1308
548

We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST

2y 10mon ago by lemmy.ml/u/dessalines in announcements@lemmy.ml

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

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

Original Announcement thread

I asked in the other thread about GDPR.

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

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

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

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

As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn't EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:

  1. Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
  2. If the former, delete all data of their data on the server, send it to them, and then (this was the important part) forward the data deletion request to every single partner we were working with.

For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between "we're thinking about it" and "we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we'll get to it sometime within the next month"), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.

As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that "no, it's anonymous" - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.

So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you're not doing that, you're not fully compliant.

Kind of shitty, but that's how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)

Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don't recall what the time was for a "see my data" request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.

There a different levels of personal data but a unique identifier for a user is one of them because it allows linking information together about a single person, and from there you can try to identify the real person. So an option would be to overwrite all the occurrences of this identifier with random data so you can't link data together anymore, as long as it's not also personal data.

Sure, but you'd still have to delete all their written posts - which is really what all this is about.

You actually would not. The content of the post can stay but the username/identifier has to be removed. Written text is not PII to my knowledge and every social platforms I've actively used only delete the identifier (Reddit, GitHub).

So, I wonder if Lemmy instances would be responsible for the instances that federate with them. It's my understanding that the Lemmy instance doesn't send the user's data to other instances, rather it is just posted, and the other instances copy it onto their local instance.

It's almost like those reddit services that would show deleted content. A user can delete their profile on Reddit, but Reddit isn't required (that I know of) to go to these services and make sure the user's data is being wiped out.

It's often too expensive to support GDPR for Europeans and disable it for other people. Most services just support GDPR for everyone.

Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?

That sounds like its something for instance admins to handle, nothing we as developers need to care about. Maybe we should add a privacy policy for lemmy.ml but thats it.

Yea it is ultimately on the admins, but Lemmy just needs to not make it hard to comply with GDPR. So it's up to admins to raise issues when Lemmy is seen as an obstacle to compliance, and it's up to devs to listen and implement compliance features.

Wouldn’t it be prudent to build features into Lemmy that make it easy for admins to manage user data though?

You don't have to bother with GDPR until you're a certain size company

That's what I thought too until I looked it up. It applies to individuals as well.

If an individual runs a web server and processes personal data of individuals within the European Union, then they are subject to the requirements of GDPR. GDPR applies to anyone, including individuals, who processes personal data of EU residents, regardless of whether they are operating as a business or on a personal basis. It's important for the individual running the web server to comply with GDPR's data protection principles and obligations to safeguard the personal data they process.

As someone not residing in the EU, I don't see how they could possibly enforce that. Best they could do is block my instance I suppose. Have they done that for any small site?

I mean, I would delete/provide all data of any user who requests me to do so for themselves. But I'm likely not following every facet of the GDPR.

They don't work like that, they have no technical capabilites. I think it would work more like a company being ordered to pay a fine if a user on your instance finds out that his data is not deleted if he asks.

But this is complicated so I hope someone else has good input on this topic. Someone must have run a website with registered users in Europe before without being a corporation.

The fediverse brings a new touch to all of this also, since the posts and comments are replicated across instances. Will that matter to the EU law? Maybe, maybe not.

What does "processing" data mean though?

Basically, anything that involves the data being present somewhere in information systems that you control. Taking decisions based on it, displaying it on a webpage, make decisions based on it, even just storing it, all counts as processing under GDPR.

Asking chat gpt, so take it with a bit of salt, but it's usually correct about these things.

In the context of data protection and GDPR, "processing" refers to any operation or set of operations performed on personal data. This includes collecting, recording, organizing, storing, adapting, altering, retrieving, using, disclosing, transmitting, and deleting personal data.

Processing can be done both manually and automatically. It covers a wide range of activities related to personal data, such as capturing information through web forms, analyzing data for marketing purposes, storing customer records in a database, or even just viewing or accessing personal data.

Under GDPR, any entity or individual involved in processing personal data is required to comply with the regulation's principles and obligations to protect the rights and privacy of the individuals whose data is being processed.

That's not true. You might be thinking about the German network enforcement act. Every little ecommerce website, even when it's a one-man operation, has to follow GDPR guidelines when they aim at people in the EU.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: news@startrek.website

Classic bot. Don't you know who you are talking to!

absolutely brilliant bot misfire 😂

Is this link supposed to work?

No, it's a fictional instance used to make a point.

I appreciate both the information and your username 🐦‍⬛

Are there any plans for a “multi-community” (pka multi-reddit) to allow users to combine multiple communities into one? This could give users a neat way to browse/participate in similar communities across instances without having to navigate to each one manually.

I agree that community structure should not change to handle duplicates. If anything, having a feature similar to hashtags or topics that can aggregate a stream of posts from multiple communities would be nice.

What do you mean by combining in this context? If they mutually agree to combine because they have aligned interests I don't see anything wrong with that. An external entity combining them I agree would lead to a bunch of problems.

I'd imagine it would be the same way it worked on Reddit when there were multiple communities with identical topics/similar names:

One gets a bit larger, therefore shows up in feeds more, appears higher in search results, etc.

Unless the other community has some kind of differentiation, it will wither and die.

And everything will be fine.

I keep seeing people being this up as if it's some huge problem. There's tons of /c/memes out there, but memes@lemmy.ml is clearly the place to go. It's not confusing, IMO.

For me it's a problem for the exact reason you describe here: I don't want centralization. If I did, I'd go to reddit. I do want each topic of discussion to be spread out amongst different instances and communities. But for that to be viable, you need a way to get all the content as easily as if it was all in one place.

Aside from any impracticality that could arise in implementation, I like the idea of federated communities between servers. I mean why not extend the possibilities of federation even further? Community mods or users could de/federate from communities on other servers with the same names or core themes should they so choose. In consideration of difficulties with moderating spam and other materials from other communities generated with the same name, I think it makes sense for that kind of community federation to be opt-in rather than opt-out.

If it goes the Reddit route, one of those communities will definitely border on dead and the risk for moderators/servers having too much power/influence within the larger communities continues.

Any plans for improving SEO? One of Reddit’s biggest strengths was being able to get very relevant results with a simple internet search. In time can you see something similar for Lemmy, even with its decentralized nature? I really you for doing this, thank you for your time!

Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there's anything else needs to be added, we're open to PRs.

Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn't be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I'd rather focus on improving lemmy's search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.

Would you please consider having only local post/community/users indexed by search engines? A lemmy.ml user complained that their username is first result on Google with lemmynsfw.com domain name. Also implementing this would decrease chance of duplicate content.

It can resolved with a simple noindex meta tag.

I'd be open to a PR for that, sure.

I hate Inferno (specifically class components) but I'll check what I can do 🙏

I do too now (I created lemmy-ui when react was king), which is why the new UI will be written in leptos, using signal-based reactivity, and functional components.

edit: This start bit is wrong; Lemmy does SSR so Javascript-free/spiders should see at least some comments.

Lemmy is currently pretty terrible at SEO, in large part because the comments don't load until the JS has run.

This isn't just a problem for search engines, it affect things like archive.org and offline reading. Earlier today I loaded a page from an instance that had dropped offline - while they had Cloudflare Always Online enabled, the page loaded without comments so it was almost useless.

I think it's a mistake to consider all the SEO-related concerns as irrelevant just because you don't care about Google, etc. Most of the things necessary for good SEO are just good practices, with benefits for all users, especially in the areas of accessibility and third-party tools.

