This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky@lemmy.world about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
NLNet Funding
First of all some good news: We are currently applying for new funding from NLnet and have reached the second round. If it gets approved then @phiresky@lemmy.world and SleeplessOne will work on the paid milestones, while @dessalines and @nutomic will keep being funded by direct user donations. This will increase the number of paid Lemmy developers to four and allow for faster development.
You can see a preliminary draft for the milestones. This can give you a general idea what the development priorities will be over the next year or so. However the exact details will almost certainly change until the application process is finalized.
Development Update
@ismailkarsli added a community statistic for number of local subscribers.
@jmcharter added a view for denied Registration Applications.
@dullbananas made various improvements to database code, like batching insertions for better performance, SQL comments and support for backwards pagination.
@SleeplessOne1917 made a change that besides admins also allows community moderators to see who voted on posts. Additionally he made improvements to the 2FA modal and made it more obvious when a community is locked.
@nutomic completed the implementation of local only communities, which don’t federate and can only be seen by authenticated users. Additionally he finished the image proxy feature, which user IPs being exposed to external servers via embedded images. Admin purges of content are now federated. He also made a change which reduces the problem of instances being marked as dead.
@dessalines has been adding moderation abilities to Jerboa, including bans, locks, removes, featured posts, and vote viewing.
In other news there will soon be a security audit of the Lemmy federation code, thanks to Radically Open Security and NLnet.
Support development
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
- Liberapay (preferred option)
- Open Collective
- Patreon
- Cryptocurrency
Has Lemmy.ml been contacted by law enforcement yet to hand over user data? If yes, when was it, and what did you hand over?
Nope, never.
- jackpot ( @jackpot@lemmy.ml ) English3•1 year ago
whats that thing where a company has a ‘we have never been contacted by law enforement or have been forced to disclose data’ sign on their website that theyll take down to implicitly inform users theyve received a request and a silencing order
Warrant canary. I doubt those really work because law enforcement could easily require you to keep updating it.
- jackpot ( @jackpot@lemmy.ml ) English3•1 year ago
could you try regardless?
I’m pretty sure all user data is public already.
PMs might be the only thing not everyone can see.
IPs and access logs, plus email addresses aren’t public and are the kind of thing law enforcement wants.
Not a question, just wanted to let you know I how much we appreciate and love you all for making Lemmy happen 🥰🥰
Thank you! Its great that you have been around all these years.
Thx a ton!
What could be done to improve interoperability between federated platforms?
mainly talking about Mastodon since it is the biggest one.I have seen the Peertube dev is quite nice and approachable. And willing to improve the experience cross-platform.
Have you tried to approach @Gargron@mastodon.social? Is he willing to contribute? How could we get Mastodon to improve the user experience with federated content, eg. communities and article posts?
What about @dansup@lemmy.ml / @dansup@mastodon.social and Pixelfed?
There have been lots of compatibility improvements with Mastodon from our side. However Mastodon seems to have almost no interest to make improvements from their side. I dont think there is much we can do about that, in the end project maintainers always care about their own users most.
With dansup there was some communication years ago, but it seems he lost interest in Lemmy.
Mastodon’s main dev isn’t really open. Have a look at the “Ego” part of this article: https://cassolotl.medium.com/i-left-mastodon-yesterday-4c5796b0f548
Misskey forks, whatever their names are today, seem more interesting
While I agree with the content of that article I don’t know if we should give up on Eugen just yet. The Mastodon team has not disclosed what their plan is regarding the groups rework currently on the mastodon roadmap. There is an old proposal here, but I think we have good reason to believe that implementation will be revisited. To that end, it is very important to advocate for the adoption of FEP-1b12 which is the standard that Lemmy uses.
It may also be a good idea to advocate for the adoption of FEP-d36d both here and on lemmy. This is a standard for group-to-group following. Effectively allowing communities to subscribe to other communities.
