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.
- 1984 ( @1984@lemmy.today ) English136•1 year ago
I asked in the other thread about GDPR.
Nobody thinks it’s very interesting but if instances don’t follow gdpr, the entire network is at risk of legal consequences.
So please bring this up, even though it’s not very fun.
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.- Derin ( @derin@lemmy.beru.co ) English42•1 year ago
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:
- Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
- 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.
- oce 🐆 ( @oce@jlai.lu ) English10•1 year ago
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.
- Derin ( @derin@lemmy.beru.co ) English4•1 year ago
Sure, but you’d still have to delete all their written posts - which is really what all this is about.
- Atemu ( @Atemu@lemmy.ml ) English5•1 year ago
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).
- Umbrias ( @Umbrias@beehaw.org ) English4•1 year ago
Written content can contain pii, but it’s rarer. Written content isn’t, by default, pii, but if someone tells anything reasonably pii the entire text can be consisted pii even when anonymized.
- interolivary ( @interolivary@beehaw.org ) English3•1 year ago
Yeah as someone who had to deal with GDPR in a professional capacity, it’s probably better to just assume that content written by users contains PII since you really have no way of telling whether it does or doesn’t.
Naturally you can just ignore that and leave the content as-is, but then you run the risk of some data protection authority ruining your day.
- randint ( @randint@lemm.ee ) English11•1 year ago
It’s often too expensive to support GDPR for Europeans and disable it for other people. Most services just support GDPR for everyone.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English37•1 year ago
Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?
- Stumblinbear ( @Stumblinbear@pawb.social ) English7•1 year ago
You don’t have to bother with GDPR until you’re a certain size company
- 1984 ( @1984@lemmy.today ) English38•1 year ago
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.
- bdonvr ( @bdonvr@thelemmy.club ) English8•1 year ago
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.
- 1984 ( @1984@lemmy.today ) English8•1 year ago
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.
- Solarius ( @Solarius@lemmy.sdf.org ) English1•1 year ago
What does “processing” data mean though?
- 1984 ( @1984@lemmy.today ) English5•1 year ago
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.
- hikaru755 ( @hikaru755@feddit.de ) English3•1 year ago
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.
- Lionir [he/him] ( @Lionir@beehaw.org ) English119•1 year ago
I’m gonna be asking hard questions, I think, sorry about that. I hope you consider it tough love considering our past interactions.
As an instance admin, I have some questions:
-
How are you doing? I know there was a lot of pressure when things blew up and it seems to be calming down a bit now.
-
How is Lemmy doing financially?
-
Considering past releases and their associated breaking bugs (including 0.18.3), what measures are you taking to help prevent that?
-
Can we consider the possibility of downgrades being supported?
-
Why are bugs affecting moderation not release blockers? Does anything block releases?
-
Are there plans to give instance administrators a voice in shaping the future of Lemmy’s development?
As someone who is trying to help with Lemmy’s development, I have some other questions:
- What do you think are the biggest problems with Lemmy as a software project and what are your priorities for Lemmy?
- Considering fairly low amounts of developers contributing to Lemmy, how are you working to help new people get into the project?
- Do you worry about the message it sends to potential contributors when the main developers are working on a different project which competes with the former? (Example: Lemmy-ui vs Lemmy-ui-Leptos)
- Considering most work is done voluntarily, how are you trying to organize and prioritize work?
- Do you believe you are stretching yourself too thin between Lemmy, Lemmy-ui, Lemmy-ui-leptos, Jerboa and Lemmy.ml? If so, what are you doing to help you focus?
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English73•1 year ago
Wow lots of questions here.
- Im doing well, its exciting to know that so many people like the software Ive worked on for the last years. The first month after the migration was really stressful, but by now its calmed down a lot. Plus there are many contributors now which are helping a lot.
- Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
- I think the “breaking bugs” were really minor considering how we had to constantly rush out performance and security fixes. This should get better as we dont need to make emergency fixes, and have more time to let the community test release candidates before making the full release.
- Supporting downgrades means that someone has to test them and report/fix problems. We dont have time for that, but feel free to do it.
- Like I said, our recent releases had urgent performance/security fixes so we didnt have enough time for testing. We also didnt find out about these problems until later. Part of the problem is that keeping up with issues is almost a full-time job on its own, so I rarely read them anymore. If you see something important reported, do let me know.
- No concrete plans, but I definitely think that admins are the main actors who should have a voice in development. Its impossible for us to listen to all the individual users, because there are too many and they often dont have the necessary technical knowledge. If you have some ideas how to facilitate communication between devs and admins, let me know.
Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English31•1 year ago
Alright second part:
- The biggest problem is definitely that there are too many things to do, but only the two of us working on it fulltime. The day only has so many hours and its impossible to keep up with everything. Thats why community contributions are really important.
- The amount of contributors is very high compared to a few months ago, its not easy to keep up with all the pull requests. Its going to take some time for processes to adjust to the new scale, and for new contributors to learn how everything works.
- This is a question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml
- People work on whatever they are passionate about. Generally that works quite well.
- I am only working on Lemmy and thats already a lot. So another question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml
- sabreW4K3 ( @sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf ) English2•1 year ago
These are great questions
-
- Menu ( @Menu@slrpnk.net ) English106•1 year ago
Right now, instances with transphobic and racist content like exploding-heads are still listed on join-lemmy.org. Are you planning to implement a Server Convenant like on joinmastodon.org? To be listed on joinmastodon.org, an instance needs “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English53•1 year ago
The instance list is fine as is. Think about it like this: do you want racists to join a single instance so they are all in one place? Or do you want them to spread across all different instances, causing moderation problems everywhere?
- Menu ( @Menu@slrpnk.net ) English39•1 year ago
Yes, I think it would be best if they would all gather on one instance that can get defederated. Right now they attract users on join-lemmy with “Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable”, no other info.
- Gaywallet (they/it) ( @Gaywallet@beehaw.org ) English35•1 year ago
And if the racist is here to cause problems rather than commiserate with fellow racists, they now know exactly which community to avoid, thus restoring moderation problems everywhere. I don’t think anyone is asking you to moderate every instance to ensure they are sticking to your TOS or your viewpoints, but it’s a very minor ask to not showcase off the racists and transphobes and bigots on the ‘join this platform’ page.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English16•1 year ago
There are plenty of other instance lists across the internet. So its not even a real solution for your theoretical problem.
- Gaywallet (they/it) ( @Gaywallet@beehaw.org ) English29•1 year ago
I don’t think the people raising this as a concern are trying to solve the problem of bigots on the internet; they are just asking for you to change the advertising you provide to remove the bigots from a place of visibility.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English16•1 year ago
And then we should block lemmygrad, lemmy.world, hexbear and hundreds of other instances? Thats not gonna happen. If you want to block instances, do that on the beehaw side.
- Gaywallet (they/it) ( @Gaywallet@beehaw.org ) English29•1 year ago
I’m not here to proselytize about what we decide to block or not. I’m explaining what the person above is requesting - not a block, but a conscious decision about what shows up on the join-lemmy list.
- Metal Zealot ( @Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml ) English7•1 year ago
I’m new to the fediverse, and even I can tell you’re missing the point.
- heavyboots ( @heavyboots@lemmy.ml ) English1•1 year ago
This brings up an interesting point. On Mastodon, besides Block User, there is also a Block Instance option. Will we ever see that on Lemmy? Seems like an easy way to resolve what has been a big issue for me (and obviously other people too).
Aka, you don’t really want to start over on another instance (hey, not migration tools yet!) but you also don’t really want to see posts from a specific server any more. Rather than people having to lobby the server admins about whether or not to defederate, wouldn’t it just be easier to allow user-level instance blocking? (I know I say “just” while knowing zip about how hard that as in the back end, but yes, from a logistics perspective, seems like you could make a lot of spam-level requests leave the admin’s plates by implementing this.)
- stebo ( @stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English19•1 year ago
i would rather want the racists to not be able to go anywhere at all
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English24•1 year ago
It doesnt really matter what you want. The software is open source so anyone can use the software freely. No way to prevent it.
- stebo ( @stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English31•1 year ago
yea sure there will always be racist instances but they shouldn’t be promoted on sites like join-lemmy.org
- BuddyTheBeefalo ( @BuddyTheBeefalo@lemmy.ml ) English16•1 year ago
It’s possible that anti-racist, queer or any other serious organisations might not want to link to join-lemmy.org because of it.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English11•1 year ago
Thats fine, they can provide their own list of instances where users can choose from.
- Menu ( @Menu@slrpnk.net ) English24•1 year ago
They are on your list (which is seen as the official one by many and has most visits) to guide transphobes and fascists to their fitting community?? Exploding-heads is not labeled as transphobe and fascist on join-lemmy. So that does’t make sense.