Lemmy-ui uses isomorphic rendering so comments do come loaded (just not all of them) on the first page you visit, no javascript needed. Did you mean it should serve all comments?

Hmm, I've just tested an that does seem to be the case, at least as far back as 0.17.4. Do you know when this was added? Or if it's something that can be disabled?

Looking into Cloudflare Always Online, it uses the Internet Archive's backup instead of keeping on itself which could explain me seeing zero comments (i.e. IA scraped the page after posting but before any comments). I can't figure out which page in my history was the post in question, so I can't be sure.

Sadly I dont know when it was added or if it can be turned off, Im not very familiar with it.

Seconding this. In addition to the accessibility, etc benefits, just think about the sheer amount of traffic/users that came from people googling a completely unrelated topic and having reddit pop up. Those are users that might not have otherwise found the platform.

and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for,

This is one of the most true statements I've read in the past years. Internet search is unusable.

It's also all about to change as soon as Google drops the new generative search feature.

Fair enough. I'm currently focused on creating my own Lemmy web UI, but later I might have room to submit some SEO-related PRs. While I'm not yet sure what needs to be done, instance owners can get tailored recommendations from Google. I have a hunch that Lemmy is currently being penalized for duplicate content, which we might be able to mitigate by adding `` to federated posts.

I'm fully with you on not wanting to cater to Google. On the other hand, if someone writes a helpful Lemmy post, I would like people who don't know Lemmy to be able to find it.

I second this. I know SEO is a controversial term with Lemmy's core audience, but being able to find posts through a search engine is pretty darn helpful. It'll also help more people find their way to Lemmy, which will diversify the range of communities.

If you're not sure where to start, Google's free Search Console can give you insight into how your site ranks, how people are finding you and which factors are preventing instances from appearing in search.

To a certain extent lemmy is inherently at a disadvantage because of how Google ranks things. Google gives a lot of weight to site trust which works on a per host basis, and lemmy is distributed meaning the trust of the system as a whole is diluted across instances. It's a really stupid system that just helps big sites get bigger. It's made even worse because big blog sites are actually only owned by a small handful of companies and since single companies own many properties that can collude between them to funnel their page ranks between their network of sites.

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

I'm personally a hard copyleft developer, so I'd prefer that people making apps and tools for the lemmy eco-system, open source them, to benefit the community as a whole. Nearly all lemmy projects have adopted that standard, and are using the GPL and other hard copy-left licenses, and sharing their code freely with the community.

One example: various devs of lemmy apps have asked me how we build comment trees. Because lemmy's source code is open, I was able to share the exact code from lemmy-ui (typescript) and jerboa (kotlin). This is not something closed source developers are able / willing to share.

So I continue to recommend that developers heed calls to open source their applications. I developed my ThumbKey android keyboard, specifically because my requests to the MessageEase developers to open-source their codebase, after development had stopped, went unheeded for years.

Side note, but I've seen a lot of the discourse around Sync confuse FOSS, with making money. Of course developers deserve to get paid for their labor time! The thing is, FOSS makes no demands on how you monetize your software: "free as in freedom, not free as in beer", is the saying. So its entirely possible to open source your app, and still charge for it if you like. And If someone wants your app for free (say via an unlocked APK), they'll get it, whether its closed source, or not.

And yes, if an instance decided to insert ads, or becomes full of blog/cryptospam, I'd def recommend other instances defederate from them. I'd rather not lemmy become the ad-machine that other social media has become.

I definitely didnt expect it, nor did I expect that there would suddenly be more than a dozen different apps. But its not a problem, the more choices users have the better. Those who like such clients can use them, thout it affecting anyone else. Plus monetization of apps could potentially help to fund development of Lemmy itself.

For instances with ads its pretty much the same, more choice for users. But I really doubt that model can have any success considering how many free instances are around which are run by volunteers. Defederation should be unnecessary assuming that ads are only shown to local users.

Hope multiples are ok ...

  1. As platform developers, do you have any thoughts about ActivityPub? Positive/negative critiques, needed developments (in your opinions), usage gripes or tips for other platform devs, future predictions?
  2. As devs of (now) the second largest platform next to mastodon (by some metrics), which are probably as distinct platforms can be in terms of format, do you have any views on interoperability between platfroms over ActivityPub, where a common critique (AFAIK), from *diaspora devs for example, is that sharing posts/information of different formats just doesn't work well over AtivityPub and so is one of its major flaws?
  3. Arguably the fediverse has so far sought to replicate the corporate big-social platforms ... should new design evolution occur now and if so how?
  4. Much has been made by some of how the lack of user-friendliness of the fediverse really isn't anything to celebrate and should be taken more seriously by users and devs alike (see, eg, Erin Kissane who focuses on mastodon). However much this applies to lemmy (where issues of user mobility probably do apply), do you think the fediverse needs a better story around catering to user needs?
  5. Do you have any thoughts on the server-based architecture of the fediverse (where all user accounts are bound to a particular user) and whether alternative architectures have a future or could be better (p2p, more single-user based for instance)?
  6. Should lemmy and the fediverse seek to grow with any and all users or seek to stay relatively small and limited to ensure a healthy cutlure?
  7. Journalism and journalists ... should they be on the fediverse (like the BBC recently with their own mastodon instance) ... and if so, how?
  8. What are the biggest or proudest moments you've had with Lemmy so far, and the worst or most embarrassing?
  9. How does it feel to have so many users using and developing against your software?!

Haha youre a very curious one :D

  1. See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2348893
  2. It sure isnt perfect, partly because Mastodon makes no efforts to be compatible and expects everyone else to cater to their way of doing things. Regardless, the fact that you can interact between different platforms is a huge improvement over current social media platforms. And Im certain that interoperability will only get better over time.
  3. Its already happening, look at Kbin combining the concepts of Reddit and Twitter into one. Or mitra which adds cryptocurrency integrations. There are probably others which Im unaware of.
  4. Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements.
  5. Its really genius because it combines the best aspect of centralized (simple login with username/password and an admin who manages technical stuff) with those of p2p (no central point of failure). Real p2p is great in theory, but it requires way too much technical knowledge for the average user, so its unlikely to ever gain mass appeal.
  6. Personally I think the Fediverse is really the future of social media, so it will grow whether we want it or not. And its much healthier than the corporate platforms with their tracking, advertising and manipulating algorithms, so the more people leave them behind, the better. I dont see a way to influence this growth, we just need to adapt and deal with it.
  7. Basically my previous reply, I dont know enough about journalism to give a more specific answer.
  8. The biggest and proudest was definitely when tens of thousands of Reddit users suddenly came here, and most of them actually liked it. Cant say there was anything bad or embarrassing, the experience for me is really positive.
  9. It feels great, I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.
  1. ... I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.

Honestly heart warming to hear!

Any plans to improve the sorting algorithm so that there's a good balance of fresh posts at the top that's also fairly active? And to help promote smaller communities that would have otherwise been dominated by the posts from bigger instances.

Any concerns about duplicate communities across multiple instances? People have made the argument that it's like having different flavors of subreddits on Reddit, but it's a flawed analogy. Individual instances have incentive to make their own communities flourish, whether or not there's a duplicate already available.

Its been bothering me too, that the large communities have been swamping out smaller ones.