Here’s a slightly older but fairly comprehensive write-up of the situation: https://blog.erlend.sh/group-convergence
Mastodon’s main dev isn’t really open. Have a look at the “Ego” part of this article
That article was over 5 years ago now. I would expect that there has been massive change now that Mastodon is way more popular, and the project is way more involved. Also, blocks and mutes do work now.
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) English3•1 year ago
Ah 5 years ago? That explains it. Early mastodon was rough but they seem to have gotten their shit together pretty recently.
Quote posts are still not there, they are on Misskey forks
https://fedi.tips/why-cant-i-quote-other-posts-in-mastodon/
They are on the roadmap, but that doesn’t say much.
Also something to be said about how a thing or two has happened in the last five years. Whatever Mastodon is doing seems to be working for a large number of users.
It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine. The freedom of choice is why we’re in the fediverse in the first place. But the fact is that quite a few people want what Madison is offering. :)
I think there’s a risk of lacking a coherent direction if decision-making is outsourced too much to the community. Furthermore, core developers might lose ownership of the project and then lose interest. As long as it’s open source, I’m pretty happy to have the core maintainers develop projects according to their own vision, and the community fork it should this vision differ too much from their own. :)
As long as it’s open source, I’m pretty happy to have the core maintainers develop projects according to their own vision
The problem is, after we as users helped Mastodon to grow strong the dev thinks it is better to do stuff outside of the standards so nothing works for other fediverse platforms. He has too much power and most people are mindless.
the community fork it should this vision differ too much from their own. :)
Definitely :)
Do you think Lemmy is decentralized enough right now, or are you worried about some of the bigger instances growing too much?
Its definitely a concern. IMO the lemmyverse is far too centralized at the moment. The big questions are:
- Is there a trend toward centralization, or away from it?
- How are people being introduced / onboarded onto lemmy?
- What can we do to combat centralization?
(1) I’m honestly unsure, and I’d def appreciate if anyone has done a study of it. We’ve seen a big growth in single person / smaller topic-focused instances, which is a great thing, but if their communities aren’t growing, we need to figure out how to reverse that trend. I’d have no problem with the current large instances, including this one, as long as the long-term-trend is away from them.
(2) Is mostly word-of-mouth, join-lemmy.org, and apps / web-ui’s which show an instance by default.
We’ve made the sort for the join-lemmy.org instances page be by random active users, and tried to emphasize on that page that it doesn’t matter which instance you join, since most federate, and can subscribe / connect to any community. I hope that helps, and we need to replicate that wherever we can.
Apps and webUI’s mostly just show lemmy.world rn, where they should show random instances. I’m guilty of this in Jerboa as well (showing lemmy.ml by default), and I’ve just opened up an issue that it should be showing a random server for anonymous users.
But I think we need to do more, and I’d def appreciate yours and anyone else’s ideas on how we can combat centralization. We need to get ahead of this problem before it gets worse.
But I think we need to do more, and I’d def appreciate yours and anyone else’s ideas on how we can combat centralization.
I am admin of the biggest Brazilian instance, but I am welcoming more local instances and talking to the admins we should spread the load. But what I notice is the users are concerned they will miss out if they are not in an instance that already have everything.
Could we have an easier way to auto-federate every new communities from a given instance? Even an “auto-federate everything possible” option. as @nutomic@lemmy.ml said lemmy DB isn’t too big, most instance owners could have it on their servers. And making it opt-in won’t hurt the small instances.
It would be relatively easy to write a script/bot which fetches the list of communities from a given instance, and then subscribes to all of them from another instance. In fact I heard something like this already exists, but dont know the name.
Lemmy Community Feeder? https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
I think it’s worth bringing a solution in house. A recommended migration route. If you want people to feel confident to pick any instance, you have to give them the confidence to move easily and not fear picking a small instance that might die when their owner gets bored. A simple setting option to migrate from, then you select the account and either (through communities accessible, or through automated request, pull that data and subscribe to communities. Maybe blocks etc also.
boost.lemy.lol?
I know lemmings.world has a bot that subscribes to the most popular communities to make sure those are federated
Maybe not auto-federate / auto-subscribe, but we do have an issue to federate a lightweight list of communities among servers, that could help with this.
