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
Is there any new p2p/decentral technology that is trying to advance beyond federation?
It would be cool to have a generic framework to make web resources that are inherently decentralized without the need for sponsor and hosting.
Like IPFS but as a social site. Everyone helps partially host content in exchange for access to all the content.
There is a ton of decentralized projects that no one has really ever heard of, new ones pop up all the time (I was watching multiple of them in the past). Sadly in most cases it seems like most authors stop working on their projects after a while.
The same ideas have existed for a long time but both decade old projects (ever heard of Freenet? Probably no) and new ones . Many of them are very ambitious and try to replace huge swaths of things (not just file storage but also social aspects, web of trust, etc) but then collapse under the complexity. IPFS is the most well known new project and (good imo) has limited its scope, but sadly (still) suffers from huge scalability issues, some of which are deep in the design.
I think it's really hard to align incentives there - the nicer it is the harder it is to make money with it. So either these projects tend towards control by one entity or they tend towards death.
Really the only one that seems to have a long lasting life so far is torrents. Which are amazing. And Email if you want to count that.
Torrents are truly one of the best inventions of the internet.
They've fully solved the static data distribution problem, in a way that's resilient and practical. I do a few torrent-related side projects, and I'm also super-interested in how we could integrate them into lemmy UIs and apps in order to take on YouTube.
I'd love to see that happen.
I'm fed up to shit with youtube's bullshit. Between their excessive advertising, unmoderated comments and far-right bias I want so bad to leave that shit and never come back.
I take a deep breath before I enter any youtube comment section that isn't a cooking video lol.
There are different software that could help this happen but I'm not sure how they'd handle all of lemmy's content
There is Gun.js and OrbitDB (OrbitDB runs on IPFS using Helia)
and there is FreeNet which allows hosting of freesites on their network if you have something downloaded to your computer.
Some of the problems could be mitigated by volunteers running relay nodes hosting the kind of content they want to stay up (this would work with Gun.js and OrbitDB since it allows subscribing to specific data) or just general relay nodes that gives the network more capacity (this would be the method if you are working with FreeNet)
Again not sure how easy or hard this would be so I hope the developers share their thoughts.
Edit: When I say relay nodes hosting I don't mean they have control over the data but instead keeps the data online. The data is still stored on the users own device and is shared between users if both are online at the same time.