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

That would actually be nice.

Check the NLnet milestones in updated OP.

The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it's not this thread

Edit: Leaving this here

Nope, never.

I'm pretty sure all user data is public already.
PMs might be the only thing not everyone can see.

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.

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

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.

Very interesting question since mastodon introduced groups very recently which are a direct competitor to lemmy

Thank you! Its great that you have been around all these years.

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.

As someone who is on a medium sized instance, I can say its a little awkward when Lemmy[.]world goes down

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this thread

Edit: Leaving this here cause why not

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'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.

Would people really pay for Lemmy merch?

May canvas event posters?

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.

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.

Something tells me lemmynsfw has the largest disks. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe, if someone implements it. Basically the same answer as all other low-priority feature requests.

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.

Strengths: Its open source, decentralized and working quite reliably

Weaknesses: Theres not enough funding/developers to keep up with all the issues

It works pretty well on Peertube, only lacks users and quality content.

but the Fediverse as a whole.

FWIW video playback on Mastodon has been seamless for me.

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.

1. Im 31
2. Not yet, hopefully that will change in the future
3. North of Spain
4. Im not really anonymous, it would just feel weird to post here with my full name
5. No
6. Maybe less than 50%
7. Im terrible with names so no

I'd hope that they are at least 18

Wait for Reddit to implode, more users to migrate and donations to increase. It worked last year :D

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 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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

From NLnet we had three funding rounds with 50.000 Euros each.

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.

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.

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).

Any breaking changes which get implemented in the meantime. There are no specific plans.

No problem, thats why its called AMA. Of course its possible that your questions wont get answered.

Lemmy is licensed under AGPL which states that everyone can use it, there are no restrictions based on politics. Besides, "right wing" is not the same as "evil", the real world is much more complicated than that. If you ask me, the whole right-left classification is way too simplistic and doesnt make sense anymore (if it ever did).

I'm not a Lemmy dev but I'm interested in this question so I'm commenting so I remember to check up on this one.

I subscribe to that sub because I feel like it's important to engage with people that I don't agree with. Even though the two main contributors to that sub are peculiar in their views, I haven't seen them break any rules of lemm.ee or post outright hate to any group but democrats.

I know sh.it.justworks had their own drama with a the_donald popup community which led to calls for defederation before the community was banned but if people are posting within the rules and properly moderate their own; we ought to let them post their politics even if we don't agree.

I think the instance admins should handle that. Lemmy itself should be a open and agnostic platform. Admins should use defederation and block specific communities.

(My oppinion, I'm not associated with Lemmy development.)

I would hope we aren't going to start kicking people out because of there political views.

What's wrong with a "right-wing" community? I'm not right wing but I'm definitely not afraid of them. Anything can be solved with education. Why would you censor based on what side of the political spectrum you're on?

Then who would moderate this? And what if lemmygrad.ml/c/books wants to have different discussions from lemmy.world/c/books?

As I understand your suggestion this would mean one super community might get moderated from 5 different instances and 5 rule sets. It is definitely the right direction but not that easy to design..

I think this is interesting but should not be an automatic feature.

The current setup cntralizes power into the hands of whoever gets traction first on the platform.

There are other factors at hand, such as the moderation and the instance politics

Another option here is FEP-d36d which is a standard for group-to-group following. This looks to me like a slightly more organic and opt-in approach.

I'd like that. I think some other platforms/projects have features like this. And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw.

see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

I see it on 19.3, your server is still on 19.2, maybe that's why?

I don't think Lemmy is succeeding, it more that Reddit is really failing.

Not necessarily