Lemmy AMA March 2025
1y 2mon ago by lemmy.ml/u/nutomic in announcements@lemmy.ml
In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.
We'd also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What's something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?
Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @dessalines and @nutomic, turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We'd like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.
We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides dessalines and nutomic, other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:
Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.
What’s something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?
One of the biggest issue at this point is probably the registration experience. There are quite a few occurrences on fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com of users not sure whether their email has been validated or not, and at the moment they really need to look out for the toastify notification on their first try, later attempts won't show it.
Most recent example: https://lemmy.ml/post/27607055?scrollToComments=true
If there could be a way to inform a user saying "your email address has been validated, please wait for an administrator to activate your account, you can reach out to them at xxx", that would be great.
This generally goes against security best practices as it can be used for attempted user enumeration. A better version would be "we'll send you an email with your account status if this user exists" but obviously that results in a fair amount more complexity (and cost) to implement
I am not suggesting users being able to enumerate other users, just that the unique link that is currently used for email verification would be more explicit than just the one time toastify notification
the password/cookie should still work even when awaiting validation, password is set before the email is sent
Enumerating users is not a security problem. It's platform obscurantism to even suggest that it is.
I think I'll trust owasp and my own over 20 years of experience building commercial software but you do you
That just opens the door for bots that can never be closed
Youre right, I also noticed some other problems while testing registrations:
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5547
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5548#issue-2949361836
For the email validation it could also make sense to send out another email saying "your email has been validated", so its not only shown on the website.
Thanks!
I'd need more detail here. If registration emails aren't being sent out correctly, we need to handle that.
These two posts should provide more details
How are you?
A bit tired because my whole family is half sick. Luckily the kids are still okay to go to school.
Otherwise Im excited for this AMA, because I rarely have such direct conversations with users about Lemmy. The discussions on Github are usually quite technical.
Not bad, the swiss chard and spinach I planted recently are sprouting, so that's got me excited.
Spinach is a finicky bastard in my experience, take good care of it
Chilling in the morning before I start my day job.
+1 on registration experience being the #1 issue.
Would also be cool if we could stop 404/500ing deleted posts and instead display some indication it has been deleted. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment.
Thanks for Lemmy! 💙
Old user, haven't been active recently. Where'd all this growth come from?? Another reddit refugee situation?
reddit@lemmy.world started to ban people based on upvotes
buyeuropean@feddit.uk movement has motivated people to look around for European alternatives to Reddit
Blaze means the website Reddit, not the community they linked
Oh indeed, giving the community can help people read more about it.
Thought you meant pre-2023 by old user
No questions right now. Just wanted to say thank you for your hard work.
I know y'all catch a lot of shit and get hammered with requests/demands, so I wanted to let you know that your work is greatly appreciated.
Thanks for dedicating your time and energy to making a non-corporate, federated social environment possible.
Being on Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air.
I think the greatest strength is that it is so compatible with other Threadyverse software like PieFed and Mbin. This brings a lot of freedom to the users.
the apps! the app support is really great for Lemmy
Absolutely agree on this point. My first app didn't fulfill my requirements, so I just tested another one being able to configure it how I like.
Yes this is a major benefit of an open network. Lemmy is a very large project already, so it takes a lot of effort to implement new features, because they have to meet high standards for quality and performance and also work together with all the existing features. A project like Piefed is much smaller and can implement new features more quickly. This allows for more experimentation, and successful features can later be added to Lemmy.
Also users who are not happy with Lemmy for any reason can switch to a different platform while still interacting with those on Lemmy. So if Piefed and Mbin grow that is also a benefit for Lemmy.
Yes I'm very excited about the growth of other fediverse software, and a lot of the cool new features they're adding. Its a great eco-system where we can experiment, be creative, and learn from each other.
Unified Push support would be great.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2631
It's coming in the next release
Let's go! No more email notifications
There is an issue open requesting this... I been following it for a while.
- From a code architecture perspective, how close is Lemmy/ActivityPub to reaching its maximum capacity for posts/comments per second? Are there any ways to 10x the load ActivityPub can handle?
- With Nicole in everyone's DMs, what does the future of spam filtering look like on Lemmy?
- There is no specific maximum capacity, in theory it can scale indefinitely with horizontal scaling. Also see my reply here regarding scaling.
- 0.19.10 already includes a fix to remove private messages when a user gets banned which should help a lot. There is an issue about disabling private messages by default, but Im not sure if that will be necessary. Also 1.0 will include a plugin system, so other devs and instance admins can write their own checks. That way spam waves can be fought in a more flexible way, without having to get a change merged into Lemmy and then waiting for a new release.
I can answer the first point.
We've already tackled part of that problem with the Parallel Sending feature that can be enabled on instances with a tremendous amount of traffic. Currently the only instance that makes sense to enable that is LemmyWorld and the only reason is so servers in geographical far away can get more than 3-4 activities/second.
With that feature, servers that eventually house and generate the biggest amounts of traffic will be able to successfully communicate all of those activities to everyone else who needs them.
I predict a 10x increase is well in our grasp of easily accessible by all of our current systems. 1000x? That's a different story which I don't have the answers too.
Currently the only instance that makes sense to enable that is LemmyWorld and the only reason is so servers in geographical far away can get more than 3-4 activities/second.
For the context, it's still not enabled at this moment: https://lemm.ee/post/59055817
Are there any plans to deal with the most common annoyances regarding Lemmy? In my opinion these are all based on federation:
- Some completely automated way for users to join Lemmy. Yeah, it's not hard to select a server and it's a "good thing to do", but it's still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the "proper" path. Maybe some kind of system where instances sign up for this general, convenience way of signing up, and the registered users just get automatically distributed evenly across those instances.
- Duplicate post aggregation. The nature of federation will always make it make sense to have duplicate communities, but this will also make posts with the same links, same images, same videos, etc show up in people's "all" feeds multiple times. It is technically possible to algorithmically detect these duplicates and offer users a UI option (not actual backend merge) to merge them all visually into one post.
- A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.
it’s still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the “proper” path.
https://phtn.app/signupgives a prepopulated list
show up in people’s “all” feeds multiple times.
Which interface do you use? Crossposts only show up once on the default UI
A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.
You can already export and import your subscriptions between instances (account settings - import/export)
Posts and comments can't be migrated, but Mastodon doesn't allow it either.
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.
gives a prepopulated list
The official one also does that. I'm talking about choosing a username, password, and email maybe, and then clicking register, and being done. No thinking involved.
Crossposts only show up once on the default UI
False, you get links to the other posts, of which you posted a screenshot, but each post is handled as being completely separate. If you are in the subscribed, local or all feeds, you would see all of these posts separately. Have you really never noticed scrolling by "the same" post multiple times? You have to go to each post manually to get all the comments to the "same" thing.
but Mastodon doesn’t allow it either [...] due to technical limitations
Yes, I know that. But I'm also a programmer and I know that "technical limitations" is mostly a term for "that's how we started it and it would be too costly to solve now, so we'll just dismiss it" and not for actual limitations (i.e. not technically possible). It'd maybe require breaking changes of some kind or some kind of annoying backwards compatibility workaround, but that is why I'm asking. I'm not completely familiar with activity pub, but there's likely some key used to verify posts/messages are made by a certain user, and there's currently no way to transfer or change that key to a new account. But it seems very technically possible to me, and also possible without massive security issues. So that was my question, is there any plans to do this or no?
The official one also does that. I’m talking about choosing a username, password, and email maybe, and then clicking register, and being done. No thinking involved.
This should probably be handled more by people when they talk about Lemmy. Instead of explaining what Federation is, just point people to https://vger.app/settings/installso that they can install an app.
Voyager by default suggests Lemm.ee as the instance to register, so no thinking indeed: https://vger.app/profile
That's the recommended approach nowadays on fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
False, you get links to the other posts, of which you posted a screenshot, but each post is handled as being completely separate. If you are in the subscribed, local or all feeds, you would see all of these posts separately.
I only see them once in my subscribed feed. You may indeed see them multiple times if you are not subscribed to all the communities.
You have to go to each post manually to get all the comments to the “same” thing.
This one I agree, and it's why I generally suggest to consolidate similar communities to solve that issue. fedigrow@lemm.ee has quite a few examples of successful consolidations.
I’m not completely familiar with activity pub, but there’s likely some key used to verify posts/messages are made by a certain user, and there’s currently no way to transfer or change that key to a new account.
You're looking for https://activitypods.org/. I haven't been following their recent progress, not sure how mature their solution is, and how many Fediverse platforms support them.