Its true that the disk space required isn’t too big a deal, but it would unecessarily increase the CPU and network requests by auto-federating the entire lemmyverse, rather than using explicit subscribes.
The big instances are bad enough but big communities are absolute killer of decentralisation
When you go to /c/books on your server, you don’t see an agglomeration of all /c/books on all servers of the fediverse. You only see that server’s /c/books, if it even has one.
This is a fatal flaw of lemmy which concentrates power enormously into the hands of the owners.
The default view should be all /c/books on all federated servers, with an easy way to filter only local posts.
Lemmy will turn into reddit if this is not quickly rectified.
I kind of get where you’re coming from, but to me it sounds like you’re looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like “books”), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you’re interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.
I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, “ownerless” topics, instead, it’s built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.
IMO it’s totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it’s totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn’t really seem like a useful feature, but that’s kind of analogous to what you’re suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.
Thst makes lemmy , a reddit with many /u/spez , but in practice it will end up like the actual internet of today, where only 5-10 sites control everything.
This process is already far along on lemmy, already very centralized and all the incentives are in place to make it even more centralized.
I expect the settlement of the defederation war, will create 2-3 cliques of the largest servers that each silence the rest of the lemmyverse on their property.
Give it a little time and they’ll probably make themselves fully private cliques.
When you go to /c/books on your server, you don’t see an agglomeration of all /c/books on all servers of the fediverse. You only see that server’s /c/books, if it even has one.
What prevents from visiting /c/books@anotherserver?
Genuinely asking, because this is one of the core concepts of Lemmy and federation
I already posted to anotherserver/c/books and no one ever saw it.
Posting anywhere but biggestinstance/c/biggestcommunity is functionally the same as not posting at all.
And of course, the owners of biggestinstance/c/biggestcommunity believe in everything you don’t believe in and they really don’t like you in particular.
Welcome to new reddit, same as old reddit
I already posted to anotherserver/c/books and no one ever saw it.
Did you promote that community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and other promotion communities? Did you actively post on your new community, to attract users to your new one?
I’m going to take two examples I personally had
- I’m not a fan of having all discussions on LW, so even if !movies@lemmy.world was the most active one, we decided with a few others to start animating !moviesandtv@lemm.ee. It is now the most active community on that topic.
- I like the show “the Office”. !dundermifflin@lemmy.ml is the historical community, but as some people are not fans of lemmy.ml, we moved to !dundermifflin@lemm.ee, which is now the most active community on this topic.
I guess that shows that community takeover is possible, and does not need additional tools, just some time and dedication.
I really don’t hate this idea from a lemmy centric UX perspective but how do you handle federation with other platforms?
I think its totally normal that instance sizes follow a power law distribution. Its similar to many other things, for example there are few large cities, some medium cities and lots of small cities. The wiki article lists many other examples. So I think its fine as long as there are no intentional attempts to lock in users into large instances or limit federation.
As someone who is on a medium sized instance, I can say its a little awkward when Lemmy[.]world goes down
So many apps die before getting any users. For Lemmy however, when was the first time you really thought “Damn, this thing really might actually take off”?
For me it was long before the reddit migration (which was ~7 months or so ago). I noticed lemmy slowly but surely gaining traction. It felt more dead than it does now, but the trend was slow and steady growth, which is always a great sign. People were using lemmy, liking it, and sticking around.
At the same time, it was clear that we weren’t making the mistake of all the other reddit alternatives, by promising to be a free speech haven for bigoted communities. Those people actively did our work for us by warning their communities to stay away from Lemmy and its tankie devs, thereby making Lemmy a much more enjoyable place from the very beginning. That was a crucial test: we were not willing to sacrifice our values for growth’s sake.
It’s great to see that positivity confirmed by a researcher who did a qualitative and quantitative analysis about Lemmy migration, and finding that >90% of people saw themselves using Lemmy in the long term. We can all be very proud of that, and it means we have a bright future.
