We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. *Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST*

Dessalines@lemmy.mlmod to Announcements@lemmy.ml – 1373 points –

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.

Original Announcement thread

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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?

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.

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