We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. *Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST*
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.
I asked in the other thread about GDPR.
Nobody thinks it's very interesting but if instances don't follow gdpr, the entire network is at risk of legal consequences.
So please bring this up, even though it's not very fun.
Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don't know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn't do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.
We have a
Legalsection under admin settings, that's an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We'd need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn't EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:
For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between "we're thinking about it" and "we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we'll get to it sometime within the next month"), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.
As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that "no, it's anonymous" - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.
So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you're not doing that, you're not fully compliant.
Kind of shitty, but that's how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)
Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don't recall what the time was for a "see my data" request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.
It's often too expensive to support GDPR for Europeans and disable it for other people. Most services just support GDPR for everyone.
Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?
Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social's privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy
As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.
That sounds like its something for instance admins to handle, nothing we as developers need to care about. Maybe we should add a privacy policy for lemmy.ml but thats it.
Yea it is ultimately on the admins, but Lemmy just needs to not make it hard to comply with GDPR. So it's up to admins to raise issues when Lemmy is seen as an obstacle to compliance, and it's up to devs to listen and implement compliance features.
How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?
Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named
!news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:This also isn't unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.
Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.
There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.
Overall tho, I'm against the concept of "combining / merging communities" that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !news@startrek.website
Classic bot. Don't you know who you are talking to!
!dontyouknowwhoiam@lemmy.world
I'd imagine it would be the same way it worked on Reddit when there were multiple communities with identical topics/similar names:
One gets a bit larger, therefore shows up in feeds more, appears higher in search results, etc.
Unless the other community has some kind of differentiation, it will wither and die.
And everything will be fine.
I keep seeing people being this up as if it's some huge problem. There's tons of /c/memes out there, but !memes@lemmy.ml is clearly the place to go. It's not confusing, IMO.
Any plans for improving SEO? One of Reddit’s biggest strengths was being able to get very relevant results with a simple internet search. In time can you see something similar for Lemmy, even with its decentralized nature? I really you for doing this, thank you for your time!
Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there's anything else needs to be added, we're open to PRs.
Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn't be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I'd rather focus on improving lemmy's search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.
Would you please consider having only local post/community/users indexed by search engines? A lemmy.ml user complained that their username is first result on Google with lemmynsfw.com domain name. Also implementing this would decrease chance of duplicate content.
It can resolved with a simple noindex meta tag.
I'd be open to a PR for that, sure.
I hate Inferno (specifically class components) but I'll check what I can do 🙏
I do too now (I created lemmy-ui when react was king), which is why the new UI will be written in leptos, using signal-based reactivity, and functional components.
I second this. I know SEO is a controversial term with Lemmy's core audience, but being able to find posts through a search engine is pretty darn helpful. It'll also help more people find their way to Lemmy, which will diversify the range of communities.
If you're not sure where to start, Google's free Search Console can give you insight into how your site ranks, how people are finding you and which factors are preventing instances from appearing in search.
Right now, instances with transphobic and racist content like exploding-heads are still listed on join-lemmy.org. Are you planning to implement a Server Convenant like on joinmastodon.org? To be listed on joinmastodon.org, an instance needs “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.
The instance list is fine as is. Think about it like this: do you want racists to join a single instance so they are all in one place? Or do you want them to spread across all different instances, causing moderation problems everywhere?
Yes, I think it would be best if they would all gather on one instance that can get defederated. Right now they attract users on join-lemmy with "Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable", no other info.
And if the racist is here to cause problems rather than commiserate with fellow racists, they now know exactly which community to avoid, thus restoring moderation problems everywhere. I don't think anyone is asking you to moderate every instance to ensure they are sticking to your TOS or your viewpoints, but it's a very minor ask to not showcase off the racists and transphobes and bigots on the 'join this platform' page.
