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
Is there a public roadmap of some sort?
Maybe a blog post like “a year in review and what’s up for this year”
I’m not talking about bugs or minor tweaks. Just a general where are we, where are we coming from and where are we going to? What are important milestones?
I’ve just updated the post body with some updates about this, but if we get approved for another year of funding from NLNet, the the two new devs will be working on these milestones in 2024 (still a draft at this point).
Being an open source project, we can afford to be less strict about a roadmap, as anyone (including ourselves) can take on any of the open issues on the issue tracker. Part of the fun of these is getting to pick which things you’d like to work on, and that you personally think are important.
Outside of maintenance-related tasks and merging PRs (which does take a significant chunk of our time) of course @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I both have things we’d like to prioritize this year. My main priorities are:
- Getting Jerboa as fully functional as lemmy-ui.
- Notifications (Unified push).
- Working on lemmy-ui-leptos, our proposed replacement web UI for lemmy-ui written in Rust.
- Performance improvements (DB, federation code)
- Stabilizing the API
- Becoming fully funded by donations, and growing our dev co-op.
I think a lemmy roadmap for the next year is hard, because scope and even individual features depend on funding (for example, nlnet funds specific features).
Maybe something like Mastodon’s roadmap would be possible though (with no specific timeline)? https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this thread
Edit: Leaving this here
It’s OK to post questions here:
Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
“Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.”
:)
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?
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.
I’m pretty sure all user data is public already.
PMs might be the only thing not everyone can see.
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.
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
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
Interoperability is great, but sadly there isn’t really any organized group effort to standardize more aspects / extensions of ActivityPub. AP is really “thin” in that it barely prescribes anything. There’s not even a test suite to test whether software complies to the spec of AP.
So everyone kind of does their own thing, and fixes interoperability on a case-by-case basis. This makes it kinda frustrating to spend time on - lemmy already has special cases for many different softwares (peertube, mastodon, …) and every one increases the complexity.
There are such efforts on SocialHub and on a W3C mailing list. However devs of major Fediverse projects are rarely active there, because they are all busy working on their own software.
Very interesting question since mastodon introduced groups very recently which are a direct competitor to lemmy
https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse/
Of course not mature but mastodon can have groups without lemmy
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.
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.
Maybe hide the big instances behind a few clicks? Like you could sort/filter for them, but you’d have to navigate a bit? The average user isn’t going to bother. Like have a default sort that hides the big ones, and a default filter that filters out the top five or whatever.
I think its totally normal that instance sizes follow a power law distribution. Its similar to many other things, for example there are few large cities, some medium cities and lots of small cities. The wiki article lists many other examples. So I think its fine as long as there are no intentional attempts to lock in users into large instances or limit federation.
The big instances are bad enough but big communities are absolute killer of decentralisation
When you go to /c/books on your server, you don’t see an agglomeration of all /c/books on all servers of the fediverse. You only see that server’s /c/books, if it even has one.
This is a fatal flaw of lemmy which concentrates power enormously into the hands of the owners.
The default view should be all /c/books on all federated servers, with an easy way to filter only local posts.
Lemmy will turn into reddit if this is not quickly rectified.
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
What point ?
The point of becoming a moderator that decide what everyone can and can’t say ?
The point of “making another reddit but I’m /u/spez” ?
maybe communities should be able to flag that they’re the same community as one on another server, and if they mutually do so be combined into one metacommunity that people can search for
This isn’t the first time I have proposed this, but the pushback leads me to believe the owners do not want to relinquish power to the users. Lemmy it seems, is a community for owners. The interests of instance owners and their delegates come first.
I think we will need the digg & reddit story to play out all over again so that in 10-15 years the next exodus out of lemmy might lead us somewhere we can actually be free.