- hruzgar ( @hruzgar@feddit.de ) English6•1 year ago
Wasnt free speech all about being able to express your opinion without getting banned?
- Dandroid ( @dandroid@dandroid.app ) English38•1 year ago
No. It’s about being able to voice your opinion without going to jail for it. No one is going to jail for making transphobic memes or comments. But that doesn’t protect them from me blocking them or banning them from my instance.
- hruzgar ( @hruzgar@feddit.de ) English4•1 year ago
Ok fair enough. But (outside of the context) defederating/banning certain communities because they don’t have the same beliefs as you can lead to a fully opinionated/based fediverse and should be prevented imo. Everybody should be able to express their opinions no matter what. I don’t want lemmy to change into some kind off mass media like everything else rn. If a post isn’t showing a good/kind, people respecting vibe, it will be downvoted and thus not shown to anybody. And later if lemmy creates an algorithm of some kind, these posts can be ghosted for certain individuals. But i don’t think they should be completely removed and banned from the connected fediverse as this platform is one of the only ways to express ourselves online at this point. I hope i could get my point across
- The dogspaw ( @Thedogspaw@midwest.social ) English17•1 year ago
Defederation doesn’t prevent them from being able to access the fediverse nobody has a right to harassing people thats like saying you are being discriminated against because you aren’t allowed in the public park because you throw garbage everywhere and spray paint the children’s play equipment but it’s a public park my rights
- dullbananas (Joseph Silva) ( @dullbananas@lemmy.ca ) English6•1 year ago
What type(s) of transphobia?
- Lionir [he/him] ( @Lionir@beehaw.org ) English26•1 year ago
Here are some examples on exploding-heads.com and rammy.site though I kinda doubt you don’t know about them. Their members frequently harass trans and queer communities as well.
Warning trans/queerphobic
https://exploding-heads.com/post/635111 https://exploding-heads.com/post/635113 https://exploding-heads.com/post/635122 https://exploding-heads.com/post/627109 https://exploding-heads.com/post/628678 https://exploding-heads.com/post/627044 https://exploding-heads.com/post/630190 https://exploding-heads.com/post/191408 https://exploding-heads.com/post/618400 https://rammy.site/c/saynotogroomers
- Hexadecimalkink ( @Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml ) English102•1 year ago
How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?
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.
- tatterdemalion ( @tatterdemalion@programming.dev ) English8•1 year ago
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.
- entropicshart ( @entropicshart@lemmy.ml ) English7•1 year ago
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.
- fidodo ( @fidodo@lemm.ee ) English3•1 year ago
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.
- bdonvr ( @bdonvr@thelemmy.club ) English40•1 year ago
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.
- lily33 ( @lily33@lemm.ee ) English5•1 year ago
For me it’s a problem for the exact reason you think it’s fine: 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.
- BonfireOvDreams ( @BonfireOvDreams@lemmy.ml ) English4•1 year ago
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.
- AlmightySnoo III 🐢 ( @AlmightySnoo@lemmy.ml ) English76•1 year ago
What’s your opinion on app developers making Lemmy clients with tracker-infused ads on their free version? Is it something you ever anticipated when you were first developing Lemmy?
EDIT: Also a similar one, what about instances potentially deciding to display ads out of nowhere? Could defederation be a tool here to discourage that?
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.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English66•1 year ago
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.
- maegul (he/they) ( @maegul@lemmy.ml ) English64•1 year ago
Hope multiples are ok …
- 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?
- 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?
- Arguably the fediverse has so far sought to replicate the corporate big-social platforms … should new design evolution occur now and if so how?
- 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?
- 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)?
- 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?
- Journalism and journalists … should they be on the fediverse (like the BBC recently with their own mastodon instance) … and if so, how?
- What are the biggest or proudest moments you’ve had with Lemmy so far, and the worst or most embarrassing?
- How does it feel to have so many users using and developing against your software?!
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English55•1 year ago
Haha youre a very curious one :D
- See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2348893
- 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.
- 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.
- Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements.
- 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.
- 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.
- Basically my previous reply, I dont know enough about journalism to give a more specific answer.
- 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.
- It feels great, I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.
- maegul (he/they) ( @maegul@lemmy.ml ) English19•1 year ago
- … I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.
Honestly heart warming to hear!
- Vlhacs ( @Vlhacs@reddthat.com ) English57•1 year ago
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?
- Dandroid ( @dandroid@dandroid.app ) English8•1 year ago
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.
- Dandroid ( @dandroid@dandroid.app ) English5•1 year ago
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.