It's possible that anti-racist, queer or any other serious organisations might not want to link to join-lemmy.org because of it.
i would rather want the racists to not be able to go anywhere at all
It doesnt really matter what you want. The software is open source so anyone can use the software freely. No way to prevent it.
yea sure there will always be racist instances but they shouldn't be promoted on sites like join-lemmy.org
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:
Wow lots of questions here.
Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.
Alright second part:
Hope multiples are ok ...
Haha youre a very curious one :D
Honestly heart warming to hear!
I'm not asking anything because I'm a potato when it comes to software. I just wanted to drop by and say: thank you both for Lemmy. The platform is amazing, and it's clear that you guys are pouring some heavy love (and labour hours) in it, as it's improving at an amazing pace.
Thanks! We're glad ppl are finding Lemmy useful, and enjoying using it!
As some instances grow, server costs are becoming significant. Right now, servers are only funded through donations. Do you see the development of anything else to help fund server costs?
If lemmy is working as intended (many small, connected servers), hosting costs should be small: like < $10 USD / month. (images are another issue, but I'll answer that in other comments).
Of course we don't plan on adding any monetization directly into lemmy or its UI, including ads, or required payments. Right now at least the best way is to put donation links in your site sidebar.
I'm on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month, which is above your costs.
Beehaw reports costs at over $500 USD/month.
I would imagine lemmy.world is in the thousands.
I know the idea is that there should be more instances, but we are already beginning to see server costs that are higher than what you think. User numbers seem to be settling down now, but who knows when the next spike will happen.
It depends where and how you are hosting. Hetzner or OVH have small VPS which can host hundreds of active users for those 10 usd. Of course if you host on AWS or Digitalocean its much more expensive. lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server. Hosting costs will also go down as the code gets more optimized.
Yep. As ppl have mentioned, while our performance bottleneck is currently the unoptimized postgres operations, we haven't even come close reaching postgres's actual internal limits. So code and DB optimization will be the biggest factor reducing costs.
Any plans to improve the sorting algorithm so that there's a good balance of fresh posts at the top that's also fairly active? And to help promote smaller communities that would have otherwise been dominated by the posts from bigger instances.
Any concerns about duplicate communities across multiple instances? People have made the argument that it's like having different flavors of subreddits on Reddit, but it's a flawed analogy. Individual instances have incentive to make their own communities flourish, whether or not there's a duplicate already available.
Its been bothering me too, that the large communities have been swamping out smaller ones.
As one solution, the closed PR linked in this issue has some more context, but we plan to add a Best sort, that retains the qualities of hot, but gives a boost for small communities over larger ones. This shouldn't be too difficult to add, as its very similar to hot.
Another benefit of lemmy being FOSS, is that we have the option to add many more sorts as time goes on.
See here.
As an aside, linking to comments appears to be bugged and only shows any replies to it and not the main comment, like so:
Might be worth copy/pasting the content for now, I assume it's a bug in Lemmy UI. Unfortunately hitting show context just refreshes the page.
I am suspecting this is related to issue 2030.
First of all, I'd like to say thank you and that I appreciate your work. Lemmy is great and I've found a new home (at least for the foreseeable future). I first joined lemmy.ml once I learned about lemmy, and I have to say I had a good experience there. You guys even responded directly to my noob questions, and I honestly felt welcome which helped me decide to stay.
My questions are about account migration. As you may have already seen, I'm not with lemmy.ml anymore. The reason is I saw you guys stickied a post encouraging users to use different instances (since the server was having trouble with the influx of redditors at that time). I figured I'd help by first moving to a smaller instance. I have no regrets, although switching was a bit tricky since I had to start from scratch.
What are your thoughts on account migration? Is it in the works or is it something that's a little far into the future? No pressure since I know you guys are busy with other stuff.
Account migration is not in the works, and I consider it very low priority. Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy isnt focused on individual users, so it doesnt matter much if you start posting from another instance one day. If its important for you, you can always put a link in your profile to your other accounts. I would rather implement a way to export/import account data. Thats much simpler and can also be used as a backup in case your instance goes down.
