Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT
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
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.
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
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 guess that shows that community takeover is possible, and does not need additional tools, just some time and dedication.
No, that defeats the entire point.
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" ?
The point of me having my own control over my instance. The bad moderator thing will always be a problem.
I don't see how agglomerating vuew of all same name communities for the user impact you as a server owner ?
You still have totalitarian control over everything happening on your server.
You can still
Delete all post and comments
Change any text in any post or comment even if made by other users and without their notice
Ban any user
Ban any community
Even ban all users and all communities (whilte only model)
I must’ve read your comment wrong. Sounds like you just want a multi Reddit type feature? I agree that that should be implemented some apps have already did it. I don’t agree that the same word community should be lumped together universally and automatically.
No multireddit cannot solve this problem.
They are not a default agglomeration view so they will never make a difference as most users never change their defaults.
Covered in more details here
https://lemmy.ml/comment/7734804
A community cannot escape the stranglehold of moderators with a multireddit, because most users will simply not have it the backup community setup in their multireddit. They will never see dissenters posting in the backuos. And that makes multireddit largely useless
Who are the moderators in this scenario you’re talking about?
It's an hypothetical community, so they're hypothetical moderators/owners. I'm not sure how to respond to "who are they".
They're some bad hombrés..
Your argument through all of this is bad moderators controlling the largest communities so I’m wondering how what you’re saying fixes any of that.
Makes communities other than the one big one visible to nonlogged and default users without extra steps.
In effect this makes all communities global by default.
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
If it requires the owner's consent, it defeats the purposeof my proposal.
It is expressly to disempower the owners in favour of the users.
I really don't hate this idea from a lemmy centric UX perspective but how do you handle federation with other platforms?