- Deebster ( @Deebster@lemmy.ml ) English4•1 year ago
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.
- Hadriscus ( @Hadriscus@lemm.ee ) English8•1 year ago
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.
- sabreW4K3 ( @sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf ) English2•1 year ago
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.
- Vlhacs ( @Vlhacs@reddthat.com ) English2•1 year ago
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
- sabreW4K3 ( @sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf ) English2•1 year ago
Federated means accessible in a single state. It doesn’t mean zero ownership or control, hence why the dictionary definition mentions internal autonomy.
Those are spammers. Block them, that’s the only way they’ll learn.
- Bady ( @bady@lemmy.ml ) English1•1 year ago
You’re enjoying the benefits of federation, by having the ability to grow “your” community with people across the fediverse rather than with only the people on the same instance as yours. So that’s the price you have to pay. Also, in the long run, communities will grow naturally based on the quality of the content and not just because they have popular names!
- CheshireSnake ( @CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi ) English54•1 year ago
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.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English65•1 year ago
Account migration is not in the works, and I consider it very low priority. Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy isnt focused on individual users, so it doesnt matter much if you start posting from another instance one day. If its important for you, you can always put a link in your profile to your other accounts. I would rather implement a way to export/import account data. Thats much simpler and can also be used as a backup in case your instance goes down.
- CheshireSnake ( @CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi ) English33•1 year ago
I would rather implement a way to export/import account data.
This is perfectly reasonable. I think a lot of users will be happy with this. Also, I agree with the view that lemmy isn’t focused on individual users. We have X, Mastodon, etc. for that. Thanks for the response!
- gelberhut ( @gelberhut@lemdro.id ) English18•1 year ago
For communities, howver, it is much more important thing. Re-tart a community from scratch on another instance has a huge “cost”.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English22•1 year ago
Thats true, but community migration seems complicated to implement so it will have to wait.
- maegul (he/they) ( @maegul@lemmy.ml ) English17•1 year ago
I would rather implement a way to export/import account data. Thats much simpler and can also be used as a backup in case your instance goes down.
This makes a lot of sense and would be quite useful too! As taking your posts with you is hard to implement (AFAIU), migration really just comes down to importing data like subscriptions.
- HobbitFoot ( @HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ) English48•1 year ago
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.
- HobbitFoot ( @HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ) English21•1 year ago
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.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English45•1 year ago
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.
- bdonvr ( @bdonvr@thelemmy.club ) English8•1 year ago
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 :)
- Dandroid ( @dandroid@dandroid.app ) English5•1 year ago
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.
- HobbitFoot ( @HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ) English4•1 year ago
What kind of internet connection do you have?
- Dandroid ( @dandroid@dandroid.app ) English6•1 year ago
I have a 1 Gbps up and down fiber connection.
- Roane ( @roanescence@lemmy.today ) English1•1 year ago
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.
- Lvxferre ( @lvxferre@lemmy.ml ) English47•1 year ago
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.
- joelghill ( @joelghill@lemmy.ml ) English45•1 year ago
I asked this in the original thread but I’ll repeat it here:
-
Are there any limitations with the ActivityPub protocol you find limiting? Do you have recommendations for future versions of the protocol?
-
Do you have any thoughts on the AT Protocol (a potential competitor to AP)?
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English47•1 year ago
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.
- joelghill ( @joelghill@lemmy.ml ) English5•1 year ago
I’ve been following BlueSky closely for a while and I’ll just add a few points here:
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
- electriccars ( @electriccars@startrek.website ) English43•1 year ago
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.
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English34•1 year ago
Yes theres an open pull request for this.
- electriccars ( @electriccars@startrek.website ) English7•1 year ago
🥳
- AgreeableLandscape ( @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml ) English42•1 year ago
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!
- nutomic ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) English32•1 year ago
Thanks for your help :)
- AgreeableLandscape ( @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml ) English17•1 year ago
It was my pleasure! Thank you for the opportunity!
I appreciate you a ton comrade, you’ve been such a great help in getting this instance off the ground. Personal stuff should always be more important, so I hope all goes well. If you ever decide you want to admin again, lmk!
- AgreeableLandscape ( @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml ) English3•1 year ago
Thank you so much comrade! I loved working with you and the other admins and am very grateful for the experience!
- sunbeam60 ( @sunbeam60@lemmy.one ) English42•1 year ago
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.
- oce 🐆 ( @oce@jlai.lu ) English40•1 year ago
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.