of social media that hopefully 🤞 doesn't destroy people's mental well-being: is easy to put down, and enjoyable to use.
  
  If you haven't read the book "bullshit jobs" yet, I really recommend it. Encapsulates this mentality very well

Will Lemmy ever become more of an organization? I'm slightly concerned about hostile take overs and or major changes that could be driven by personal views or bias.
Also a organization could facilitate cooperation and organize events.
- Lemmy is somewhat protected by being an AGPL-licensed project, preventing proprietarization. If there's ever a relicensing effort, ba fearful.
  I'm not sure what exactly becoming a organization would entail, but so far I'd say the development part is not really large enough? For me I would start being suspicious when a significant amount of dev power came from compan(ies), but so far no company has shown any interest afaik.
  There's already been a few forks, for example lemmynsfw has made some changes on their side, which nutomic is now looking to integrate back into lemmy.
- As a multi-national open source dev team, it would only complicate our lives to try to set up a more formal legal structure.
  I wouldn't be too afraid of hostile takeovers: this is a dev-run-and-controlled project. People will go where the development is, and the federated nature of lemmy protects against the kind of attacks its possible to make against centralized entities.
- If Lemmy does become more of an organization, it would be nice to have a level of public assurance over any control exerted by the organization. A lot of people see that the lead developers of Lemmy are communist and shy away from it based merely on that. I have one of the oldest accounts on Lemmy, I've seen plenty of them, and my impression is that they have conducted themselves with only the utmost ethics. However, it can still help newcomers who don't want to feel like someone might be breathing down their neck.

Regarding funding - Can you give a detailed breakdown of what you've gotten per year and from which sources since you started Lemmy?
- I think most of that can be taken from here: join-lemmy.org/donate. If you click through each donation method they each list goals/monthly intake.
  EDIT - Minus crypto of course!
  
  It also doesn't have historical data on i.e. how much NLNet contributed (which iirc, was a lot*)
  *(a lot in terms of donations - Lemmy devs are living below poverty line. Please donate)
- From NLnet we had three funding rounds with 50.000 Euros each.

What does lemmy v1 look like?
- I'm sry I can't give a good answer there... but to me it seems like when we go a certain length of time (not sure how long) without any breaking changes. That will have proven that the API as it exists is stable and well-formed.
  That seems a long way off atm, because of all the features and new fields we've been adding and modifying on existing data structures.
- Nutomic said in another comment:
  Yes once we reach 1.0 there will be way fewer breaking changes and then it will be easier to do more frequent releases.
  So maybe that?
  
  Yes thats it, 1.0 just means there are no more breaking changes (until we decide to release 2.0).
  
  I'm more curious what it will take to get to 1.0, rather than what happens after 1.0.

When are we getting polls in a similar format that Reddit does? I would love to have those!!

Regarding server architecture - How many users can the Lemmy network, or the fediverse as a total scale to, assuming the average person posts once per day and reads ~50 comments/posts a day?
- The ActivityPub protocol lemmy uses is (in my opinion) really bad wrt scalability. For example, if you press one upvote, your instance has to make 3000 HTTP requests (one to every instance that cares).
  But on the other hand, I recently rewrote the federation queue. Looking at reddit, it has around 100 actions per second. The new queue should be able to handle that amount of requests, and PostgreSQL can handle it (the incoming side) as well.
  The problem right now is more that people running instances don't have infinite money, so even if you could in theory host hundreds of millions of users most instances are limited by having a budget of 10-100$ per month.
  
  In the future it could make sense to make a protocol extension to send multiple activities in a single HTTP connection. But for now its probably not worth the effort, considering that it would break compatibility with other Fediverse platforms.
- Lemmy supports horizontal scaling, so in theory it is only limited by the amount of servers you can afford. Of course there are always unpredictable bottlenecks which need to be fixed, but no inherent limitation.

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.
- Then your (hashed) password would have to be copied to all servers, and the email as well for password reset. Seems very problematic for security.
- No, Activitypub isn't based on a migrating authentication / single-sign-on model, but on server-to-server communication.
  Instances with many users already on them dying should be a rare occurrence, and its unfortunate that it happens not just for us, but in the whole fediverse.

Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

NLNet Funding

Development Update

Support development