False, you get links to the other posts, of which you posted a screenshot, but each post is handled as being completely separate. If you are in the subscribed, local or all feeds, you would see all of these posts separately.
I understand your frustration, however these can be multiple posts but to different communities with varying focuses and moderation styles.
Simply consolidating all the comments in one introduces its own problems.
That's why no one suggested "simply consolidating". I didn't suggest any solution at all. I'm just posing a question of if this actually pretty big problem is attempted to be handled.
I guess it's just been mentioned too much in the past that it still comes to mind when I hear this. Sorry.
Multispam is one of the things that is genuinely a threat to Lemmy's usability. If you follow certain topics, you start seeing 2-5 copies of every post. It's a genuine spam problem and "just block" or "just scroll" is as much of a non solution as it is with other spam.
Some users use it as an ideological war on instances they don't like, which is extremely funny.
Personally when I want to share something to multiple communities, I deliberately space out the posts in time. It has the slight downside of potentially showing up for a person repeatedly for days, but I think this is outweighed by the upside of them not seeing the same post multiple times within a few minutes, which is really annoying. And it has the added advantage of being more likely to be seen by people who weren't online at the right time to see it the first time.
Sometimes. But other times the instance/moderation vibes of each post will be different. Sometimes I enjoy seeing how different groups respond.
Yeah, it's not hard to select a server and it's a "good thing to do", but it's still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the "proper" path.
We could add a "fast join" button to the signup dialog on join-lemmy.org , where it takes you to a random instance's signup page.
Overall though, we should ignore the "advice" from reddit that tells us that people are too stupid to sign up for anything now. People did this for every forum and every other site all until ~2005 when US tech gobbled up most services, and ppl continue to show us that yes, they do know how to type in a username, password, and email to sign up for something.
Duplicate post aggregation. The nature of federation will always make it make sense to have duplicate communities, but this will also make posts with the same links, same images, same videos, etc show up in people's "all" feeds multiple times.
In lemmy-ui we have a post-deduplicator for feeds, but unfortunately not a lot of other apps (including jerboa, that's my bad) have added something similar.
A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.
Settings export already exists. Copying historical content and rewriting history isn't possible in a federated system, but we do have an open issue for data export.
we should ignore the “advice” from reddit that tells us that people are too stupid to sign up for anything
Definitely agree. The problem is just when someone in the past said "you should join <forum x>!", you were always able to just immediately go to forum x's signup page and sign up. But if someone hears of Lemmy, and goes to join-lemmy.org, there is no way to go to a signup page directly. They have to first learn about the multiple servers, and choose one. I think a "fast join" button like you say should be fine, and immediately next to it something to catch all the advanced actually curious users with something like a "advanced sign-up"
In lemmy-ui we have a post-deduplicator for feeds
That's weird, because that's exactly from where I'm coming from, I'm always using the lemm.ee website directly on all my devices, and I constantly see duplicate posts.
Copying historical content and rewriting history isn’t possible in a federated system
I have less knowledge of this topic so I'll defer to you, but I have the feeling this may not be true. You might of course not be able to ensure consistency between all instances, ensure that it's been changed everywhere, but I really can't see why this is any different than "editing" a comment's content or a post title, which is already possible. Why wouldn't it be possible to "edit" the comment/post author in exactly the same way?
Thanks for your response and all you're doing!
That’s weird, because that’s exactly from where I’m coming from, I’m always using the lemm.ee website directly on all my devices, and I constantly see duplicate posts.
I was thinking about what you were saying yesterday and I had another look.
- on the subscribed feed, using "New Comments", crossposts seem to indeed aggregate
- on the All feed, using "Top of the Day", crossposts would indeed appear multiple times, depending on their respective scores
I like to use "Top of X" a lot 🤔
Then that's where the issue comes from. I guess you might open an issue on the Lemmy GitHub so that crossposts are grouped in the Top views too rather than separated by their own upvote scores
The problem is just when someone in the past said “you should join <forum x>!”, you were always able to just immediately go to forum x’s signup page and sign up. But if someone hears of Lemmy, and goes to join-lemmy.org, there is no way to go to a signup page directly.
People should probably stop saying "join Lemmy", and instead link directly to the site/instance they suggest
- A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.
This would be great.. also even if the "restore" part were not possible (yet?) I feel offering a way to extract your data might even be a requirement for a server to be fully GDPR compliant (though I could be wrong on that, IANAL), reddit does allow you to download your data after all.
What are your thoughts on blocking AI scraper access? Any attempts to improve that on the side of Lemmy? Basic things like allowing to customize the robots.txt easily would already help.
I also recently tried this new AI block tool called Anubis with Lemmy, but for some reason it fails with Lemmy-ui. Might be interesting to investigate further.
Anyone that wants to scrape Lemmy would have an easier time setting up their own server, federating with everyone, and reading straight from their DB. No web scraping required. Though, web scraping defenses would be useful against general web scrapers/crawlers.
That would require the authors of these AI scrapers to actually give a f*ck. The problem is that they don't, and just scrape what ever they can find repeatatly almost like a ddos attack on the open web.
Yup, same as they could clone git repos in one shot, but they instead crawl every single page.
You can load a different robots.txt in your nginx config, something like this:
location /robotx.txt {
index /path/to/my/robots.txt;
}
Additionally 1.0 will change the "private instance" to work with federation enabled (see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5530).Then only logged-in users will see content, while AI scrapers wont see anything except the login page.
I just set up Anubis today. Specifically I'm only testing it for Lemmy-ui, and it seems to work fine.
It looks like the distributed waves that keep bringing the service down hit exclusively our lemmy-ui subdomain, so maybe non-SSR photon is also a good defense, heh.
Hmm, that is odd. I guess I need to double check my Nginx config for lemmy-ui then. You have your setup documented somewhere?
Edit: ah, you run Photon as the main UI and lemmy-ui somewhere else? I think specifically the split between frontend and backend on the root domain somehow makes Anubis fail to set the correct cookie.
I don't think it should be a problem, but I'm not that sure either. Lemmy.fedi.zutto.fi also runs it and that's just a normal lemmy-ui installation. I think Zutto simply forwarded all traffic to Anubis and then fixed federation. There was some discussion and config shared in sopuli's finnish matrix room.
I've previously worked in anti-scraping. There is a negative 0% chance the Lemmy devs have the resources to effectively do this without tanking the server for everyone else.
Hi, I think that Lemmy is great thank you for your hard work
I actually think that given the ads and other distorsions, and thanks to federation, Lemmy is overall actually better than reddit!
Some features I miss are:
- tags
- direct messages outside Lemmy (even if not encrypted)
- better rendering of posts on mastodon (something beyond the title only). Not sure what side is responsible for this, tho!
Keep up the good work guys!
- Tags are work in progress
- Not exactly sure what you mean by "direct messages outside Lemmy", but in version 1.0 they will be compatible with Mastodon and other platforms
- Its a known problem with Mastodon because it only renders
Noteobjects properly, which are meant for short texts less than a paragraph. Lemmy usesPagewhich is meant for longer text. Some platforms like Wordpress (iirc) have an option to federate even long posts asNoteso that it gets rendered fully in Mastodon, but that seems like a bad idea to me. In the end its up to Mastodon how to render different types of federated content on their frontend, so it needs to be fixed by them. Here is an entire discussion about this by developers of different Fediverse platforms (including a Mastodon dev).
Thank you, great to hear all my points are being addressed! The thing about post rendering, well, I just hope a common solution is found 😊
Hello,
Thank you for organizing this AMA!
Starting with a quite expected question: when do you think you'll be able to release Lemmy 1.0?
Its hard to say because these things always take longer than expected. Now we are finally getting to the point where all the breaking database and api changes are almost finished. After that it will take some months to update lemmy-ui for all the backend changes and new features, and the same for all other apps. Then a testing period to fix all the problems that come up. So maybe around autumn for the final release, although lemmy.ml and some other instances may upgrade some months before already.
Thank you!
With the rate ppl are adding issues (and we're finding more), is sometimes feels like it keeps getting farther away than nearer, but we'll get there in some months.
Are you disappointed with the way things are growing with people trying to marginalise the likes of ML and Grad?
Communities that go against hegemonic capitalist/imperialist discourse will always get marginalised. Not being able to take down those communities easily like on Reddit is a huge win by itself for Lemmy. The software offers a valuable savehaven for e.g ex r/chapotraphouse, r/genzedong etc.