As one solution, the closed PR linked in this issue has some more context, but we plan to add a Best sort, that retains the qualities of hot, but gives a boost for small communities over larger ones. This shouldn't be too difficult to add, as its very similar to hot.

Another benefit of lemmy being FOSS, is that we have the option to add many more sorts as time goes on.

Any concerns about duplicate communities across multiple instances?

See here.

We'll have that fixed in the next release.

I'm very interested in this feature. It has been of of my biggest complaints about Lemmy. My feed is almost entirely memes and cat pictures, which I love seeing, but I'm also subscribed to a hockey community, and I will only see those posts if I scroll past dozens of adorable cats.

At least in the meantime, before we add that, you can block the memes community. I've done that and my feed is a lot better.

What I have actually done is, since I have my own instance for just me, I created another account which subscribed to the communities that drown out the others, but then unsubscribe from them on my main account. That way they still get federated to my instance, because I want to see them sometimes. Then when I want to see those communities, I view All. And when I don't want to see them, I view subscribed.

It's kind of silly, but it's perfectly fine as a temporary solution.

I've done similar - I have three accounts on three instances and they each have different focuses. This account is meme/shit posting (since Lemmy.ml has access to all of it) and my accounts on smaller instances have the noisy communities blocked so I can see my interests.

So far I like the idea of having potential duplicates. I think it's unlikely that a community would stay split across several instances for long, people tend to gather up.

So if I have a successful community, someone on another instance should get to ride on my work and flourish by setting up a community with the same name? This makes no sense.

Isn't that one of the side effects of having a federated universe? I don't feel it's so much riding your work as it is combining conversations within a single deduped community.

Also, if nothing is done about it, wouldn't we keep having issues like this: https://lemmy.ca/post/2821804

As some instances grow, server costs are becoming significant. Right now, servers are only funded through donations. Do you see the development of anything else to help fund server costs?

If lemmy is working as intended (many small, connected servers), hosting costs should be small: like < $10 USD / month. (images are another issue, but I'll answer that in other comments).

Of course we don't plan on adding any monetization directly into lemmy or its UI, including ads, or required payments. Right now at least the best way is to put donation links in your site sidebar.

I'm on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month, which is above your costs.

Beehaw reports costs at over $500 USD/month.

I would imagine lemmy.world is in the thousands.

I know the idea is that there should be more instances, but we are already beginning to see server costs that are higher than what you think. User numbers seem to be settling down now, but who knows when the next spike will happen.

It depends where and how you are hosting. Hetzner or OVH have small VPS which can host hundreds of active users for those 10 usd. Of course if you host on AWS or Digitalocean its much more expensive. lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server. Hosting costs will also go down as the code gets more optimized.

Yep. As ppl have mentioned, while our performance bottleneck is currently the unoptimized postgres operations, we haven't even come close reaching postgres's actual internal limits. So code and DB optimization will be the biggest factor reducing costs.

I'm on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month

If I really wanted to shoestring it, I could definitely get it lower. But I did want some headroom to grow, and to operate semi-professionally. With the recent upgrades we should be good for a while.

(Also if anyone wants to jump to a small instance, thelemmy.club has some room :)

I run an instance on a spare computer that I had lying in my house. If I had to guess, I would say running my instance probably costs less than a dollar per month.

What kind of internet connection do you have?

I have a 1 Gbps up and down fiber connection.

Sorry for stupid questions and doubts 😭 but you said you don't plan to add any plan, monetization or ads. SO never ever right? I'm willing to donate a hell lot to support the lemmy. So it'll always remain like this innocent, inherently open source and always have the same "our"/ "people's" internet, and never like a platform that is above us like it feels when using Twitter or reddit? (I said stupid question cus idk if having activitypub adopted and being decentralized makes lemmy and other platforms inherently "people's" open-source and free internet?

We will never have ads or in-app monetization or crypto scams, no. We'll always be 100% funded by donations and open source grants.

First of all, I'd like to say thank you and that I appreciate your work. Lemmy is great and I've found a new home (at least for the foreseeable future). I first joined lemmy.ml once I learned about lemmy, and I have to say I had a good experience there. You guys even responded directly to my noob questions, and I honestly felt welcome which helped me decide to stay.

My questions are about account migration. As you may have already seen, I'm not with lemmy.ml anymore. The reason is I saw you guys stickied a post encouraging users to use different instances (since the server was having trouble with the influx of redditors at that time). I figured I'd help by first moving to a smaller instance. I have no regrets, although switching was a bit tricky since I had to start from scratch.

What are your thoughts on account migration? Is it in the works or is it something that's a little far into the future? No pressure since I know you guys are busy with other stuff.

I asked this in the original thread but I’ll repeat it here:

  1. Are there any limitations with the ActivityPub protocol you find limiting? Do you have recommendations for future versions of the protocol?

  2. Do you have any thoughts on the AT Protocol (a potential competitor to AP)?

Limitations no, if anything the protocol is too extensive and lets you do too many things (or do the same thing in different ways). But thats somewhat expected for a protocol which can handle all types of social media platforms. I think the protocol is fine as is, but it needs minor changes here and there to keep up with how it is being used in the real world. The FEP process is doing a good job of that.

From what I know the AT protocol used by Bluesky is entirely centralized, so it doesnt look like a competitor yet. They claim that it will be decentralized in the future, but I will believe it when I see it. For now the decentralization seems more like a marketing gimmick.

I’ve been following BlueSky closely for a while and I’ll just add a few points here:

  1. There is currently a federation sandbox for developers, it’s definitely on the way but it is a significantly different model than AP. Severs are really “dumb” and it has an emphasis on using a handful of services to crawl the network and generate a pipeline of all posts.

  2. Moderation and custom algorithms are also a part of the decentralized model. Custom algorithms are out now, and custom moderation services are also under development.

Having played with both AP and ATP a fair amount they definitely both have strengths and weaknesses, very different approaches to decentralized social networking.

I'm not asking anything because I'm a potato when it comes to software. I just wanted to drop by and say: thank you both for Lemmy. The platform is amazing, and it's clear that you guys are pouring some heavy love (and labour hours) in it, as it's improving at an amazing pace.

With so many growing instances, were finding a lot of duplicate communities within each one, wich results in a lot of duplicate posts by cross posters.

Do you think it will be possible to aggregate similar communities together in some way?

I agree with this, but I find it amusingly ironic that questions on the issue itself are also many lol

See here

Since you're very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?

Thanks for your work, it's projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive.

Are there any plans to make an upvote history log available for users to view? I loved looking back over my upvoted content occasionally, but now I have to specifically save them to be able to keep track of them.

Yes theres an open pull request for this.

🥳

Thanks for both of your work on Lemmy, join-lemmy, lemmy-ui and Jerboa.

  1. Can you tell us about any upcoming major features/issue resolutions in development currently, if there are any?
  2. Will Lemmy have any form of cross-instance community/post grouping, similar to multi-reddits, hashtags, "alliances" or categories? Although some Lemmy apps have implemented something along those lines, it could be more fully-implemented in the official backend/frontend. I've been thinking Lemmy has desparately needed it to help solve some of the fragmentation problems across instances. It would also help avoid one instance necessarily having all the content, ballooning in both running costs and control.
  1. The best way is to look at the open PRs on each repo, to see the things that are being worked on / fixed.
  2. We have an open issue for community collections, but its not being worked on currently. We have cross_posts come back through the GetPost endpoint, to see where else specific posts have been posted to.