This is perfectly reasonable. I think a lot of users will be happy with this. Also, I agree with the view that lemmy isn't focused on individual users. We have X, Mastodon, etc. for that. Thanks for the response!
This makes a lot of sense and would be quite useful too! As taking your posts with you is hard to implement (AFAIU), migration really just comes down to importing data like subscriptions.
For communities, howver, it is much more important thing. Re-tart a community from scratch on another instance has a huge "cost".
Thats true, but community migration seems complicated to implement so it will have to wait.
I asked this in the original thread but I’ll repeat it here:
Are there any limitations with the ActivityPub protocol you find limiting? Do you have recommendations for future versions of the protocol?
Do you have any thoughts on the AT Protocol (a potential competitor to AP)?
Limitations no, if anything the protocol is too extensive and lets you do too many things (or do the same thing in different ways). But thats somewhat expected for a protocol which can handle all types of social media platforms. I think the protocol is fine as is, but it needs minor changes here and there to keep up with how it is being used in the real world. The FEP process is doing a good job of that.
From what I know the AT protocol used by Bluesky is entirely centralized, so it doesnt look like a competitor yet. They claim that it will be decentralized in the future, but I will believe it when I see it. For now the decentralization seems more like a marketing gimmick.
Hi! This isn't really a question, but I was a former admin on Lemmy.ml and I just want to say that I really appreciated the opportunity to be on your team and it was a really valuable experience for me! I'm no longer an admin due to inactivity and personal life events causing me to no longer have the time to serve such a role, but I enjoyed the time I was and I really hope I was able to make a positive contribution to the instance!
Thank you for your continued work developing this project and running your instance comrades! This is still by far my favourite fediverse platform, actually, favourite social media in general. I intend to continue using both Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad and I hope I can continue to contribute by using Lemmy when I have the chance!
Thanks for your help :)
It was my pleasure! Thank you for the opportunity!
I appreciate you a ton comrade, you've been such a great help in getting this instance off the ground. Personal stuff should always be more important, so I hope all goes well. If you ever decide you want to admin again, lmk!
What do you think of the neoliberal hell that lemmy.ml is right now?
I dont follow /c/worldnews so I dont see much of that. Also hexbear is federating now, so it might easily swing back the other way again.
I don't share your optimism but I appreciate it!
A very warm welcome to our comrades from Hexbear!
Have you considered a feature like “sibling community”?
What I mean is, for example, car community on server 1 marks itself as a sibling community to a car community on server 2. Similarly server 2 marks itself as a sibling community to server 1, ie it is two-way.
When communities have been linked bi-directionally, any post and comment are shared between the two sibling communities.
This would allow bigger communities to form out of smaller communities, thereby preventing discussions from being fragmented and showing the true size of Lemmy, across servers.
Since you're very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?
Thanks for your work, it's projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive.
Are there any plans to make an upvote history log available for users to view? I loved looking back over my upvoted content occasionally, but now I have to specifically save them to be able to keep track of them.
Yes theres an open pull request for this.
First, just want to say thanks for building and maintaining Lemmy. It's an incredible project, and it provides an incredibly valuable public forum that's completely open. This is the way internet was always meant to work before it got hijacked by corporations.
The questions I'd like to ask would be whether the platform is developing in the way you originally envisioned, what surprised you in terms of how the platform ended up being used in the wild, and what were the biggest technical and non technical problems that came from the rapid growth after the Reddit migration. And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.
I mostly imagined the slow but steady growth we'd been having, and def didn't anticipate that reddit would mess up so badly that a massive chunk of users would migrate from a multi-million dollar enterprise software, to a hobby project developed by a couple of marxist-leninists 🤣 . But so it goes, with all these late-capitalist social media companies alienating their users, monetizing them in any way possible in search of declining surplus.