Yep, the fact that Communists can build their own platform and networks free from any outside censorship on corporatized platforms is itself the strategy for building leftist spaces. The goal isn't hurt by more non-Communists being on the overall Lemmy platform because these non-Communists can't actually do much to shut the Communists out.
That's a good thing, as a Communist I'm happy we have spaces.
I get a chuckle out of the "Tankie Triad" talking point some people keep using. It sounds like a villain organization from a Saturday morning cartoon.
It seems some people simply need some target to hate on. Hopefully they will learn to accept different opinions when they arent being manipulated by for-profit social media anymore.
The anti-communist witch-hunters are extremely peeved that they can't remove our communities like they can on reddit. Overall it doesn't bother me because I don't work for them, and they can always go back to reddit where their views are already dominant.
Anyone trying to make the world a better place, will always be hated and hunted by some people; it's a fact of life, and the sooner we accept it, the better.
<3 I appreciate your work, comrades!
Just wanted to say I LOVE lemmy! It's a really positive community, the atmosphere is great and I like how it's unique but also familiar. I really appreciate your work on it. I know this is AMA... what's your favourite animal?
Some companies use Reddit as their main forum or an established way to communicate with customers. Are there any companies that have explored Lemmy and have their community yet?
Not that I know of, only some open source projects as mentioned by others.
Communities should be more unified across servers, especially for niche ones. I want to see an active Metroid community, I don't give a crap what instance is hosting it (or if it's a mostly-opaque medley of instances) so long as I'm federated with it. This is probably the biggest UX misunderstanding new users have.
Having distinct communities is a feature, not a bug. If two cities set up their own lemmy instances, say lemmy.sao_luis.br, and lemmy.lagos.ng, they can each have a news community, without them overlapping.
Do a search for metroid, and subscribe to whichever ones you like.
It would still be a huge benefit, especially for more niche topics, if we had something like a federation-wide comm like /f/niche_hobby that you could subscribe to instead of 20 different /c/niche_hobby communities.
Maybe comms could opt in/out of behavior to avoid the issue you described.
This would also benefit smaller instances because few people will subscribe to their comms because they are too inactive, making it so their content never gets traction.
My biggest complaint with Lemmy is that it is too hard to group & categorize content. Sometimes I want politics, sometimes I want nerd shit, but my only three options are subscribed, local, and all, which doesn't have any categorization unless you are on an active, niche server.
Multireddits are pretty much the only thing I miss from reddit.
Piefed has exactly that: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/38733273?scrollToComments=true
Interesting, is this all manually curated like multireddits? Would also be nice to have automatic ones (with include/exclude overrides)
The problem with it just being Piefed is that Lemmy clients probably won't bother to support it unless it becomes standard.
Is this a frontend specific thing or does it also require the Piefed backend on your instance too? If it is just frontend, I would definitely use it for desktop browsing.
Dope seeing implementation diversity resulting in experimentation and innovation. Would love to see this adopted in other Lemmy implementations too
Interesting, is this all manually curated like multireddits? Would also be nice to have automatic ones (with include/exclude overrides)
They have both
- user defined feeds, public or private
- admin defined "topics"
It's a whole different software, backend and frontend
They have both
Awesome!
It's a whole different software, backend and frontend
I know Piefed is both a frontend and backend, but does this behavior require the backend? Like can it be used with a regular Lemmy backend and/or database without backwards-incompatible changes?
The frontend requires the backend. Feeds and topics are managed by the backend anyway
Look, this is just my take -- I think this is bad UX. I'm not saying federation isn't a good idea -- on the contrary, I like the idea that many different posts in the same community are all hosted on different instances. Sure, for a community like news it doesn't make as much sense -- fixes for this would be that some communities don't have the behaviour I'm suggesting, or the convention is to call it sao_luis_news or something.
Who controls this universal community name system?
It's a good question. Perhaps nobody needs to control it. Users of c/foo post on their own instance (or choose an instance to post on). Mods are responsible for posts on their own instances (as before). The difference is that when viewing c/foo, you see posts from all federated instances.
For news, politics, etc, which might cause trouble if combined, here's a solution: Perhaps if your instance's c/foo community has the "keep separated" flag enabled, then users on your instance browsing c/foo won't see posts from other instances, and users on federated instances won't see your instance's c/foo posts when browsing c/foo.
Consolidation isn't always a good thing, communities on different instances will have different styles and trends, and that's a good thing. The benefit of federated social media is just as much in local instances as it is in federation, unique niches are going to have unique comments even if the post is the exact same.
It does not have to be something mandatory...
I mean, there could be some form of "metacommunities", something like being able to group multiple communities together in a "view" that shows them to you visually as if they were a single community despite being separated. Bonus points if everyone can make their own custom groupings (but others can subscribe to them.. so there can be some community-managed groupings).
In theory you could have multiple "metacommunities" for the same topic still.. but at least they could be sharing the same posts if they share communities. I feel grouping like this would be helpful because small communities feel even smaller when they are split.
I think reddit has something similar to that, multireddits or something I think they are called.
Piefed has feeds that achieve exactly that: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/38733273?scrollToComments=true
Nice! It also seems to be under discussion on lemmy's github here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
I think the benefit of federation is that nobody controls the whole ecosystem. The downside of federation is splintering.
Less that nobody can control the whole thing, more that you can have full control of your own thing. Basically the same thing you said, but I think it's important to note that many niche communities thrive on Lemmy.
Many more niche communities languish because they can never get enough traction to be seen.
If I subscribe to /c/dubstep, chances are I don't care if it is lemmy.ml/c/dubstep or lemmy.world/c/dubstep, but neither community is likely to be active because one comm on one instance needs to be the popular one for other users to sub and want to post there. What I really want is /f/dubstep
I disagree, actually. The issue here is relying on communities to be active, rather than instances with a healthy size and sorting by new rather than active. Hexbear has a bunch of communities, but people sort by New so any post will have some traction.
Lemmy works best when instances rely on themselves, and not federation. Federation is a bonus, not the point itself. Thinking of this massive fediverse as a single entity would mean it's probably better to use Reddit, anyways.
Federation should be the point. I didn't join Lemmy to join yet another reddit-like service but with far fewer users. I joined it because I want to be on something like reddit but which no one group controls. Otherwise I'd use threads, bluesky, etc.
Federation is one side of the equation, the fact that no one person controls it relies upon the fact that it isn't centralized into few communities. It's a double-edged sword, the same benefit is also potentially a drawback for others.
I'm not asking that we centralize communites to be hosted on a single instance. I'm asking that communities with the same name on multiple instances appear to the user to be merged. In this way, a community can grow and benefit from network effects, but no one instance controls the community.
Communities don't need to grow, though, my point is more that different instances have their own flavors of the same concepts and that's a benefit.
When I want to post about metroid, I want to reach everyone on lemmy who is interested in metroid. I understand that people are not homogenous. On reddit, I expect a range of opinions. Different instances perhaps serve to adjust the distribution from a smooth continuum to something more lumpy. Perhaps there is value in that, but I think it's outweighed by the value in reaching a larger portion of lemmy.
I understand what you want, but you'll never reach everyone on Lemmy, as there are no instances that are not defederated from anyone. This is a structural aspect of Lemmy's federated model. You can find different opinions all over Lemmy, but any community is going to be subject to its mods and admins for the instance, and a "multicomm" will still run into issues with federation.
I think we might be talking past each other. I understand that not every instance is federated with every other instance, and that there are differences between the instances.
Each instance is one piece in a larger mosaic -- but looking for niche interests inside one particular instance is a bad venn diagram. The choice of instance should be of secondary consideration when it comes to niche interests. I barely care from what instance someone hails if they're giving me cooking advice. This is why we have federation in the first place -- it just needs to be a smoother experience.
Sure, but this community will belong to an instance though.
I don't see why that is necessary, as different posts could be hosted on different instances. Either way, the choice of instance is of little concern for me as an end user, so it should be de-emphasized.
What exactly is it you're asking for, though? A change in user behaviour towards consolidation? Some new feature of the platform similar to multi-reddits? How exactly do you suggest that should work?
Not a change in user behaviour. How about: communities on different instances with the same name appear as one community essentially. As in, all instances' version of that community appear in your feed if subscribed, and when viewing posts in a community, all instances versions of that community are visible.
Perhaps the user can restrict to just one instance's community or just the local instance's community with a button (like local/all), if that's their preference.
Good luck with politics@hexbear.net and politics@lemmy.world
Right, so, in some circumstances it wouldn't necessarily be a good idea to join identically-named communities.
Maybe it should be more like the multireddit idea -- people have to manually set up the links between the communities.