Lemmy was meant to be a Reddit replacement from the beginning, so it was always supposed to take off. Even in the early days the tech was working quite smoothly and users were happy so there was no real doubt about it. The only thing missing were more users. However I had no idea how a real migration would actually look like, so it was really overwhelming when last year people started to flood in and everything got overloaded and broke down.
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) English32•1 year ago
A lot of people say there are a bunch of tankies on Lemmy which really begs the question: Where do you all keep your tanks and can I drive one?
They stay in the bunker except for emergencies like facebooks threats.net . You get to drive one when you can recite the first section of the communist manifesto from memory.
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) English7•1 year ago
Thank you for being honest, most would deny the existence of the tanks. I’ll get to work on that right away, I wanna drive the tankie tank.
Maybe the real tankies are the comrades we made along the way
People, avoid to ask repeated questions and keeping it one question per comment is generally better.
Yes thank you. Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming when there are 10+ questions in a single comment, and each of them requires a little essay.
also people should search the issues on github, a few of these questions already have issues filed with discussions in them, put a thumbs up on a github issue if it’s something you want
Were you ever approached by any kind of organization making some weird proposal regarding lemmy?
A few, mostly harmless tho, just about working on pet features they’d like to see in Lemmy. None panned out.
I imagine the more parasitic companies avoid us as soon as they see the AGPLv3 license.
Some company (dont know which) wanted to make a one-time donation of 500 Euros to get listed as donor on join-lemmy.org. Rejected because thats only for recurring donors. Does this count as weird?
What happened with the domain Lemmy.ml when Mali took back controls over its domains and some sites went offline? Are you confident that the .ml domain will be reliable in the future?
We’re paid up on our current registrar for a few more years, but I honestly don’t know how much that can be trusted. Its pretty difficult to get clear information on which ones are safe, and which ones aren’t.
If lemmy.ml goes down, it will be a major annoyance as we migrate domains, and will likely have a day or two of downtime. Even outside of DNS yanks, we do daily DB backups, and have our pictures backed up locally as well, so a full restore is possible, but federation would definitely have issues, and would probably need to do a lot of re-subscribes. Overall tho, it wouldn’t destroy the lemmy project or anything, and if people migrate to smaller servers in the process, that would give us a lot more time to code 😄 .
I apologize for that tho , it was something I didn’t forsee and wasn’t even thought of many years ago when I registered.
Have you considered migrating while you still have control of the domain? You could at least make the domain redirect in that case. Though not sure if federation could somehow pick up that lemmy.ml has moved elsewhere.
Seems a bit too risky, because there’s always the possibility that our current registrar will be fine, and just make whatever agreements they want with Mali’s government.
I’d be very curious how you guys migrate to a new domain if you ever need to, maybe there will be an open source tool to help with it, and maybe some improvements inside Lemmy’s code, like api calls from both domains to initiate the migration
There’s some instructions here, but I haven’t tested them recently: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/backup_and_restore.html?highlight=backup#backup-and-restore-guide
We might be able to make something inside lemmy’s code that could do a lot of that for you, but someone would need to open an issue and work on it.
I meant stuff like other instances updating your domain name for all its users/communities, fixing their subscriptions and stuff
First, I want to say thank you for the incredible job you already have done in this area. However, do you have any thoughts on further improving some fundamental Lemmy UX painpoints? Examples such as:
- Migrating accounts between instances
- Tagging users across instances
- Linking communities across instances
- Finding communities across instances
As @phiresky@lemmy.world mentioned we have improvements coming down the pipe for linking content across instances.
Community linking and user linking do work currently (for example I just linked phiresky above), and a community example would be !risa@startrek.website , but we could improve this by extending it to posts and comments, as well as creating a url link standard that would work across apps.
Can you add one to your list? Linking posts across instances? Like you can do
!community@instanceand the community will open viewed through your instance. But for linking posts there is no such equivalent. Like if I make an HTTP link it will be through my instance or possibly the one the community is hosted on which would be annoying for users of other instances.Also, linking communities across instances is possible already, but you can leave it up since it’s confusing. I still see a lot of folks try to do the reddit approach if
c/communityReally like your protocol handlers contribution here. Seems tough to square with multiple accounts though.