The biggest non-tech problem, is just the overwhelming amount of notifications. Companies have multiple layers between devs and users, to separate, order, and create a more controlled explosion. That doesn't exist here, so we get hundreds of notifications every day, with everyone treating us as their personal issue tracker.... and I basically would get nothing done if all I did was respond to them. Luckily things are calming down a bit now.
The biggest tech-problem was the performance and security issues of so many users joining the network all at once, and luckily we had so many wonderful community contributions to help stabilize that.
We should be ambitious, and wantthe fediverse as a whole, on the long term, to replace big-tech. Every user we draw away from them, is one less person exploited for their data and treated as a commodity.
Technically, I'd just like us to continue making the software better, maintaining the code, and adding features.
To be honest I never had any long-term vision, and still dont have. I just thought that decentralized software in general and Activitypub in particular is very exciting and lets us take power away from corporations like Reddit, Google, Facebook etc.
Biggest technical problem was implementing Activitypub, when I started there was no implementation in Rust yet, and it was very hard to find detailed information how everything is supposed to work. Over the years I had to rewrite the federation code at least 4-5 times, each time making it a bit cleaner.
Biggest nontechnical challenge is dealing with all the people who are suddenly joining and want to contribute, so that it doesnt turn into total chaos. Luckily there are many helpful community members who helped to organize things. Another challenge is with funding, now we dont have as much time to work on the paid NLnet milestones. And its not clear if NLnet will grant us another funding round once this is over. Hopefully the user donations will grow over time so that they can cover our full salaries.
I'm gonna ask some tough questions, but I am hopeful to get a response. Thank you for all that you do.
Thanks!
Alltab will be full of potentially illegal content if you federate with NSFW instances. We want to focus on dev, and not on legal issues, so for that reason we won't federate with NSFW ones.Comrade Dessalines, you rock. Your audiobooks and essays are great. No questions.
o7 comrade. I'm glad I can help out in any way.
Chances that hexbear emojis become the Lemmy standard across all instances ?
Thank you for your service.
Each instance should be in control of their own emojis IMO, for example a star trek instance would have only star-trek related emojis.
Who wouldn't want Star Trek themed emojis and
Is that a denguin lol, nice.
If they tried to have any non-Star Trek emojis Dessalines would press the secret instance destroying button and eradicate them
Resistance is futile, your emojis will become part of the collective.
With so many growing instances, were finding a lot of duplicate communities within each one, wich results in a lot of duplicate posts by cross posters.
Do you think it will be possible to aggregate similar communities together in some way?
See here
Thanks for both of your work on Lemmy, join-lemmy, lemmy-ui and Jerboa.
cross_postscome back through theGetPostendpoint, to see where else specific posts have been posted to.The fragmentation issues I've addressed here.
Are you proud/happy/satisfied how Lemmy progresses and its current status?
Does it make sense to spend your time to develop client apps when there are so many other already (including open source)
What are your ambitions/goals/hopes for Lemmy in one year from now?
What do you see as the biggest issue for Lemmy (as a platform) which must be addressed?
Ps: thank you for your work!
Thanks!
Do you think 'normies' (people with very very little technical knowledge/experience) will be able to come to a decentralized platform like lemmy? Can a platform be successful long term (especially in niche areas) without that super huge low effort part of the user base?
I’m an over-50 white Southern lady with no tech skills and I’m loving it. The apps help, and I’m sure I’m missing out on something, but it honestly isn’t that hard to figure out in a general sense.
Great response. Love to see that it is not just us nerds on here!
One of the things up next on my agenda, is to re-do join-lemmy.org . We have the mockup for it done, I just need to complete it.
Also as someone who grew up before the "use this single US-based site to connect to everything", I don't see how lemmy is too different from older forums. You go to a site, click the signup button, and wait for approval / log in immediately. You don't need to know anything about activitypub, federation, or the fediverse to sign up and start using a lemmy site.