Piefed has feeds which work like multireddits https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/38733273?scrollToComments=true
Ha! The discoursive whiplash would be immense.
This is a bad idea. They're different communities. Full stop. They have different moderators. They may have different rules. I'm not even convinced communities using the same URL slug on different instances would even imply they're the same topic.
That's gonna be fun for cases like c/trees. Someone somewhere will get the joke, someone somewhere won't.
Being able to view "all" communities with the same name across all instances would be so nice.
The problem here is that a community news@connecticut.social will have a completely different topic than news@mmorpg.net . In some cases the same name means same topic, in some cases not.
To be totally honest, a lot of communities aren't big enough yet to really necessitate splitting into niche communities yet. I don't know if gaming/Metroid is an example of one that does or doesn't meet that. It's just an observation.
fedigrow@lemm.ee has several examples of consolidation
this post provides a good overview of this issue and possible solution. https://popcar.bearblog.dev/lemmy-needs-to-fix-its-community-separation-problem/
Proposed solution 3: Communities following communities
Really, really like that idea!
Not on the current roadmap of Lemmy 1.0, which is planned for autumn 2025
This should be among the first priorities. It would really help kick things off. Not only niche communities, but bigger ones as well. They represent topics of interest. I think I've seen a thing like macro community in one of the clients?! Could that be it?
Eternity Android client allows grouping communities into a multi community, but it only helps on getting consolidated feed, not necessarily reaching the same people
the Summit app does it too
How would two communities named news, work for say, a server about star trek, and another located in a city.
Well, what is each meant to represent? Should communities be constructed around the concept of topics, or should there be a server for each topic?
And please don't use any variant of "everybody can do it whichever they want", because this just avoids the responsibility of offering a personal answer and shifts it to them.
Personally I think the first (communities=topics)., while servers should provide voluntary redundancy for each other in case one of the servers has an inconvenient change of policies or circumstances for the users.
But I am not on the creative team of Lemmy, so my vision might differ from theirs. Also, I'm willing to change my belief if more solid arguments are presented.
We are seeing an influx of new users, but what's happening to older users? Are they still active? What's the average lifetime of Lemmy users nowadays? I'm kinda curious about the user retention in general
The best data we have on that is probably https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Not sure how to get the user retention from that, though
I believe they are still active. User numbers have been stable for a long time, and there are some names that I recognize from the very early days 5 years ago.
Every server and community has monthly active users stats. Best way to see them would be a tool like this that keeps track of history: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
We don't do any tracking of user retention, but overall lemmy has been fairly steady at ~50k users for a year now.
but what’s happening to older users? Are they still active?
There are certainly names still around who I remember from my first year on the site. Like Blaze said, I'm also not sure how to get some concrete numbers.
I've been here for almost two years and don't think I can go back to anything else. I like the freedom of information that this idea brought to us.
Do you guys have plans to add a spoiler tag? I post a lot of memes about tv shows that I watch, but the users complain that the post isn't blurred.
I know I can use the NSFW tag, but this gives the wrong idea and limits the post visibility (since people can hide nsfw posts).
You can put spoilers in the body
spoiler
Helloooo
but then the user might not realize that there's an image in the post, which will also limit it's reach.
So a spoiler tag for post links? This could potentially be added later as an addition to the post tags feature.
Even that isn't too necessary, since you can already put images in spoiler markdown blocks.
I see. Would the spoiler tag also blur the thumbnail?
The only thing that concerns me about handling spoilers is how the third party apps handle them. Do you think it would be a good idea to also blur the entire image (not only the thumbnail) and remove the blur only when the user clicks the image?
Not sure, we would have to see whenever we get around to implementing that.
Doesn't work on boost client apparently.
It may still be using reddit style markdown
Yeah a lot of former Reddit apps that switched to Lemmy did a really lazy job of it and haven't implemented all of the Lemmy text parsing syntax properly. Spoilers are one of the most common issues, but so are subscript (including multiple word subscript) and superscript (and multiple words of it).
If your app doesn't parse text correctly 2 years later, it may be time to consider switching.
Doesn't work on the android app Eternity
Eternity hasn't been updated in a while. You might want to try summit@lemmy.world or thunder_app@lemmy.world
Open up an issue on their repo.
You can hide images behind spoiler tags also:
check it out
Is there a way to move myself as an user from one server to another?
What was the last post that made you really laugh?
Hahaha thanks! That's great!
When a instance goes permanently offline, does the content vanish? If so, could there possibly be a way for another instance to "adopt" the content on their instance so those posts aren't lost to time?
I think it might help reassure people to pick smaller instances.
Some Lemmy clients offer the option to auto-hide posts and comments which contain certain keywords of the choice of the user. Are there any plans to implement this feature into the stock Lemmy experience?
I know it is possible to do some hacky stuff with UblockOrigin to do the same, but that is not something most know about and are willing to do.
This is currently work in progress.
From my perspective we need better Mod and Admin tools. Forum software has a lot of them but Lemmy is lacking in this department.
The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities. You'll often get reports of posts not being appropriate for a community but there is no way to actually move it.
Which tools specifically? I ask because this is a common complaint, but 99% of the time its something we already have, that most ppl are unaware of.
The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities.
Lemmy like all federated services, can't rewrite history, but you can already cross-post (although it would be the mod cross-posting, as we don't let mods alter user data except to remove it). It would just take someone adding that as an issue to lemmy-ui and working on it.
Which tools specifically? I ask because this is a common complaint, but 99% of the time its something we already have, that most ppl are unaware of.
- mod mail, so that users can reach out to the whole mod team at once, and the team can come back to them
- a more structured mod queue, allowing to filter by community. The Reddit one on old.reddit was good to help keep an overview on the mod actions to take
more structured mod queue, allowing to filter by community
The upcoming combined modlog has this, as well as other more detailed filters.
You can read through these issues related to modmail, but the short version is that it's way out of scope for us, and not something we have time to do. Replicating private group chats is better done by other services like matrix, or using a shared email inbox.
I see, thank you for the links
Which tools specifically?
Standard Web forum tools include:
- Editing posts - the main issue is misleading titles
- Moving posts to different communities
- Merging posts
- Splitting comments into separate posts
- IP check
This post makes some good points about reports federating (being worked on, I believe) but also about the lack of what we'll call a "moderation panel" where you can access tools for the community, like seeing a list of banned users and being able to add to it there or unban someone.
There are other "nice to have" tools like post approval
I am curious to see what moderation tools PieFed, has and NodeBB now they are federated, but the documentation is skimpy on that front.
Editing posts - the main issue is misleading titles
Moving posts to different communities
You can read over the discussion here, but we will never allow mods or admins to act as / impersonate users, or edit their content.
We also can't rewrite history in the fediverse (unlike a forum) so "moving" a post would also entail deleting and recreating content other people made.
Splitting comments into separate posts
Merging posts
These ones sound really strange, but its similar, I don't want mods to be able to rewrite user history or move it.
IP check
We don't store IPs so that'd be impossible.
You can read over the discussion here, but we will never allow mods or admins to act as / impersonate users, or edit their content.
I really don't get this. Why is editing user content with slur_filter or modifying URLs accepted but allowing mods/admins to change the NSFW toggle isn't? It also ignores that savvy-enough admins can edit user content with SQL queries.
I think slur filters, tracking param removals, and local link rewriting are acceptable, because (with the exception of the slur filter) they're non-moderation actions, and also applied uniformly regardless of who made them.
It also ignores that savvy-enough admins can edit user content with SQL queries.
That's unavoidable of course, anyone with DB access ultimately can edit things. But if people catch on, I doubt your server would gain many users or last that long. Most importantly, we shouldn't allow that to happen via the API.
You're free to start a "Should mods be able to edit user's data?" discussion, but I doubt it would get much support, especially from reddit allowing this and it souring everyone to it.
Most importantly, we shouldn’t allow that to happen via the API.
My view is that not adding this to the API will only encourage admins who want this to do it through less transparent means, like injecting fake activities into the sent_activity table. Most admins are reasonable people, and have good relations with their users, so if admins explained themselves then I think most users would be pretty accepting.
You’re free to start a “Should mods be able to edit user’s data?” discussion, but I doubt it would get much support, especially from reddit allowing this and it souring everyone to it.
I mean there's been like 3 or 4 GitHub issues opened about this, so there's clearly some demand for it. Should I make a post in lemmy@lemmy.ml? So users not on GitHub can chime in.
Sure, and be sure to link that closed github issue.
It would be nice to have way for admins and mods to make notes on people. E.g. If you are giving someone a warning, you currently need to use an external tool to log the warning.