The fragmentation issues I've addressed here.

Alright thanks for the answers! I've looked through them, and maybe I was looking for more of what you thought personally of what major features you had in mind. Rather, it sounds like (but don't let me put words in your month) you're more focused on just keeping the overall work together and stable. I can respect that.

As far as some longer-term goals, I posted this elsewhere, but some are:

  • Performance improvements (DB, federation code)
  • Creating a better onboarding site (joinlemmy)
  • Stabilizing the API
  • Becoming fully funded by donations, and growing our dev co-op.
  • Lots of code maintenance
  • Notifications (Unified push)
  • Better sorting to push content from smaller communities (a best sort)
  • A better web UI written in rust (lemmy-ui-leptos)

Hi! This isn't really a question, but I was a former admin on Lemmy.ml and I just want to say that I really appreciated the opportunity to be on your team and it was a really valuable experience for me! I'm no longer an admin due to inactivity and personal life events causing me to no longer have the time to serve such a role, but I enjoyed the time I was and I really hope I was able to make a positive contribution to the instance!

Thank you for your continued work developing this project and running your instance comrades! This is still by far my favourite fediverse platform, actually, favourite social media in general. I intend to continue using both Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad and I hope I can continue to contribute by using Lemmy when I have the chance!

I'm gonna ask some tough questions, but I am hopeful to get a response. Thank you for all that you do.

  1. Do you envision NSFW content having a place in the federation safely? And if so, would lemmy.ml ever refederate with NSFW instances? What would it take for that to happen?
  2. How do you feel about lemmy.world being the proto "default" lemmy instance right now, especially on Sync app. Some have expressed concern about it causing centralization on the platform, others are hoping that people will spread out.
  3. Do you anticipate making a distinction between NSFW and pornographic content at all? And taking that a step further potentially, is implementing activitypubs content warnings on the road map?

Have you considered a feature like “sibling community”?

What I mean is, for example, car community on server 1 marks itself as a sibling community to a car community on server 2. Similarly server 2 marks itself as a sibling community to server 1, ie it is two-way.

When communities have been linked bi-directionally, any post and comment are shared between the two sibling communities.

This would allow bigger communities to form out of smaller communities, thereby preventing discussions from being fragmented and showing the true size of Lemmy, across servers.

Do you think 'normies' (people with very very little technical knowledge/experience) will be able to come to a decentralized platform like lemmy? Can a platform be successful long term (especially in niche areas) without that super huge low effort part of the user base?

I’m an over-50 white Southern lady with no tech skills and I’m loving it. The apps help, and I’m sure I’m missing out on something, but it honestly isn’t that hard to figure out in a general sense.

Great response. Love to see that it is not just us nerds on here!

@VantaWhite @JohnDClay how did you start using Lemmy? Did someone introduced you to? How could you pick the instance where to register?

In my case, like so many others, I’m a Reddit refugee. I was mostly a lurker over there, but I spent enough time to know things were going all the wrong ways. They had some good explanations of what Lemmy was and how to use it, and that’s how I got here. Others have pointed out that us old folks were used to Usenet and other similar things so maybe this isn’t all that alien. Also, fuck spez.

@VantaWhite so basically lemmy.world was the default instance for the app you registered your account on?

It was actually the other way around - several of the posts on Reddit about where to go next explicitly mentioned lemmy.world, so I started there. I wandered around for a bit and then looked for apps that offered something similar to the Apollo experience. There are a lot more out there now but Memmy works for me, so that’s where I am.

One of the things up next on my agenda, is to re-do join-lemmy.org . We have the mockup for it done, I just need to complete it.

Also as someone who grew up before the "use this single US-based site to connect to everything", I don't see how lemmy is too different from older forums. You go to a site, click the signup button, and wait for approval / log in immediately. You don't need to know anything about activitypub, federation, or the fediverse to sign up and start using a lemmy site.

I think an already established player like Sync or Boost should provide an experience that hand holds newcomers, by leaving little to guess work.

For me its already a huge success that Lemmy got where it is today, with over 50k users. If you had told me that a few months ago, I hardly would have believed it. When I started working on Lemmy, there were a couple dozen active users at most, yet the project didnt die. Instead it kept growing and growing steadily. So I think it will keep growing, and there will be more improvements which make Lemmy more accessible for normal users.

Sync makes it as simple as any mainsfream social media

I haven't tried sync yet, how does new account creation work through their app?

This comment states that they default to lemmy.world. I don't think it should be handled that way.

Which is terrible, it centralizes Lemmy in lemmy.world, they're already facing performance issues because of this.

So this is an ad. An ad for a platform with ads.

@HR_Pufnstuf @OtakuAltair can you give some more context?

Sync is a client app designed to make money either buy being purchased (cool) or by monetizing Lemmy’s content with their own ads. This person is promoting it, hence it is an ad.

  1. For sure! I'm just glad we can provide an alternative that some people enjoy and get some use out of, and to not feel like they're just adding to a company's market cap. Development has certainly picked up with this massive migration, and people have helped us find and fix so many security and performance issues that just two people would never have found before.
  2. The current official UIs (lemmy-ui and somewhat jerboa), have had a ton of developer contributions, and more people added as direct contributors besides me, and they've made those apps better than I ever could. So while I never want to be completely hands-off from those, its wonderful to have the help.
  3. A few I can think of: I hope that performance issues stabilize, that we can create a better onboarding site / improve join-lemmy.org , do lots of code maintenance, become financially stable and grow our little developer co-op into more than just us two, learn how to scale handling issues better, that we can add notifications / unified push, better sorting, and move the web-ui over to a more stable app in rust / leptos : lemmy-ui-leptos
  4. Currently, performance and security, so that we can focus on the above.

Thanks!

Maybe I'm completely misremembering things, but at some point wasn't there a hotfix to Lemmy that hard-limited how many comments a thread could have? Does anyone know if there's a maximum and if so how many?

Just wondering, cause uh, I could see this one having a lot of comments.

The fix you are referring to only limits how many comments can be retrieved in a single API call (300). This limit is only used when specific parameters are passed, not in all cases.

Tree-paging is a pretty complicated issue, and we really do need some DB / SQL experts to help us with figuring out how to page them correctly. The limit is 300, but only for the top-level comment fetch, which could also have different slices whether you sort by top, or new, and doesn't apply to the nested comments, which could have thousands.

The limit is a kludge, because ppl were creating thousands of comments, and without proper paging, it was affecting performance.

Is there a reason we don't have users ability to block entire instances, or is it difficult to code? (I don't mean to sound ungrateful)

Firstly, I just have appreciation for you and nutomic for this amazing platform that you've created. This has become my favorite source of reading discussions and looking at memes. I know it's small, but I love it and want it to succeed. My question is Do you see Lemmy or any other federated platforms reaching the level of audiences that other big Social Media Platforms currently have? Do you want it to grow big like them, or remain as it is, An amazing platform hidden in one corner of the Web?

I don't know that we'll ever replace big tech, but none of us can see the future. These giants will likely have a slow decline, whilst open-source and federated services will grow at their expense. But of course in the long term I do want the fediverse to replace the US tech giants, who treat us and our data as commodities to be bought and sold.

Any case where we can draw users away from that exploitation, is a victory.

Yeah, I'm with you, Open source forever over the Monopoly of Few Corporations on the Web. Thanks for the reply, Lemmy Creator.