I think an already established player like Sync or Boost should provide an experience that hand holds newcomers, by leaving little to guess work.
For me its already a huge success that Lemmy got where it is today, with over 50k users. If you had told me that a few months ago, I hardly would have believed it. When I started working on Lemmy, there were a couple dozen active users at most, yet the project didnt die. Instead it kept growing and growing steadily. So I think it will keep growing, and there will be more improvements which make Lemmy more accessible for normal users.
First off, thank you for this awesome platform and for being my first real experience with contributing to FOSS, I learned quite a bit and I had a lot of of fun! I really hope Rust ends up becoming the new standard in web backends instead of Java with Spring/Springboot.
The only question I have that hasn't already been asked is about the legal side of things:
What are you responsible for as the developers of Lemmy, and what are you responsible for as the owners of a Lemmy instance?
Do you have to take certain measures to keep the platform clean from illegal activities and CP/gore? If so, what has been done?
The same question applies to GDPR rules for Europe.
Thanks for doing this :D
Like any instance admins, we just have to remove illegal content as it comes up and gets reported.
You can report posts, so that admins / mods can see and remove them quickly.
GDPR-related stuff we've answered in other comments, but neither of us are familiar with its details.
Opinions on hexbear finally federating?
Im glad its finally working, took a long time. Welcome to the federation!
Is it possible to disable the caching of images from other instances onto my server?
YES! 150GB of image archive with only 94 users 🤡
Maybe I'm completely misremembering things, but at some point wasn't there a hotfix to Lemmy that hard-limited how many comments a thread could have? Does anyone know if there's a maximum and if so how many?
Just wondering, cause uh, I could see this one having a lot of comments.
The fix you are referring to only limits how many comments can be retrieved in a single API call (300). This limit is only used when specific parameters are passed, not in all cases.
Tree-paging is a pretty complicated issue, and we really do need some DB / SQL experts to help us with figuring out how to page them correctly. The limit is 300, but only for the top-level comment fetch, which could also have different slices whether you sort by top, or new, and doesn't apply to the nested comments, which could have thousands.
The limit is a kludge, because ppl were creating thousands of comments, and without proper paging, it was affecting performance.
Which are your 3 favorites lemmy instances besides Lemmy.ml?
also thanks for the work you do
I love all my children equally 🤣 . Haha no I don't want to play favorites. So far every instance has something great about it, and something to add. I also really like startrek.website, and would love to see more topic-based instances. I would love to see a ravelry-type site in lemmy.
Is there a reason we don't have users ability to block entire instances, or is it difficult to code? (I don't mean to sound ungrateful)
The only reason is that no one got around to it yet. Its not that difficult, in fact I plan to work on it soonish. There have just been tons of more important things to work on recently (like improving performance and keeping up with all the pull requests).
FYI: I use this usercript to block whole instances: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469297-block-lemmy-instances
You need to edit line 17
Here adapted to work also with MLMYM (https://old.lemmy.world): https://pastebin.com/z0mShfDP
Can we get the show context bug fixed? Pretty please? :3 Possibly the most frustrating bug we've ever had.
Also, on crossposted threads can we get the first thread marked as "original post" so it's clear what the originating community is for people that might want to subscribe to it for similar content. The indication of the originating community is a considerable source of subscriptions over on reddit and one of the primary methods that crossposting functions as a growth tool for new communities.