There was some discussion of this not long ago: https://feddit.uk/post/24412286
@nutomic@lemmy.ml linked this GitHub issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2345
It shouldn't be too difficult. A move is essentially a cross-post but it keeps the OP as the poster (rather than the cross-poster). You'd then want to lock the original post, and either hide it or add a message directing people to the new post. That's all current forum software does.
The main question is how this can work in terms of federation. When creating a new post it directly references the community url. If the user and community are on different instances then the community instance cannot rewrite the post to reference a different community. So it would have to tell the post creator to (automatically) resubmit the post to the new community. Same for all comments, they would have to be recreated by the respective author's instance in the new post. Seems quite complex to implement.
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What is your opinion on Bluesky being more popular than Mastodone because it is easier for most?
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Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?
thanks
edit: lemmy dev replies only please
Who is your daddy and what does he do?
No seriously he's retired and cooks his brain watching fox news all day. If he got off that drug for even a month he'd return to being a sweet and caring person.
Wait, I thought you're French, dad sniffing the Fox from France?
Kindergarten cop right?
Thanks a lot for the work you do! How do you get by with such a limited amount of funds? How sustainable is your financial situation if donations don't pick up considerably?
On the server perspective, I have a question, what are your thoughts for horizontal scaling on the database? This seems to be the biggest limitation and requiring higher spec hardware to scale especially for the bigger instances.
My tiny instance for example I give over 20GB of RAM just to postgres to make it perform efficient enough.
The way to solve the database problems isn't to keep throwing more and more money at powerful servers and scaling. Its to fix it at the root: lemmy's unoptimized database.
dullbananas has done invaluable work in making our DB better (and all of these will be in 1.0), but I'm convinced that if we had even 1-2 more Postgresql experts do a pass over the DB, and ideally one full-time expert, all of these problems could be solved.
Does the project maintain a list of known slow queries? This is my favorite type of work
The post list query is by far the worst offender. It needs to filter, sort, cursor paginate, and join to many tables, and indexes are hard to follow and keep up with.
What's more is that the problems only surface with lots of historical data, meaning we can only really test the query plans with a fully populated DB.
All this requires running lemmy locally, and inspecting the postgres query durations. We really need proper test suites (lemmy DB perf is one example) that can stress-test production data also.
Here is one historical issue:
I'd very much appreciate any help.
I should have some time tonight to start looking at this. Thanks for the info!
Thank you in advance!
Good evening Dessalines, I have started looking at the posts query.
The lowest hanging fruit I think would be if we could replace some of the joins with WHERE EXISTS which can have a huge impact on the query time. It seems this is supported in Diesel: https://stackoverflow.com/a/74300447
This is my first time looking at the codebase so I can't tell yet which joins are purely for filtering (in which case they can be replaced by WHERE EXISTS) and which joins need to be left in because some of their columns end up in the final SELECT
I can't tell for sure yet but it also looks like this might also be using LIMIT...OFFSET pagination? That can be a real drag on performance but isn't as easy to fix.
EDIT:
Looking some more, and reading some linked github discussion - I think to really get this out of the performance pits will require some denormalization like a materialized view or manual cache tables populated by triggers. I really like the ranking algorithm but so far I'm finding it difficult to optimize from a query perspective
Sounds promising
This is helpful. Could you make a github issue and copy-paste this there? Thx.
Nice number
lol! i love your inputs hahaha
Trying to keep it fun ha ha
I love it, thanks!!
I 100% agree with this and there have been great strides since I started using Lemmy ~v0.17! That said at some point optimization will have lower returns and have a higher effort to put into and once a community grows extensively it likely might not be enough, so I was curious to what you guys were thinking at that point, something like Ctius for sharding postgres?
I'm sure we're nowhere near that level yet. We haven't come close to postgres's limits, and most of our bottlenecks are unoptimized queries.
That's a very interesting point, have you tried asking for support on lemmy@lemmy.ml or other general communities? There are probably a few Postgres experts on the platform
We've asked for help various times, but don't usually get much help. Despite the seemingly large number of "experts" out there, only a tiny number of them contribute to open source. I'd still consider it mostly a wasteland, with a few people doing the work that should be done by 100x their number.
20 GB RAM for a single user instance sounds like a lot. Did you use pgtune? It may also help to run a reindex or full vacuum.
Yeah I used pgtune as a base and found more memory needed to be assigned to certain spots especially to keep federation with bigger instances, otherwise timeouts would occur resulting in my instance being constantly behind.
That said I read postgres 17 is much more memory efficient, though I have yet to move my lemmy database to it yet since its the largest haha.
Maybe your disk is too slow, or latency between Lemmy and Postgres is too high?
It is a k8s cluster and using ceph for all of my storage so the latency from that I bet is the largest reason and upping the memory offsets the disk writes. i also have another postgres DB syncing as a fallback for high availability. Fortunately after tuning the database and giving it enough RAM my instance has been running pretty stable for over a year without any changes.
I am also using less powerful computers for the entire infrastructure (not server grade) which brings to the point of having horizontal scaling on database I imagine will be a growing need with growing instances, communities, and users since it can be cheaper to run multiple smaller spec servers rather than a single with the added benefit of high availability.
Postgres supports sharding which should work without any changes in Lemmy. But so far not even lemmy.world needs that. There are also read replicas which would require support directly in Lemmy afaik. Such a feature will surely be added as instances grow bigger over time and need more resources.
I didn't think of using read only replicas, that would probably be a very good way to go since its probably 80%+ of actions are reads. Thanks for answering, I am excited to see the how lemmy grows and thanks for all the devs hard work!
Not really a question, but something to think about is being more strict about backwards compatibility so that people don't get burnt out on having stuff break. Coming from this post by the Tesseract dev, who did not like the breaking changes to the v3 API in 1.0: https://dubvee.org/post/2904152
To formulate that into an actual question, do you think the changes are still worth it and you'd make the same decision to break backwards compatibility?
I would reply directly to that post, but it looks like the admin (who is also the Tesseract dev) has completely blocked federation with lemmy.ml by IP block or useragent block. So Im going to respond here to his complaints:
Lemmy didnt have a single breaking change since version 0.19 which was released 1 year and 4 months ago. And the breaking changes in that version were quite minor. Before that was 0.18, 1 year and 6 months earlier. That version only removed websockets, so most third-party app devs who used the HTTP API didnt notice any difference. Meaning the API has been almost unchanged for over three years which is quite long for a project that hasnt reached a stable version yet. 1.0 includes all the breaking changes that were held back over the years, so that we dont need any more breaking changes for a long time.
That said it would be great if we could keep backwards compatibility with the existing API in Lemmy 1.0. Problem is with all the major changes we are doing now, it would take a huge amount of work to implement this kind of backwards compatibility. If we had twice as many fulltime developers working on Lemmy this would be doable, but our resources are very limited so we have to make some compromises.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172
This is all a matter of dev resources. If we had maybe 6 full-time devs, we could handle things like backwards compatibility.
People forget that lemmy, like other open source hobby projects, don't have the resources that large corporations do. People understandably get frustrated when there's breaking changes, but they also need to not put enterprise-level expectations on a small number of people.
If someone wanted to work on that, of course we wouldn't be opposed, but you should know how monumental a task that would be.
Having a tantrum because breaking changes were announced is asinine. The Tesseract developer comes across like a proper twat.
Divas have problems no matter what you do.
What Is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Do you plan on moving away from GitHub to something else like Forgejo?
Hi! As you might remember, i've been pushing for this platform for quite some time so i'll just dump ideas in a pretty annoying way, hope you'll spare me :3
- do you realize that the power of the threadiverse is that a forum can even fully exist alone and the federation between them is a plus while for microblogging it's kinda a shit to not have the big reach? basically, are you going to bring lemmy in a ''more forum'' direction or a ''more social'' direction?
- will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes? it's clear that the reddit effect is already here and people are not incentivized to read the article and comment on point or discuss less agreable stuff just because posts gets downvoted?
- if on my instance downvotes are deactivated, do they still influence my home when I browse subs from other instances that have downvotes?
- more UI mod tools! they are never enough because a community manager has not to be also a sysadmin or a linux poweruser just to take care of the community; stuff like subscribing to blocklists and allowlists, stuff like deleting cached media and so on
- how is the plugin stuff going?