For me Lemmy is already extremely huge now. For a long time it was possible to keep up with all new comments in less than half an hour per day of browsing. So I wouldnt mind if it stays small, but anyway its not my choice. On the other hand its also great to see the project finally grow after we put so much work into it. And getting more users is actually necessary in order to get more donations so that we can make a living.

Yeah, the work that you guys have put into this platform deserves to be acknowledged and appreciated. Personally, I love it, and thank you both for doing the brilliant work. I'm been here only a month, and even I've seen it grow. All the new apps, and few of Reddit's apps transferring to Fediverse, and the new communities popping up. I'm optimistic about Lemmy, and Fediverse. Thanks for the reply.

Monday. It's on Monday.

They posted the thread now so you can start filling it with questions before the devs get here.

I'm confused, it's on Monday, How? In my Time Zone, it's 4 hours to Monday, So, they'll start answering then? Edited: Also, I love your Username.

15:00 CEST. That's the time they'll start answering questions, i think. It's already Monday where I am lol.

How do you plan on improving the onboarding/sign-up process for newcomers, especially when they have little to no understanding about the Fediverse?

Is it hard? Didn't seem hard.

“Join a server” was enough to kill all interest for plenty of Twitter users looking at Mastodon.

So instead of "Join a server", maybe something like, "Pick your Home. While the Lemmy is connected by this thing we like to call The Fediverse, choosing a Home for your account is like choosing who you want to share a dorm with. You aren't necessarily alike, but can see yourself living with and around these people. And because of this Fediverse, you can still visit all the other dorms, friends houses, and even a back alley or two."

In all honesty, any sort of picking or choosing will turn off casual users. Ideally there'd be a button that automatically redirects you to the sign-up page of a random smaller trusted instance.

@HKayn @HR_Pufnstuf A wizard that gives you a random choice based on your interests could be an interesting tool from a UX perspective. Questions to refine down the options could be based on language, specialized vs generalist, categories within specialized, number of users (S, M, L) age of the instance

I'd be fine with that, if we can have some sort of HA ranking for the servers out there. To be on the list of random servers they should be able to maintain decent uptime and combat threats and DDOS swiftly. Oh, and be on a non-free and stable DNS domain... that .ml fiasco sucked. Not the server admins fault, but it did suck. Last thing we want are newcomers having their instance disappear. That was my experience... got nestled into my first lemmy home for it to fall to the great .ml purge of 2023. I lamented a week, hoping for it's return... Finally giving up and joining lemmy.world. And while it's nice, it seems to get taken down by attacks a LOT. :(

For me it, wasn't too hard since by various metrics I am what'd you call a "power user", but for those who aren't, it could take a while to get their head around the Fediverse.

What was your first reaction to the massive exodus from Reddit during the blackout? Was it something you were expecting?

What are your opinions on third party apps for Lemmy using ads on their free version?

First off, thank you for this awesome platform and for being my first real experience with contributing to FOSS, I learned quite a bit and I had a lot of of fun! I really hope Rust ends up becoming the new standard in web backends instead of Java with Spring/Springboot.

The only question I have that hasn't already been asked is about the legal side of things:

What are you responsible for as the developers of Lemmy, and what are you responsible for as the owners of a Lemmy instance?

Do you have to take certain measures to keep the platform clean from illegal activities and CP/gore? If so, what has been done?

The same question applies to GDPR rules for Europe.

Thanks for doing this :D

  1. What is the best Linux distribution?
  2. Favorite instance outside of lemmy.ml?
  3. Best and worst Lemmy client?

what new feature would Lemmy have in the 1.0.0? I know it's quite a long way to go, but what is the vision you guys have moving toward it?

Edit: bonus question: what does Chat supposed to do?

1.0 is not about features, but stability. It means there wont be any breaking changes to the api or federation for a while, until 2.0. In fact we were thinking to make some breaking changes and then release 1.0 later this year. But then the Reddit migration happened and those plans had to be scrapped.

Chat simply orders the comments in a different way, newest first without any nesting.

Do you aim for Lemmy to become GDPR-compatible in the future ( see https://gdpr-info.eu/for details)?

  1. What's your favorite dinosaur?

  2. The way lemmy instances are organized reminds me of IRC. Was that any part of the inspiration?

  1. Stegosaurus looks really badass
  2. No, I only found out later on Lemmy that it is apparently similar (though I still dont know any details)
  1. Brachiosaurus
  2. Not for me either.

Curious about how irc and lemmy are similar could you add examples?

Why are Lemmy devs so adamantly opposed to a Follow User feature?

This is the one feature that is the biggest hurdle for full federation between Lemmy and all the other fediverse instances. Mastodon (and its forks), Peertube, Pixelfed, and kbin all allow this and federate extremely well together while Lemmy is the worst at federating because its the only one to exclude this feature.

(Please don’t reply with “use kbin if you want to follow users” again as its very dismissive and frustrating)

Here’s my crude write up on a somewhat hacky way this can be implemented as is:

spoiler

When creating an account the backend can automatically create a community thats the same as your username. make you the mod, and enable mod only posts to the community by default. On the update to the new version with the Follow User Feature a script can run to auto create communities with the names of users.

The script can also change any usernames that exist with the same name as a current community and add a U at the end of the user (an extremely small amount of users would be affected and usernames aren’t as important as preserving community names/urls)

Then we just need to follow the community of the same name as the user to follow them. The way mastodon already federates with Lemmy currently would allow you to recurve updates whenever the user posts to their own community since only they (and assigned mods) can post to their community.

One of the major complaints on Reddit was the mod governance structure, with rank dependent on who showed up first. On the roadmap, do you see implementing other ways to govern mods, maybe something like how a lot of video game guilds govern themselves?

As a communist, I'm also receptive to a more democratic and less-hierarchical style of moderation. A LOT of reddit communities have been wrecked by an absent top moderator, who suddenly and suspiciously "becomes active" and removes the moderators who have been keeping the sub going for years.

We've had several people make proposals on github, but my issue has always been this: these are mostly untested, and potentially insecure. In the online space without any sort of real-person verification, If some kind of voting on mod actions were implemented, people could just create fake accounts to game the system, or find other ways.

AFAIK there hasn't been any forum or community software that doesn't implement the top-down chain of trust model. And of course this is less of concern with decentralized software like lemmy, where people always have the option to host their own instance, or create their own community, and moderate it exactly as they see fit. That's not an option you have with reddit.

Part of what you would need to create is a qualified voter system.

For a meme sub, maybe the qualified voters are known participants in the community over a period of time.

For a more technical sub like what AskHistorians is on Reddit, voters are those qualified to answer questions.

It doesn't have to be open to everyone, just the interested.

And you keep coming back to the federation model as a way to keep this in check, but it is still a dictatorial model and the only answer to dealing with a bad head mod is to destroy a community and lose the history of that community.

"qualified voter system" sounds all too much like karma that's readily gamed with repost bots creating a worse experience for everyone.

Mods can alter who becomes qualified.

But lets face it, there are already a ton of reposters here already.

I'd be surprised if users routinely recognised one another, but perhaps I've just not participated much in the past.