When you started this project did you think it would get where it is now? Was it a sort of daydream thing or a serious belief that it would get this far?
cross_postsfield is sorted by published, but I'm not totally positive. In that case it'd just be marking it in the UI in some way.I can, will do it this evening. I don't think it does sort like that I'm pretty sure I noticed it just being in any old order, maybe alphabetical? Either way a clearly indicated
Original post:separate to theCross posted to:would strongly incentivise community owners to crosspost their content for the community promotion it provides, and reward them with subscribers for doing it. It generates a little bit of "hey stop advertising in our subreddit" from some modteams but it's worth far more than it takes away, and this is an extremely specific little detail of the system that I think only people that have tried to start many different new subreddits will understand.Back in the Digg days Reddit just quietly sat in Digg's shadow as a sort of "dual power" if you will. Its community did its own thing, creating a culturally-unique space with its own community that liked it for its own sake. They just had to exist and Digg would eventually shit the bed. I think one of the major things that community owners here ought to be doing, which sadly the largest - lemmyworld - is not, is to create a space that is not just "we're reddit but without Spez". Better reasons for being here other than just spite are essential for longevity. Hexbear does a good job of this, Lemmy seems to be building that up too, I've recently become fond of the direction lemm.ee appears to be headed but we'll see.
Ironically lemmyworld won't see this criticism because of their defederation, so their users are missing out on several ama responses.
Show context is working on hexbear again.
We love our devs folks
Our wild emotes showing up on other instances must be something lol
Some of them show up really big on other instances.
Any plans to make it easier to interact with links to other instances?
The QoL value to automatically open links to other instances inside my current instance would be enormous.
What was your first reaction to the massive exodus from Reddit during the blackout? Was it something you were expecting?
It was
On the negative side, for about 2 months, I got an average of 5 hours sleep a night, got 12k+ notifications on github alone, and every day was a new stressful emergency.
But it also helped us expose a bunch of security issues, and help expose and optimize some of our DB issues, so in that sense a reddit-sized stress-test was of long-term benefit to the project.
Luckily things have calmed down now, and we're able to cope with things a bit better.
Thank you a lot for building such an awesome platform! Here are my questions:
How did you get into communism? Were there any events that had an influence on you becoming communists and what personally motivates you to keep working on lemmy even though you could earn much more as developers working on proprietary software?
Growing up during the US war on the Iraqi people, the jingoistic coverage in media for all US wars, then the subsequent alienation I felt after I started working, is the main thing that turned me to Marxism. Essentially, when the extremely untrustworthy warmongers start calling everything they dislike, "communism / socialism", then it must be worth looking into. And I found that there was good reason they carefully steer populations away from Marxist literature, and deem it a heresy: because its a clear and straightforward description of how things actually work, and it threatens their fortunes. Nearly every communist grows up in liberal-dominated cultures, and goes through their own process of rejecting the world that enshrines property and profit over human lives, and how it affected them personally. Their stories are all worth listening to.
I've worked in many different industries in software, and found the same issues in all of them, and just lost patience, especially seeing that all the work I did creating proprietary software was essentially thrown in the trash, and societally useless. I'd much rather be paid very little, and contribute something positive to the world; time is our most valuable resource, and we should spend it doing things that improve the world, because there is so much that needs doing.
This is very well put and mirrors the issue I keep coming up against in my career.
Thanks for the reply! As a baby Marxist I just wanted to add that I recently listened to your Audiobook of Zak Cope‘s Divided World Divided Class and I thought that it was really eye opening as it for the first time made it clear to me, that there actually is a material basis for people in the West to buy into the liberal ideology. Living in the west one personally benefits from the bribes that the western haute bourgeoisie is able to pay its workers in inflated wages made possible by the super exploitation of labor and resources in the third world. (At least that is my understanding of the book, I‘m open for different interpretations)
So thank you for making the book available as an audiobook!
Thanks! Yep that book really did open my eyes too, that the process of colonial extraction of the labor of millions of super-exploited global south workers, to feed the imperial core nations, is still going.
Glad I could help!
Firstly, I just have appreciation for you and nutomic for this amazing platform that you've created. This has become my favorite source of reading discussions and looking at memes. I know it's small, but I love it and want it to succeed. My question is Do you see Lemmy or any other federated platforms reaching the level of audiences that other big Social Media Platforms currently have? Do you want it to grow big like them, or remain as it is, An amazing platform hidden in one corner of the Web?