- wouldn't it be better to drop the android client and the federated wiki to fully focus on making lemmy the best federated threadiverse software? now that nodebb has federation the competition is existent (mbin and piefed were never enough e.e) and other frontends are generally cooler (voyager basically brought me back on being active here)
- can we have a lemmy-first approach regarding comunication and contributions? basically i don't want to make a github account to push some opinions and it seems like they kinda get ignored when on the lemmy community about lemmy
- ability to merge communities having them mirrored in a basic way i guess it's already on his way
- would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv)
- would be cool to have lists to be able to browse lemmy from lemmy in a more rss way: for example there are communities i want to check once in a while but totally don't want em in my home and having lists would help
- changing ''favorite'' posts into ''bookmarks''/''saved''
- would be cool to have the possibility to have a favorite users list to check what your friends are up to
- any other suggestion would basically be ''can this thing that forums have also be ported to lemmy?'', i just think that lemmy has to evolve into a forum first with a link aggregator ui; it's kinda easy to use discourse as a bug tracker and feature request tracker for example (observation made because of the previous question of using lemmy instead of github for non code stuff)
- would be nice to have word filters and user notes
- also lobste.rs invite tree would be nice
- have you taken into account that maybe offering a service of lemmy hosting managed by you could help?
- dulcis in fundo, always about empowering non tech people, what about having lemmy on yunohost as one of the curated methods by the devs?
alright i think it's enough lol; now one very big appreciation: thank you for the rss first approach, having rss for basically everything like it was on reddit (well still miss some query rss but i understand it's harder to do) it's really so fucking useful and cool and i really hope that lemmy will make niche communities shine again
do you realize that the power of the threadiverse is that a forum can even fully exist alone and the federation between them is a plus while for microblogging it’s kinda a shit to not have the big reach? basically, are you going to bring lemmy in a ‘‘more forum’’ direction or a ‘‘more social’’ direction?
Im not a fan of microblogging, so for me Lemmy should definitely be more like a forum.
will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes? it’s clear that the reddit effect is already here and people are not incentivized to read the article and comment on point or discuss less agreable stuff just because posts gets downvoted?
As mentioned by others, downvotes can already disabled by the instance, so that local users cannot downvote and federated downvotes are ignored. Lemmy 1.0 will also add per-community downvote settings.
if on my instance downvotes are deactivated, do they still influence my home when I browse subs from other instances that have downvotes?
Yes
more UI mod tools! they are never enough because a community manager has not to be also a sysadmin or a linux poweruser just to take care of the community; stuff like subscribing to blocklists and allowlists, stuff like deleting cached media and so on
I only work on the backend, lemmy-ui and other frontends could definitely use more contributors to work on these things. Im not familiar with all the different apps but they are probably missing many features that already exist in the backend. That said subscribing to blocklists and allowlists seems a bit risky, as you can end up with most instances subscribing to the same list, giving the creator a lot of power. I believe Mastodon or Twitter had some drama like that. Anyway this could be implemented with the API.
how is the plugin stuff going?
Practically finished, you can already start developing plugins.
wouldn’t it be better to drop the android client and the federated wiki to fully focus on making lemmy the best federated threadiverse software? now that nodebb has federation the competition is existent (mbin and piefed were never enough e.e) and other frontends are generally cooler (voyager basically brought me back on being active here)
Lemmy is not a company with a boss ordering the workers what to do. Everyone including me and Dessalines are volunteers, and chooses for himself what he wants to work on. As its all open source its not really competition, more users on NodeBB is also good for Lemmy as it means more user choice and activity.
One reason Im working on Ibis is because I waited for a long time for someone to start a federated wiki project. Its a major thing thats missing from the Fediverse. As no one else did, I have to do it myself. The other reason is to have something different that Lemmy to code on. Working on Lemmy can be quite exhausting because the project is already very mature, so every new change needs to pass tests, be approved by other maintainers and work with the existing features. Ibis is still in early stages and under my control alone, so I can do whatever I want.
can we have a lemmy-first approach regarding comunication and contributions? basically i don’t want to make a github account to push some opinions and it seems like they kinda get ignored when on the lemmy community about lemmy
I checked your profile and it looks like you received adequate replies for all the latest posts.
ability to merge communities having them mirrored in a basic way i guess it’s already on his way
There are open issues for these, but developer time is very limited so we need to set priorities.
would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv)
Theres an open pull request for post tags.
would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv) would be cool to have lists to be able to browse lemmy from lemmy in a more rss way: for example there are communities i want to check once in a while but totally don’t want em in my home and having lists would help changing ‘‘favorite’’ posts into ‘‘bookmarks’’/‘‘saved’’ would be cool to have the possibility to have a favorite users list to check what your friends are up to any other suggestion would basically be ‘‘can this thing that forums have also be ported to lemmy?’’, i just think that lemmy has to evolve into a forum first with a link aggregator ui; it’s kinda easy to use discourse as a bug tracker and feature request tracker for example (observation made because of the previous question of using lemmy instead of github for non code stuff) would be nice to have word filters and user notes also lobste.rs invite tree would be nice
A lot of things would be nice to have, but with the very limited resources we have there is only so much we can do. So we need to focus on the main functionality, its basically the unix philosophy: "Do one thing and do it well".
have you taken into account that maybe offering a service of lemmy hosting managed by you could help?
Yes, but in the end I dont think the profit would be enough to justify the workload.
dulcis in fundo, always about empowering non tech people, what about having lemmy on yunohost as one of the curated methods by the devs?
We dont have time to manage yet another installation method, but anyone can help out and contribute there.
Wow these were a lot of questions :D
Wow these were a lot of questions :D
Ahah, y e s
Thank you for the answers, I’ll avoid answering back to not make a mess u.u
There's a forum sort called NewComments, that servers and any user can use to turn lemmy into a forum-style feed.
Instances can already disable downvotes site-wide, but we also already have fine-grained vote display settings:
Merging communities is no more possible than merging mastodon users.
Which mod tools do we need?
We already have RSS feeds.
We already have the ability to save posts and comments.
Word filters and flairs are in the works.
There's too many other things here for me to answer.
I love the NewComments sort btw, to find and engage in ongoing discussions in threads that sometimes span weeks
I can confirm the sections around downvotes as Reddthat has the stance exact what you are talking about (re your child comments)
A downvote disabled instance creates it's own algorithm/feed/ranking based purely on all other metrics, because as far as the data is concerned, it sees every post having 0 downvotes. It does not take into account external instances.
will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes?
There is an option in your settings so you don't see upvotes or downvotes.
Lemmy (AFAIK) doesn't even show you your total upvotes (karma... whatever it's called) by default either. None of these imaginary points matter.
So why don't you do yourself a favor and uncheck these boxes and not give a fuck what others think about your comment.
I know I have.
(Lemmy is rad as fuck)
I already hide them and my ego is already not touched by downvotes :P
I explained in another comment why I think they are deleterious nonetheless
It’s not about me, it’s about social dynamics :)
If I'm not mistaken, instances like Hexbear already eliminate downvotes. I haven't looked into whether that's just a default setting for everyone or if it mechanically disables them, but it certainly creates a different social dynamic.
You cannot re-enable downvotes on Hexbear.net. Other instances can downvote Hexbear posts and comments, but those won't appear for Hexbear users, and Hexbear users cannot downvote other posts or comments.
I already hide them and my ego is already not touched by downvotes :P
I explained in another comment why I think they are deleterious nonetheless
It’s not about me, it’s about social dynamics :)
Will we ever get the ability to mute posts?
You can hide them (three dots menu - hide post) is muting different?
If I create a post and then a bunch of annoying people from LW start flooding my inbox, I'd like to be able to prevent new replies from taking over my inbox, but still be able to access the post should I decide I have the energy to tackle the LW hoard.
Not sure where this falls on lemmy's roadmap or if there is a github issue for it, but you can turn off notifications in piefed per post or comment. You can also enable notifications for posts/comments that aren't your own if there is a thread you want to keep tabs on.
I see
To chime in on the user creation thing:
I think it's a natural part of decentralization that it's harder for a single instance to get big enough to be the "go-to" for general users.
Having said that, I also think this will naturally happen over time. As long as the mechanical aspects of sign up are simple, it's just a matter of users of a given instance to promote their instance.
World events also always play a role in encouraging a move to freer waters. Look at what happened with Mastodon and Bluesky (though Bluesky imo is just a big snooze button on a blaring alarm)
What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it?
There are some more obvious things, like mod tooling, but I'm gonna concentrate on smaller, niche UX issues that I think arise from how it is designed already, because I think there are probably already enough voices who will speak up for the bigger things.
- Inconsistent language UX between lemmy-ui and Jerboa. Specifically, that Jerboa provides no way to specify the language of a post or comment.