Turning the fediverse button into an “open on my instance” with similar functionality to subscribing may also be a solution here. Bonus points if it’ll also open a comment on mastodon.
Yup that’d be sick
Migrating accounts between instances
Isn’t that implemented in the 19.2 and later versions? I just migrated using that feature a few days back, worked quite well
That would be awesome if true. It’s progressing faster than I thought. I’m still just learning about the scaled sort and enjoying that new feature lol.
I’m pretty sure it is there, you can export and import your subscriptions in the settings
What are the plans around admin tools?
Instance owners currently gets notified when someone has reported a user for spamming or trolling, but frequently it’s a user that is not on his instance, so he can’t do anything about it. Wouldn’t it be better if instance owners got notified only when they can take actual action (like the user being registered on their instance)?
If you’ve been following our code commits / PRs, we’ve been adding a lot of mod tools improvements not just lately, but over lemmy’s entire life. I would even go so far as to say we have the strongest mod tools of any project in the fediverse, all the more necessary for us because of the community-focus.
The upcoming roadmap for 2024 includes some mod additions, such as mod warnings, attaching report counts to items, viewing mod actions for items, etc.
Instance owners currently gets notified when someone has reported a user for spamming or trolling, but frequently it’s a user that is not on his instance, so he can’t do anything about it. Wouldn’t it be better if instance owners got notified only when they can take actual action (like the user being registered on their instance)?
Instance admins are responsible for what content their users see, so if a troll is visible to their users and ruining their day, then it should be taken care of everywhere necessary.
I have seen this first hand. I think when someone hits report it needs to go to the moderator of the community. From there the mod should be able to forward it to where it needs to go.
Instance admins should be able to intersect this process.
There’s some more context for this in this issue, and we each have different views on it, because there are tradeoffs no matter what.
My personal view (based on experience modding and admin’ing), is that we should prioritize handling a report ASAP, by the first eyeballs that see it, rather than whose jurisdiction it is. On all but the largest communities, admins are generally more active, and more likely to see the report and take action on it.
Maybe make it go to everyone?
That’s what we currently do ( as in the report goes to both mods of that community, and instance admins).
The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this threadEdit: Leaving this here cause why not
But it says in the OP that this thread should be used for posting questions for the AMA?
I stand corrected!
Back when the first Reddit exodus happened, there was a group heavily DDOSing many of the popular Lemmy instances. While it was a great opportunity to optimize Lemmy, did you ever find out who that attacker was?
Is there an official roadmap for Lemmy?
What are the current needs of the project, if any? For instance, are you currently looking for skilled or financial contributions?
Check the updated OP. We can definitely use more donations, at the moment we are getting around 4000 Euros per month which is not much for two fulltime devs. And code contributions are also helpful, there is an almost endless amount of open issues.
Very interesting, thank you for this
Please stop using time zone abbreviations. Everyone can read an offset (UTC +02:00 in this case). But almost everyone has to look up the abbreviation
I linked a timezone convert link (before I updated the post), which I think I’d have to do even if we used the UTC offset format. I must be just far away enough from UTC to not know what my offset is at any given time.
No, I can not read an offset. Because we have summer time and winter time here, and I dont instantly know what the offset is for which one.
Developing countries still catching up to the no-DST of the rest of the world. Asia, Africa, Central/South America 💪
What are some cool “Lemmy Adjacent” projects you know of and want to share? (Things like LemmySchedule or Toast.ooo’s Canvas)
One that I can think of rn, is @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml 's lemmy-bot, as well as ridoukousage’s TLDR bot.
With the web being so ad-infested and completely owned by google, people have noted how the TLDR bot means they often don’t have to leave their lemmy app at all, and can stay behind its privacy shield.
While of course I do think we can code a lot of functionality directly in to lemmy in a way that we couldn’t with reddit, there’s undeniably a lot of potential with bots that can do different things for us.