For me Lemmy is already extremely huge now. For a long time it was possible to keep up with all new comments in less than half an hour per day of browsing. So I wouldnt mind if it stays small, but anyway its not my choice. On the other hand its also great to see the project finally grow after we put so much work into it. And getting more users is actually necessary in order to get more donations so that we can make a living.
I don't know that we'll ever replace big tech, but none of us can see the future. These giants will likely have a slow decline, whilst open-source and federated services will grow at their expense. But of course in the long term I do want the fediverse to replace the US tech giants, who treat us and our data as commodities to be bought and sold.
Any case where we can draw users away from that exploitation, is a victory.
Do you aim for Lemmy to become GDPR-compatible in the future ( see https://gdpr-info.eu/ for details)?
what new feature would Lemmy have in the 1.0.0? I know it's quite a long way to go, but what is the vision you guys have moving toward it?
Edit: bonus question: what does Chat supposed to do?
1.0 is not about features, but stability. It means there wont be any breaking changes to the api or federation for a while, until 2.0. In fact we were thinking to make some breaking changes and then release 1.0 later this year. But then the Reddit migration happened and those plans had to be scrapped.
Chat simply orders the comments in a different way, newest first without any nesting.
What is your and others Devs opinion on the pre-emptive de-federation of 20k hexbear users by 120k user instance lemmy.world?
Would you think Ranked Choice voting for admins i.e. with the Schulze method - which Debian
uses - integrated into the sites would mean that better community supported decisions can be made for both moderation as well as in comments/communities about stuff?
Also: is there a remind me in 2 month of this post option?
For obvious reasons, we don't want to be involved in inter-server conflicts. Admins are free to run their servers however they see fit.
I don't know how the debian one works (I'm also personally a fan of olympic score / range voting over ranked choice). Because of the possibility of weaknesses of these community-moderation proposals(people creating fake users to vote, and gaming them in hundreds of other ways I can't think about) I'd rather not stress-test them in lemmy.
We don't have a remind-me, but someone could implement it, it'd def be useful. I don't even think there's an open issue for that one yet.
One of the major complaints on Reddit was the mod governance structure, with rank dependent on who showed up first. On the roadmap, do you see implementing other ways to govern mods, maybe something like how a lot of video game guilds govern themselves?
As a communist, I'm also receptive to a more democratic and less-hierarchical style of moderation. A LOT of reddit communities have been wrecked by an absent top moderator, who suddenly and suspiciously "becomes active" and removes the moderators who have been keeping the sub going for years.
We've had several people make proposals on github, but my issue has always been this: these are mostly untested, and potentially insecure. In the online space without any sort of real-person verification, If some kind of voting on mod actions were implemented, people could just create fake accounts to game the system, or find other ways.
AFAIK there hasn't been any forum or community software that doesn't implement the top-down chain of trust model. And of course this is less of concern with decentralized software like lemmy, where people always have the option to host their own instance, or create their own community, and moderate it exactly as they see fit. That's not an option you have with reddit.
How do you plan on improving the onboarding/sign-up process for newcomers, especially when they have little to no understanding about the Fediverse?
See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2337049
Why did you choose Rust for the backend and Inferno for the frontend?
P.S. Thank you for your work!
Performance.
For web services, check out https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
For front-end, check out https://github.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark
At the time of making lemmy, actix (for back end), and inferno, were two of the highest-performing in their areas.
Why are Lemmy devs so adamantly opposed to a Follow User feature?
This is the one feature that is the biggest hurdle for full federation between Lemmy and all the other fediverse instances. Mastodon (and its forks), Peertube, Pixelfed, and kbin all allow this and federate extremely well together while Lemmy is the worst at federating because its the only one to exclude this feature.
(Please don’t reply with “use kbin if you want to follow users” again as its very dismissive and frustrating)
Here’s my crude write up on a somewhat hacky way this can be implemented as is:
::: spoiler spoiler
When creating an account the backend can automatically create a community thats the same as your username. make you the mod, and enable mod only posts to the community by default. On the update to the new version with the Follow User Feature a script can run to auto create communities with the names of users.