- Inconsistent parsing of markdown between lemmy-ui and Jerboa. Specifically. Superscript and subscript work fine on single words, but multiple words in superscript or in subscript do not display correctly in lemmy-ui. They do in Jerboa.
It's bad enough that third-party apps do these things (and others, like spoiler text) without following the spec consistently. But can they really be blamed when even the two main first-party UIs don't do it right? The post/comment language feature is awesome, as is the fact that you can do such a wide variety of syntax including subscript. But if users are not getting a consistent experience with these across platforms, it leads to confusion.
- Spoiler text syntax is clumsy. I like the idea of having collapsible text, but
::: spoiler [display text]is an insanely wordy way of doing it. In what other context is markdown do anything similar to requiring the literal textspoiler? It would be great if (a) an inline spoiler text syntax could be implemented, similar to>!Reddit's!<or||Discord's||, and (b) if a more elegant collapsible text syntax could be created. - Lemmy has a nasty habit of transforming user input. I just found out it converts your backslashes into forward slashes (see this comment), but a while ago I noticed that it completely removes text posted between angle brackets <like this text>, which is annoying when trying to write pseudo-XML. {does it allow braces?} [square brackets?]. It feels to me like a relatively lazy attempt to sanitise user inputs, and it creates a poor UX, especially since I'm sure prepared statements and other safe data handling is employed. In my opinion any time you're changing what a user wrote, that's an anti-pattern. If you can't just leave it how it is, it's better to just block posting with a clear error message explaining why
Basically, I'd just like to see an overall focus on the user experience and how it all fits together as a system.
Also my little pet feature: keyboard navigation. Back on that other site, before the redesign, there was incredible keyboard navigation thanks to the Enhancement Suite. j/k to navigate up/down through comments. Enter to collapse. a/z to up/downvote. Etc. It's a delight to use, and is a big part of the reason I could never move to the redesign, before I came over here. Not having that is a big drawback IMO.
edit: looks like the angle brackets thing was <fixed> . Still need the backslash thing fixed.
edit 2: I was just reminded of another example of the lemmy-ui vs Jerboa confusion, as well as another example of well-intentioned by ultimately anti-patternesque transformation of user text: how user and Community mentions are handled.
nutomic@lemmy.ml will not be a hyperlink for viewers in lemmy-ui, but /u/nutomic@lemmy.ml will be...despite the latter being generally not the preferred way to do it. lemmy-ui also does this awkward thing where if you use the autofill suggestions when typing a name, it wraps them in a hard-instanced URL instead of the better UX of taking someone to their profile on your instance: @dessalines@lemmy.ml.
Communities are even weirder. Allowing the autofill of announcements@lemmy.ml will create a hard-instanced URL ([!community@domain](https://domain/c/community)), but then the parser ignores this and creates a URL to the user's instance. If, instead, URLs went where the user's text input says they go, but the autofill would default to naked Community mentions such as announcements@lemmy.ml, this would be a much better experience.
Meanwhile, Jerboa doesn't have an autofill capability for users or Communities. Users who are mentioned with /u/ are not linked, while users who are linked with get a link that is handled within the user's instance, regardless of whether it's a hard-instanced link or a naked mention. Communities are also always handled within the user's instance.
All these are due to a lack of developers for open source in general. Jerboa needs more devs than just me and MV-GH, but no one else has stepped up to take on fixing any of these. If there were 5 more of me, I could get these done, but I'm too busy.
Regarding the markdown point for lemmy-ui, I think part of the issue is that we don't use a markdown parser tailored to our purposes. We use markdown-it, and our custom (non-common mark, so stuff like the spoiler blocks) stuff uses plugins for it like this one. One of these days I'd like to make a markdown parser specifically for Lemmy.
The plugin architecture for markdown makes a lot of sense, because it allows other projects to mix and match markdown rules for their specific use case. I also used some of your Rust markdown plugins for Ibis.
Have you ever tried https://github.com/vmavromatis/Lemmy-keyboard-navigation?
I had not. I had no idea that even existed, thanks!
Do they have a Lemmy community for feedback? It's super buggy right now unfortunately, with "a" taking me to the post on the poster's instance, instead of upvoting (or at least taking me to the post on my instance...), and with all keyboard shortcuts handling alternative keyboard layouts in what I would consider to be the wrong way (though this is possibly debatable/up to preference).
More advertising! Boycott Reddit.
Probably not at the top of anyone's list, and a little bit old, but do you have any thoughts about the following?:
If the Reddit mascot's name is "Snoo," then the Lemmy mascot's name is . . . ?
Its a Lemming!
Lemming:
Probably depends on the instance
Different instances have their own logo, but there is the official Lemmy logo:
#/media/File:Lemmy_logo.svg){kind=logo}
edit: looks like Lemmy doesn't like escaping URLs? It literally converted my backslashes into forward slashes... anyway, here's the URL of the image I tried to embed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)#/media/File:Lemmy_logo.svg
#/media/File:Lemmy_logo.svg){kind=link}
I use Reddit many years and don't know that the logo has a name.
Dunno if I’m too late, but here goes. My question is about federation between instances.
On PeerTube an instance follows another instance and then federates every channel and videos available.
On Lemmy, the user can follow a specific community and then that community will federate with the users instance.
How about being able to, either as the instance itself or a user, to follow an entire instance and have it federate everything?
An example. I have a user on Lemmy.wtf, but I am also very interested in the communities at Feddit.dk. I never know when new communities have been created on Feddit.dk, unless I go directly to Feddit.dk and look. If I could subscribe my instance to Feddit.dk, then all future communities would be visible to me automatically.
If something like that isn’t possible, then what about being able to browse other instance’s communities from my own instance?
Random general question, how do you feel about file hosting? When posting, I tend to avoid uploading media larger than like, 5MB, just cause I know that the cost of storing said media can get exorbitant very quickly and I wouldn't want to be part of the burden.. I'm not able to donate just yet. Knowing this, I am currently on the fence on whether I should create a "gaming clips" community.
That said, it's nice to be able to embed media from other sources (despite it potentially not working natively for mobile platforms if I'm not mistaken?), which got me thinking: it'd be nice to have some sort of preference list of image/video hosting hosts that users can add to or remove from, and uploading directly from the comment/create post view would use the first working file hosting domain from the list.. Just spitballing here.
The upload function is mainly meant for images, like others said its better to use external sites for video uploads. Integrating upload to those remote sites seems like a lot of work for little benefit though.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html#torrents
Torrents should be used, as it entirely solves the static data distribution problem, and keeps servers from having to shoulder potentially enormous hosting costs.
I've even added a lot of torrent-support related features to lemmy-ui and jerboa, that will come in 1.0
Great!
Shouldn't torrents be used for large files?
This is correct. Torrents should be used.
i'm clueless about torrents and Lemmy, can you embed them in posts/comments somehow? The closest thing I could think of is using a Framatube instance, but I don't think you can embed them
You can just use magnet links. I wrote a guide for how to use them here
Like here's a Joan Crawford movie I like: Sudden Fear 1952 . A super-beginner way, is to install stremio and click that link. Boom, you're now watching the movie.
I was hoping it could be embedded, but this is a nice-to-know, thanks!
You could find a peertube instance and upload links to peertube videos.
depends on instance they all set hard limits of their own lemmee is 5mb which is lowaf
Reddit has far more niche communities. There’s the saying that “there’s a subreddit for everything.”
What do you think the trajectory/timeline looks like for lemmy to develop a more robust array of niche communities (aka niche subreddits)?
I like Lemmy a lot, but when you share a URL it's just an ID number. Compare that to Reddit, where you can get a lot more information on what you're about to look at just from the URL alone.
https://lemmy.ml/post/27659153vs
https://old.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1jg3vlk/progress_report_linux_614/
Are there any plans to make Lemmy URLs more meaningful?
Another issue is that post links are instance-specific, since the post ID isn't the same across instances.
ex: https://lemmy.ml/post/27659153is https://lemmy.ca/post/41237641on Lemmy.ca
There are external tools like https://lemmyverse.link/and some browser addons to alleviate those issues, but it'd be nice if this could be addressed at the source if doable.
And I dream of a lemmy:\\ protocol handler one day.
It will be a feature for Lemmy 1.0: https://feddit.org/post/5390705
Until then https://lemmyverse.link/feddit.org/post/5390705;)
I even discovered there was a new one today because the creator wasn't aware of Lemmyverse link x)
Protocol handlers are the way to go IMO. I've opened an issue based on phiresky's comment.
