Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

Dessalines@lemmy.mlmod to Announcements@lemmy.ml – 386 points –

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.

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Will Lemmy ever have another source of income like official merch or will it rely on donations for the foreseeable future?

Would people really pay for Lemmy merch?

I think they would, it would be super cool to do art competitions and have the community pick the designs, could do it once a quarter to help boost funding.

There might need to be a revamp of the logo to make it a bit more appealing.

What I could definitely see happening would be instance-based merch, especially if the community feeling is strong.

Personally maybe with some better art, not with the plain mouse logo

Lemmy merch could be really cool especially if there was competitions/events for designing the merch

I’d be down for an enamel pin. I’m sure you guys are familiar with the Apollo app (RIP), but in his merch store he had enamel pins made in the style of some of his app icons.

To add, recurring donations, no matter how small, help us plan for the future, as we can then reliably estimate how many developers we can support off them. One-offs donations and merch sales wouldn't help us out in that regard.