This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

  • Lionir [he/him]@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m gonna be asking hard questions, I think, sorry about that. I hope you consider it tough love considering our past interactions.

    As an instance admin, I have some questions:

    • How are you doing? I know there was a lot of pressure when things blew up and it seems to be calming down a bit now.

    • How is Lemmy doing financially?

    • Considering past releases and their associated breaking bugs (including 0.18.3), what measures are you taking to help prevent that?

    • Can we consider the possibility of downgrades being supported?

    • Why are bugs affecting moderation not release blockers? Does anything block releases?

    • Are there plans to give instance administrators a voice in shaping the future of Lemmy’s development?

    As someone who is trying to help with Lemmy’s development, I have some other questions:

    • What do you think are the biggest problems with Lemmy as a software project and what are your priorities for Lemmy?
    • Considering fairly low amounts of developers contributing to Lemmy, how are you working to help new people get into the project?
    • Do you worry about the message it sends to potential contributors when the main developers are working on a different project which competes with the former? (Example: Lemmy-ui vs Lemmy-ui-Leptos)
    • Considering most work is done voluntarily, how are you trying to organize and prioritize work?
    • Do you believe you are stretching yourself too thin between Lemmy, Lemmy-ui, Lemmy-ui-leptos, Jerboa and Lemmy.ml? If so, what are you doing to help you focus?
    • nutomic@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Wow lots of questions here.

      • Im doing well, its exciting to know that so many people like the software Ive worked on for the last years. The first month after the migration was really stressful, but by now its calmed down a lot. Plus there are many contributors now which are helping a lot.
      • Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
      • I think the “breaking bugs” were really minor considering how we had to constantly rush out performance and security fixes. This should get better as we dont need to make emergency fixes, and have more time to let the community test release candidates before making the full release.
      • Supporting downgrades means that someone has to test them and report/fix problems. We dont have time for that, but feel free to do it.
      • Like I said, our recent releases had urgent performance/security fixes so we didnt have enough time for testing. We also didnt find out about these problems until later. Part of the problem is that keeping up with issues is almost a full-time job on its own, so I rarely read them anymore. If you see something important reported, do let me know.
      • No concrete plans, but I definitely think that admins are the main actors who should have a voice in development. Its impossible for us to listen to all the individual users, because there are too many and they often dont have the necessary technical knowledge. If you have some ideas how to facilitate communication between devs and admins, let me know.

      Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Alright second part:

      • The biggest problem is definitely that there are too many things to do, but only the two of us working on it fulltime. The day only has so many hours and its impossible to keep up with everything. Thats why community contributions are really important.
      • The amount of contributors is very high compared to a few months ago, its not easy to keep up with all the pull requests. Its going to take some time for processes to adjust to the new scale, and for new contributors to learn how everything works.
      • This is a question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml
      • People work on whatever they are passionate about. Generally that works quite well.
      • I am only working on Lemmy and thats already a lot. So another question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml
  • Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:

      This also isn’t unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.

      Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.

      There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.

      Overall tho, I’m against the concept of “combining / merging communities” that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.

  • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I asked in the other thread about GDPR.

    Nobody thinks it’s very interesting but if instances don’t follow gdpr, the entire network is at risk of legal consequences.

    So please bring this up, even though it’s not very fun.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don’t know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn’t do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.

      We have a Legal section under admin settings, that’s an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We’d need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.

  • Menu@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Right now, instances with transphobic and racist content like exploding-heads are still listed on join-lemmy.org. Are you planning to implement a Server Convenant like on joinmastodon.org? To be listed on joinmastodon.org, an instance needs “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      01·
      1 year ago

      The instance list is fine as is. Think about it like this: do you want racists to join a single instance so they are all in one place? Or do you want them to spread across all different instances, causing moderation problems everywhere?

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlMEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          Thats fine, they can provide their own list of instances where users can choose from.

          • Menu@slrpnk.netEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            They are on your list (which is seen as the official one by many and has most visits) to guide transphobes and fascists to their fitting community?? Exploding-heads is not labeled as transphobe and fascist on join-lemmy. So that does’t make sense.

      • Menu@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yes, I think it would be best if they would all gather on one instance that can get defederated. Right now they attract users on join-lemmy with “Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable”, no other info.

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlMEnglish
          01·
          1 year ago

          It doesnt really matter what you want. The software is open source so anyone can use the software freely. No way to prevent it.

      • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        And if the racist is here to cause problems rather than commiserate with fellow racists, they now know exactly which community to avoid, thus restoring moderation problems everywhere. I don’t think anyone is asking you to moderate every instance to ensure they are sticking to your TOS or your viewpoints, but it’s a very minor ask to not showcase off the racists and transphobes and bigots on the ‘join this platform’ page.

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlMEnglish
          01·
          1 year ago

          There are plenty of other instance lists across the internet. So its not even a real solution for your theoretical problem.

          • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I don’t think the people raising this as a concern are trying to solve the problem of bigots on the internet; they are just asking for you to change the advertising you provide to remove the bigots from a place of visibility.

            • nutomic@lemmy.mlMEnglish
              0·
              1 year ago

              And then we should block lemmygrad, lemmy.world, hexbear and hundreds of other instances? Thats not gonna happen. If you want to block instances, do that on the beehaw side.

              • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                I’m not here to proselytize about what we decide to block or not. I’m explaining what the person above is requesting - not a block, but a conscious decision about what shows up on the join-lemmy list.