Potentially, using some sort of predictable hashing to get the same id across instances might also help in the detection of duplicate links so that they can be aggregated in a single place (sort of what was suggested at point 2 here).
I fear this could be too much of a breaking change though.
We won't add UUIDs or any "universal" sort of identifier, but universal links are still possible without them.
Seems like a good time to introduce a breaking change, jumping from 0.19 to 1.0.
There's some discussion of this here. It's not something I care too much about, but anyone is free to add more detailed URLs to either lemmy-ui or other front-ends.
Its been years but no one has found it important enough to them to work on.
It will be a feature for Lemmy 1.0: https://feddit.org/post/5390705
How is it some can mod 15+ comms, like this awful character PugJesus , ban anyone for no reason and then comment stuff like this without consequence:
Be less of a dick.
Be less of a moron.
I am new to Lemmy, so haven’t really looked into if the following is possible but can I create groups of communities with a similar topic across multiple instances?
What's the vision for using lemmy? User should create an account on one server, and use all? Or should create users on multiple servers? The first one seems like the way to go, but it wasn't quite clear for me when I signed up
I'm not sure how we could make this more clear either on https://join-lemmy.org/, or the docs: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/index.html
User should create an account on one server
Mostly this. Some people might want a few accounts but those would be hardcore users.
one with alts if you need or want them because of instanve specific rules
How do we avoid defederation through leemy.world and lemmy.ml? What I mean is, there are instances for Canada, or FOSS, or any other inalienable trait. Most can communicate with eachother with exception of porn specific instances. When new people sign up, they look for popular instances and there are no restrictions on what you can join. So, larger instances like .world and .ml will have more foot traffic and more new signups. I think that's just an immediate path to recreate reddit and I think that needs to be recognised and seriously avoided, at all costs. The whole point is that this is not-for-profit, free of advertisements and already voyager as downloaded for android contains ads. Also, unless specifying only foss software during the building process of app on linux, ads are present there too. I would love to see some community driven livestreams or events, where we could fund the developers ourselves through donations. We're all refugess from reddit, but that doesn't mean we have to be "libre reddit." I think we could easily fund ourselves if we fostered more of a connected sense of community through events and conversations, turn this group of websites into something more than just friendly social media.
So, larger instances like .world and .ml will have more foot traffic and more new signups
Lemmy.ml is only 5th by monthly active users: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
voyager as downloaded for android contains ads.
That's Boost or Sync? Never seen an add on Voyager @aeharding@lemmy.world
Granted, but that doesn't answer the question at hand.
No, it is on voyager too. I built and installed it last night.
Maybe it's this bug? https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2701127
From that thread
To be clear, I will never add ads to Voyager.
Yeah, voyager does not have any ads or tracking or anything. It's truly privacy first. In fact the only "analytics" I get are from Apple App Store and Google Play Store download counts etc which I can't turn off. But if you use F-droid I have literally 0 usage information even crashes :)
Also Voyager has reproducible builds which means you don't have to trust me. You can verify that the APK was built from a specific release of the source code!
This is a serious problem, that we didn't anticipate during the first reddit migration wave. Since then, we added a join dialog to join-lemmy.org, and tried to make its join page sort by random, to spread out users more evenly.
Unfortunately, the people evangelizing lemmy on other platforms like reddit, continue to link specific popular servers, rather than join-lemmy.org or server pickers that sort by random. And people also tend to just link their own home server as a sign-up, instead of join-lemmy.org, so we'll likely continue to see centralization problems.
We're doing what we can to fight it, but other need to also.
I would love to see some community driven livestreams or events, where we could fund the developers ourselves through donations. We're all refugess from reddit, but that doesn't mean we have to be "libre reddit." I think we could easily fund ourselves if we fostered more of a connected sense of community through events and conversations, turn this group of websites into something more than just friendly social media.
nutomic recently added Donation dialogs, which adds support for wikipedia-style banners (which are annoying, but they work). I think most of lemmy's problems could be solved if we were able to add a few more full time devs. We currently don't even have a single dev funded.
Admits should defederate as they wish.
New users should be able to join a "default instance" that is federated with all instances so people can window shop for the instance they prefer.
That way they aren't intimidated by the many choices available right away.
New users should be able to join a “default instance” that is federated with all instances so people can window shop for the instance they prefer.
Almost by definition, any default instance is likely to get defederated by some other instances, if that default grows too large. Being default means it's more likely to attract more people of all sorts. And some of those won't get along with the federation policies of some stricter instances.
Do you plan to introduce some kind of post tags into Lemmy, preferably something that will behave like Hashtags on Mastodon and other activitypub platforms? I know that Lemmy has been embedding community name as a hashtag for a while now, though having tags that can be populated by users would help discovery greatly.
Do you have any plans to make it easier to manage the images stored in pictrs? One issue I have is that I used to proxy images, I no longer do that, but now I have like 300GB on backblaze doing nothing. In this post I outlined more precisely what I mean.
When will users be able to frictionlessly migrate between instances without losing their posts, their comments, their history, their relationships, their reputation etc? (Without requiring the consent of the exiting instance owner, or that this server still even exists, as they sometimes don't)
I'm just a user and don't follow the project super closely so please forgive me if this has already been addressed somewhere.
Is there any sort of JavaScript-less interface that would work properly on the Tor network with strict settings enabled? And could you set up instances only with a .onion domain? That way you don't have to pay for a domain and you're not at risk of having your domain yanked by ICANN, etc.
If I remember correctly, there was a mastodon instance that was using like a Pakistan domain or something like that and they yanked it.
Also, Federation between Onion and Standard Domains that way tor users would not be isolated.
My main reason for asking is that in my worldview, governments want to break encryption and break freedom of speech, if at all possible, and so the dark web is going to be more and more necessary as time goes on.
Edit: The more standard traffic we add onto the Tor network, the less able it is to be blocked or surveilled as to why somebody is using the Tor network. As an example, I send all of my signal traffic through Tor and download apps from fdroid through Tor and chat on SimpleX through Tor and quite a number of other things. Not because I need the Tor network, but just simply to be yet another person using it for standard activity
There is documentation for running a Lemmy instance over Tor, and one of the many frontends probably works without JS. If not someone could implement it with the API. Anyway there doesnt seem to be much interest in practice, because the clearnet works good enough for now.
I did open an issue on the thunder application asking them if they could implement SOCKS5 proxy support in order to do the tor proxy at like 127.0.0.1:9050
Okay, that shows how to make the interfaces available over the network. But is there planned functionality for making Federation work? Even if you don't federate to clearnet domains, you could have several onion instances that could federate with each other and have a network of onion instances.
Federation uses standard HTTP so it shouldnt require any specific support. If you want to send outgoing federation over Tor you can set a proxy via environment. Youre welcome to test these things and update the documentation with your results.
Oh, okay, good to know it should work. I'm just a standard user, but it is something that interests me.
Federation between Onion and Standard Domains that way tor users would not be isolated
This is the hardest part as you would need to be both have an onion and have a standard domain, or be a tor-only Federation.
You can easily create a server and allow tor users to use it, which unless a Lemmy server actively blocks tor, you'd be welcome to join via it. But federation from a clearnet to onion cannot happen. It's the same reason behind why email hasn't taken off in onionland. The only way email happens is when the providers actively re-map a cleanet domain to an onion domain.
This is what Lemmy would need to do. But then you would have people who could signup continuously over tor and reek havok on the fediverse with no real stopping them. You would then have onion users creating content that would be federated out to other instances. & User generated content from tor users also is ... Not portrayed in the best light.
I'm sure someone will eventually create an onion Lemmy instance, but it has it's own problems to deal with.
This is especially true for lack of moderation tools, automated processes, and spammers who already are getting through the cracks.
@ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io time to shine
How would you improve it?
a way to filter out posts that have no engagement or comments from others would be helpful since the larger instances flood my feed w hundreds/thousands of news links that flood out the discourse on lemmy.
More customization for site owners. I have an independent instance and there's a lot of things on there that are confusing for people unfamiliar with the fefiverse or lemmy. It would also be nice to remove the donation beg at the top. I know Lemmy needs funding, but it makes it look like I'm asking for donations.
- I have no idea how and which server I joined, is there any manial I can read better yet visually see how servers are connected that are federated? Thx. And when we search something does it search across all servers? Thanks.
When will anyone be able to click the following /c/books And see an agglomeration of all "books" communities on all federated server? I don't mean multireddits Thanks!!
Hello, would it be possible to include a button next to the up/down vote button, which marks a post as "read" and prevents it from being shown again? While scrolling I just sometimes see the same post again on the next day