Interestingl, linked elsewhere in this thread, there is a middle ground between global karma and existing mod opinion: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2377401

Effectively rather than considering the total upvotes/down votes you could consider only the votes cast by already trusted members. Although it may be a little too close to MeowMeowBeenz

Yeah. I would pick karma within the community as a rough basis. Even then, I would keep the karma limit low to prevent a MeowMeowBeenz issue. It just shows that you're a participating member of the community.

Could you expand on how video game guilds are governed for those of us unfamiliar?

You have different levels with guild defined titles and privileges. Some privileges are effectively mod abilities, but others are more enhanced user abilities.

The idea is that a sub could assign mod ranks in a more transparent manner while providing means to kick out non-performing mods easier.

You could also have a selected user base be able to vote on policy so that mods have a better understanding what the user base wants.

It isn't a perfect system, but better than the first system we have.

Any plans to make it easier to interact with links to other instances?

The QoL value to automatically open links to other instances inside my current instance would be enormous.

Thank you a lot for building such an awesome platform! Here are my questions:

How did you get into communism? Were there any events that had an influence on you becoming communists and what personally motivates you to keep working on lemmy even though you could earn much more as developers working on proprietary software?

So, is the official term for AMAs on Lemmy "Ask Us Anything" (AUA)? Or shall we call it "Lemmy Ask U"?

Why did you choose Rust for the backend and Inferno for the frontend?

P.S. Thank you for your work!

How much experience did you have with Rust when you started making Lemmy? What programming languages did you use before?

Why isn't there a feature to allow individuals to block whole instances?

Who are you guys if you don't mind me asking. What's your background?

Do you have any strong opinions on Richard Stallman? Is it good that he's back at the FSF?

Will an AMA comment sort type be added? Would be convenient to scroll by new replies from OP so we can easily keep up with AMAs

Something that trips me up a bit about federation and instances is the overlap of identical communities from different instances.

So for example, I'm an atheist, but it's be years since that was a part of my identity that moved me to care about atheist memes or patting myself on the back for not being religious, which (sorry guys), is what I feel like happens in those communities. So I get them out of my feed by blocking them the way I block plenty of other communities I'm not interested in. In Apollo I was spoiled by the 'hide subreddit' feature that I don't believe existed in Reddit itself, but which was crucial to my enjoyment of that particular app. But since there are multiple instances hosting a version of any given community, I must've blocked at least three 'atheist' and two or three 'atheistmemes' communities, which look the same to me, but are hosted on different instances.

Is my All feed destined to continue having different instance versions of all the topics I don't want to see, no matter how many times I block them, as long as there are more and more instances hosting those communities? I don't want to sound unimpressed by this new technology or ungrateful for the amazing service you all are building, but this feels like either a pretty big flaw in the federated user experience or a pretty big gap in my knowledge of how to work the platform. I'm entirely receptive to the idea I may just be doing something wrong.

Just curious. Thank you for everything you do.

No thats just how it is, and I dont think there is a general solution. Maybe sharing blocklists with other users, but that might create even worse problems. Hopefully the users of such similar communities will over time move to the largest one so its all in one place.

Thanks!

As for fragmentation, see here.

Subscribe to more communities and only look at all when your Subscribed moves too slowly.

I have heard some respectable communities, namely r/AskHistorians, express hesitance at coming to Lemmy in part over fears of appearing biased due to the overt political stance of Lemmy's creators. In other words, it's hard to be a neutral body in affiliation with anything that has an overt political stance.

I wonder what the devs of Lemmy think of this hesitance. Is it unreasonable and itself biased? Or do you see any potential for finding a way to facilitate a platform that would allow for a more neutral space?

Why are Lemmy devs so opposed to a Follow Thread feature? (The feature request is always immediately closed on github with the message: not planned)

Users being able to opt in to receive updates whenever a thread receives an edit to the post, a new comment, or a reply to a comment thread would be extremely useful.

Will lemmy users be able to interact with Mastodon users in future and is there a roadmap for lemmy?

Sorry, no question, only: Thank you for your hard work :)

Could you please create a middle ground between the nuclear option (banning sites) and the whack a mole option of banning users. It would be effective to be able to ban communities (at least temporarily) during bot spam attacks while you wait for admins to police up their site. Could there also be a way for admins to notify other admins that their site is spamming garbage so that admins know that their board is the cause of a problem and what that problem is?

Now that right there is a very good idea. Thank you. Going to be a busy day for you guys.

Any thoughts on overhauling cross-posting, to allow more interaction with the source interaction?

As far as I'm aware: currently when you cross-post, only the recipient instance gets all interactions (comments, upvotes), instead of duplicating to or having the origin solely receive those.

The current implementation hampers the growth of smaller instances when reposting something to a bigger one. Discoverability is still there due to seeing from which instance the post originates from, but that's arguably not enough.

Why Unicode usernames aren't supported yet? After all, a big part of the world's population don't use the Latin alphabet in their native languages.

will uploading audio files become a thing? as a musician i need it

Any regrets during your time working on Lemmy? Like implementing a feature and then later on thinking "Shit. This sucks, but I can't remove it now or it will fuck up everything later."

Maybe I couldn't find it somewhere online, but is there a structured development roadmap for features you plan to implement? If not, what are the top priorities going forward? What are your long term goals with the project?

We don't have a written roadmap, but my current goals are:

  • Performance improvements (DB, federation code)
  • Creating a better onboarding site (joinlemmy)
  • Stabilizing the API
  • Becoming fully financially supported by donations, and hopefully growing our little dev co-op.
  • Lots of code maintenance
  • Notifications (Unified push)
  • Better sorting to push content from smaller communities (a best sort)
  • A better web UI written in rust (lemmy-ui-leptos)

chatgptbot@lemmings.world what is unified push?

chatgpt@lemmings.world what is unified push?

Is there any coordination with The other fediverse projects (mainly mastodon) and mastodon client developpers to enhance the interoperability with each other.

for instance being able to flawlessly post to lemmy and get notified about replies to your mastodon instance in a more convenient and user friendly way. where mastodon and its clients recognizes that a reply is comming from a lemmy server and displays it in a threaded way.

  • to stops showing every comment on posts made to community I follow as a separate post. it fills up the timeline. I know it's something to work on from the mastodon side. but maybe there are things lemmy can help improve.

With some other projects yes, but Mastodon not really. They often implement things in weird or nonstandard ways, and expect everyone else to deal with it. They even wrote an entire implementation for groups which is intentionally incompatible with Lemmy or other existing implementations. At least they had the good sense not to merge that.

I have a suggestion about lemmy. Could there be a way where Lemmy can check for community names across instances to help reduce multiple communities of the same name? For example, say someone wants to create a Linux community on their instance and during the creation Lemmy searches an index of community names and finds one already named that name, it would then recommend the existing community which already exists be used or a new community name be made.

My theory is to help reduce the multiple communities of the same name posting the same article numerous times on the all feed.

A few questions:

  1. Why did you name it Lemmy?
  2. What have some of the biggest challenges been in developing a Reddit-like community platform?
  3. What's a big feature you hope to implement someday?

Is there anything happening in the Fediverse that makes you concerned for its future?

The whole philosophy of it is to give power back to the users and not be kept in a box, but do you think the current mindset of most people using the typical social media platforms will bring bad habits here and squander what the Fediverse stands for? This is more of a concern of mine, but I'm new here

Why is lemmy licensed under the AGPL3? What prompted you to take that decision?

  • Is there a plan to improve search and federating communities between instances? My biggest hurdle joining and using Lemmy was without a doubt the search functionality and subscribing to a community on my own instance, it was severely off-putting. Let me walk you through it: you find a community you like, say vinyl@sopuli.xyz. You paste it into the search of your instance, as instructed. It immediately tells you "No results". If you don't click off, sometimes it changes it's mind within a few seconds. Sometimes it never loads. You try manually creating the URL by going to example.com/c/vinyl@sopuli.xyz but it gives you an error. If you're lucky it works the next day, if you're not then I don't actually know the next step. Not to mention the lack of feedback on subscribing to communities. I have "subscribed" to communities before then realised a week later that despite appearing in my list of subs it didn't actually work and I have to redo, the only feedback you get is "pending". This is the #1 issue that stops me from recommending Lemmy, or at least smaller instances that haven't federated with much yet. Is the search a priority?

  • I know you've been asked about splitting NSFW already, but is there any chance of a specific NSFL tag or a generic spoiler/blur tag? Gore and nudity are such different topics they really don't deserve to be under the same banner.

  • Are proper inline previews something on the roadmap? What I mean is items like YouTube videos, Streamable links, and just about anything that isn't a Lemmy image is not expandable and requires leaving the website. It's one of my most missed features from old Reddit with RES.

I read as much of the thread as possible, so hopefully these are new questions. Hope I didn't come across too negative here as I've been enjoying my time overall and I know y'all have been swamped these months and never expected this popularity.

With instances already disappearing (eg. vlemmy), content is being lost. Are you considering a lemmy archive?

For me the whole point of fediverse is not depending on a single party for your socials/subs. But the current climate in each instance forces users to have accounts in multiple instances.

As a Lemmy user I believe account migration should be a default Lemmy feature which enables true federation for end users. Any plans for this feature in the near future?

Thoughts on a GPL4?

Many examples indicate an even stronger license is needed, I will list a few

  1. The current RedHat debacle

  2. MuseScore's closed source Musehub (after being acquired by Ultimatw Guitar)

  3. Google commiting copyright infringement by combining free (as in freedom) software with code under Apache license for Android

We clearly need a stronger, more all encompassing license.

how often will you do AMAs?

I don't really have any questions at the moment, just passing by to thank you for making this great product/service.

After the Reddit fiasco I felt like my internet life would be empty, then I saw a thread on /r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH about they joining here and making an instance, so that's why I'm here now (not with them at the moment).

Then I started to be more active here than on Reddit until today which my Reddit account is basically forgotten.

I have read many of your answers and I can't wait until that "best" sorting comes out!

I wasn't very active in the biggest communities of Reddit because my likings which are a bit smaller (I don't think niche) than the big masses.

Thanks again for your hard work!

Will you implement an sorting algorithm that would show more content from small, neglected, unknown communities/instances on the main /all/ timeline so that they are more discoverable and will be seen rather than only showing the most-liked posts from huge communities/instances?

How's progress on OAuth2? I know previously you (understandably) said it wasn't a priority this early, but is it on the greater roadmap?

Any thoughts on adding emoji (or custom) reactions to posts? Might be a fun free alternative to Reddit’s award system. Might just add clutter.

What are the challenges posed by moderation (and admin in general) that you didn't think of when launching the first instance?

(and: How can things get improved, how can people help?)

When did you first think of starting lemmy?

Wish we could have the fediverse of instant messaging.

Fediverse instant messaging could work like email, just like how someone with gmail id can send mail to yahoo id.

username@whatsapp sending messages to username@telegram, that's how it could work

Which instant messenger do you use and recommend the most for general use? I read Dessalines essay about why Signal is bad, from these options SimpleX looks best to me. Thoughts?

Thanks for creating Lemmy! I like it a lot :) Do you have any ideas/plans on a privacy and user focused algorithmic view? If Lemmy wants to be big, I think we need something like this.

No, I dont even know what you mean by that.

I think he means another sorting option for posts, using an algorithm to tailor their order for the user

Urgh, algorithms.

How was the upvote weighting system designed?

Where did it come from?

Any plans for it changing over time?

will a search bar exist for searching through comments on a post

First of all, thank you for creating Lemmy!

  • Are you confident that ActivityPub is the right protocol for large numbers of users/communities/instances? I've read about concerns about the scalability of ActivityPub due to its "push" nature, and I'm wondering how reliable those concerns can be.
  • Is there a "right" maximum size for instances (user or community-wise) so that the load and reliability is properly spread?
  • (On behalf of a colleague not yet using Lemmy) Is it planned or enviable to provide OAuth/OpenID for auth, so that a user could have created an account in instanceA but log in to instanceB with the same account; potentially reducing the load on instanceA and/or allowing interaction with content federated with instanceB but not instanceA?

Lemmy is obviously getting bigger and bigger. Especially with the revolts against Reddit, and it seems currently we are in a similar state to where Reddit was when it was first started. Are there any tools you currently plan on implementing for server admins to prevent bot accounts, server toxicity, etc?

Also, do you guys have any worries about the fediverse devolving into a toxic cesspool of politics and unhinged users, like Reddit did? My worry is that over time, Lemmy as a whole will devolve into Reddit and be like one big virus that just spread over time due to growth. Once idiots find a platform to settle on they stay there. I think most people don't want that.

When the possibility to block instances will be implemented?

I will probably work on it soon. Can make any promises though as there are always lots of PRs to review and other things to do which prevent me from coding.

Thanks a lot for your work.

What do you mean? Being on instance X federated with Y would you like to have the possibility to not see content posted by people from Y? Does the content include comments? (Imagine weird blank spots in the middle of conversation and people replying to non-existing for you message). Would you like to also not see Y in search results?

I mean blocking all communities from an instance by a user. Currently, it's implemented on a client level in a few clients, but it obviously doesn't work for the web UI. Blocking all users from a certain instance is not that useful, I guess.

FYI: I use this usercript to block whole instances: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469297-block-lemmy-instances
You need to edit line 17

Here adapted to work also with MLMYM (https://old.lemmy.world): https://pastebin.com/z0mShfDP

If an individual wants to help develop this, how would they go about doing so?

Go to Github, look through open issues and find something you are interested to work on. Basically like any other open source project. Then make a pull request with your changes. You can ask for help from other devs in Matrix or directly on Github.

Since the release of Sync for Lemmy, some servers (like Lemmy.world for example) are down quite often, probably because of a huge influx of users. Will something be done about the big increase in down-time across Lemmy servers, and if so, how will that problem be dealt with in the near and far future?

Thank you.

I recently submitted a PR for stopping pictrs image federation. IMO the images themselves do not need to be downloaded when served by another pictrs instance. This would reduce the amount of diskspace and reduce the burden of hosting images that are unwanted by the instance owners.

What are your thoughts on this, and do you think this will be merged? https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3799

What inspired you to create Lemmy?

@dessalines yesterday, I asked around about the desired improvements to Lemmy and @bmp replied that conversation flows could be improved. Threads or comments aren't always explicitly showed and makes the user unsure about how to actually interact in the conversation.

Also, what are your next points on the roadmap? (If you have one)

First of all, thanks for the great work!

How's the onboarding of the new contributors going? I assume suddenly getting a huge influx of eager contributors might create a lot of fun "problems" that software developers don't usually get in their day jobs.

Related to that, besides the contributor docs on join-lemmy, is there any recommended reading before getting down to work on starting to contribute (already made or in the works)? I've been looking into helping out and getting better at Rust in the process.

A bit late on this, but when can we expect the new rewrite of Lemmy's UI? It seems like a big task.

Will the ability to send instance-agnostic post links be coming?

Where did the Lemmy name originated from? How long was the development of Lemmy?

A bit technical question: how do you manage to build performant comment trees on frontend?

What's your oppinion on lemmy being used by a few hundreds of people for quite some time and then recently exploding overnight with new instances and tens of thousands of new users. That certeinly changed some things...

I would love a way to optionally post a location while choosing specificity, i.e. United Kingdom vs Newcastle etc. That way I can filter communities and posts to just those in a location I like.

I think it could lead to some really cool interactions and ways of looking for things.

Is there any limitations with the database (postgres)?. I know postgres is one of the best (maybe even best) monolith database (running on one node) at the moment, but will the space be enough? With this in mind, has there been any consideration of migrating to a distributed database like ScyllaDB or CassanraDB to alleviate potential space constraints? On the other hand, if Lemmy doesn't intend to store data for long periods, maybe the capacity of Postgres would suffice. Any thoughts or plans on this? I appreciate your insights on this matter.

Do you plan a mod queue?

Where either in active mode hides the post and only after approval reveals itself or passive just have an queue for mods to see all the posts to double check?

I know about your decision regarding Threads but what are your thoughts on the blog post from the Mastodon CEO? https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/especially the address to the EEE concern

Any thoughts on the "federated community" discussion? I find both positions to have merit, but I think I'm leaning towards community aggregation as an option.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3033

  • What are your dream features or rework you would ask a magic genie? I mean nice features that require a huge amount of work
  • If you were to rewrite Lemmy from scratch, would you do everything the same way or would you rethink something?

Thanks for your amazing work, you guys are changing the world!

Why is selfhosted Docker such a mess?

  • How do you feel about ads on the internet?
  • What are your thoughts on the sustainability of FOSS?

How do you combat bot accounts and illegal content? Is it moderation or algorithms or both?

Do you ever plan on monetising this platform?

No, we will never have ads, or require you to pay to use lemmy or its UI. The most we will have is links to optional donations.

well, that's great to hear. not often we get to see this sort of thing around nowadays

How even would they? It is open source and decentralized, each instance has to monitize separately.

Like Sync is doing maybe that's what OP means.

Can we have an option to enable opening a new tab on click? I hate when I forget to middle click or control left click, and losing my place of scroll.

What is the best Motorhead album, and why is it Overkill?

Can we have a filter for excluding memes, please? Some times I want them, some times I don't.

Is there a use case for a user creating their own Lenny instance for their own use?

Êtes-vous francophones ?

Any plans for aggregated total of upvote/downvote karma for each user?

When are we going to get ability to schedule posts ? Also would it be possible to know anonymous mass statistics of followers of communities ?

Javascript-less interface when? At least for browsing. I thought this whole mumbo jumbo was for escaping from corporations, and it has quite some value for recovering the old, retro days of the internet.

Where do you see Lemmy 5 years from now?

Is there any way to unsubscribe and defederate from all instances to get a fresh start while keeping the same domain?

How well do you think the federation model is working, in terms of cultural dynamics, more defederations than I would have expected to see, etc.? I'm not counting technical glitches that I assume will get sorted out over time.

Why are instances like exploding heads allowed to exist?

The effort made in this site is a beacon of hope on the future of what's interested, just wanted to say thanks even the thread is old

Can you add a feature to allow me to defederate life tia

Where to start when I want to learn how the API works? I miss a real API documentation.

How come I can natively log into my Lemmy apps on iPhone / iOS, but with every single Mastodon app, it opens a Safari window to try log in?

(Reason: I blocked the browser, and just want to use the apps I specifically chose as daily drivers, still testing out Lemmy + Mastodon apps.)

I want a statement on the apparent lemmygrad connections and supporting human rights violations. The recent blog post was a PR non-answer, free speech is important, but human rights violations are just not acceptable.

Edit: it's obvious at this point there will never be a proper statement. I just want to say that regardless of the country of origin, US, China, EU, South Africa, India, it doesn't matter to me, all human rights violations are violations and unacceptable. This isn't a communism vs capitalism debate, this is a situation of whether to support the guy creating this software if that individual supports genocidal tendencies.

I know I’m very late I don’t have a question I just want to say thank you you bloody legends

To both @dessalines@lemmy.ml and @nutomic@lemmy.ml, why the castro pics and mao banners? I am not saying it's wrong or right, I am just curious

edit : yeah, why not downvote me. I am just fuckin' curious man.

What role do you think Lemmy developers should have in limiting the way that private instances can be used?

For example, (IIRC) you can't say the n word on any unmodified Lemmy instance—even one that you host yourself. I wonder what other such limitations are currently in place or may be added in the future. Can any open source contributor add such a limitation?

Edit: Regardless of whether you think such limitations are appropriate, I think it's an important question. I also expressed this comment in a neutral manner.

pls figure a way to monetize instances: a small fee charging api or something so admins could feel safe, or else instance owners will be piggy backed by third party app devs, and its happening.

Why?

Why not?

why male models?

Do think we need a second federation with more free speech?

Are you tankies?

Why did you choose to name your social media system after a person who owned the largest personal collection of Nazi memorabilia in the world for years leading up until his death. Lemmy was an entire piece of shit human being. Fuck Lemmy.

From Wikipedia*: In a 2020 post, Lemmy's co-creator Dessalines wrote about the origin of the name Lemmy. "It was nameless for a long time, but I wanted to keep with the fediverse tradition of naming projects after animals. I was playing that old-school game Lemmings, and Lemmy (from Motorhead) had passed away that week, and we held a few polls for names, and I went with that."[8]

(*Accuracy not guaranteed)

Accuracy is guaranteed though, it's from this post.

I think you need to go for a walk in nature friend.

Lemmy's obsession with nazi iconography was cringe, but I think you'd have to stretch things to say he was a racist, given his staunch and vocal anti-racist stances.

Also liking someone's art doesn't mean you have to subscribe to all of their ideological views, just as you are using lemmy right now yet I greatly doubt you agree with my stances.

Are museums also an issue for holding such artifacts or do you just have a problem with individuals? Because to me ownership or an item doesn't mean you agree with what it represents. Like it or not the Nazi party has a lot of historical significance.

Now I don't know anything about Lemmy as a person so he may well be a POS I have no idea but if the above is your basis for it, then it's weak.

I mean Nazism and Communism are religions too, make no mistake, with Hitler and Stalin as God, right? It’s the same thing.

wat

well I guess he means that Nazis are like cultist or rather any zealots of any religion in a sense that they are blindly following some ideology made up by some guy and that he therefore neither likes religions nor nazism. To saying Lemmy would "sympathize" with Nazism is just plain wrong. Of course he did have a rather weird hobby...

Brain rot

To the point, ideology is, to a degree, a modern equivalent of religion. It provides a framework to view history and the future, dos and don’t, utopia to strive for, often comes with own set of (almost)religious practices and idolization. It even requires a degree of faith in utopia being achievable. I don’t think it’s that outrageous of a statement.

Oh, last time i checked the criticism was because of communism but ok

Haters gonna hate

Does it seem odd to you that the devs would name their platform after a Nazi, when they are Marxists? That just strikes me as exceptionally odd, given everything I know about the two groups.