The script can also change any usernames that exist with the same name as a current community and add a U at the end of the user (an extremely small amount of users would be affected and usernames aren’t as important as preserving community names/urls)
Then we just need to follow the community of the same name as the user to follow them. The way mastodon already federates with Lemmy currently would allow you to recurve updates whenever the user posts to their own community since only they (and assigned mods) can post to their community. :::
Who are you guys if you don't mind me asking. What's your background?
We're just two software devs, and prefer to stay anonymous / undoxxed.
Would you consider reaching out to Victoria and see if she would be willing to start a new AMA community? This seems to be a chance to recreate all the best of the old/lost internet
Someone could do that for us, we're pretty busy.
Im from Germany and studied computer science. Was always very interested in open source and decentralized software. Worked in a couple different companies, but was never happy making profit for someone else. Luckily I found Lemmy shortly after Dessalines started the project, and put a lot of work into it. Then we found the NLnet funding which allowed us to work fulltime on the project.
Do you have any strong opinions on Richard Stallman? Is it good that he's back at the FSF?
He has done a lot for open source, its hard to imagine where we would be today without his contributions. Hes also a weird and controversial figure, but I couldnt care less about that pointless drama.
Very complicated figure, and we should weigh his contributions to the FOSS movement against his negatives, rather than defaulting to a simplistic worship or demonize.
What's your favorite dinosaur?
The way lemmy instances are organized reminds me of IRC. Was that any part of the inspiration?
Why Unicode usernames aren't supported yet? After all, a big part of the world's population don't use the Latin alphabet in their native languages.
Simple, no one has implemented it. Dessalines and I are busy with lots of things, so we rely on community contributions.
Tbh I think the display names as they currently work are dangerous. What would prevent me from setting my display name to
nutomic@lemmy.ml? Most front-ends would not show that I'm actually not you at first glance.Edit: Misread the question as being about display names. Full unicode support for usernames would be even more dangerous, basically opening the door to unicode homograph spoofing on that level too.
How much experience did you have with Rust when you started making Lemmy? What programming languages did you use before?
Just a little, on a few side projects. But lemmy was the one that I used to teach myself rust. Before I was mainly a Java developer.
Having a good idea + learning the new thing to program it in, is one of the best motivators for me, as I'm sure it is for a lot of devs.
I had zero experience with Rust before. Writing code for Lemmy was how I learned it. Didnt read any docs or books, just writing code and searching around how to solve my concrete problems. That approach works very well for me. Before that I was working on Android with Java, Kotlin and some Scala. Also used all kinds of different languages before that, PHP, C++, Delphi, Python, C and assembly in university (ugh)...
Will lemmy users be able to interact with Mastodon users in future and is there a roadmap for lemmy?
They already can, outside of lemmy users not being able to follow mastodon users, since we're a link-aggregator, not a micro-blogging platform.
Isn't there already some interop between Mastodon and Lemmy? I've seen Mastodon users comment on my Lemmy posts. Maybe Mastodon posts that aren't replies don't appear in Lemmy.
They speak the same protocol, but afaik Lemmy doesn't really have a concept of following Posts from a user instead of Posts to a community, so you won't see Mastodon posts on Lemmy.
Sorry, no question, only: Thank you for your hard work :)
What are your opinions on third party apps for Lemmy using ads on their free version?
Similar question here.
So, is the official term for AMAs on Lemmy "Ask Us Anything" (AUA)? Or shall we call it "Lemmy Ask U"?
I have heard some respectable communities, namely r/AskHistorians, express hesitance at coming to Lemmy in part over fears of appearing biased due to the overt political stance of Lemmy's creators. In other words, it's hard to be a neutral body in affiliation with anything that has an overt political stance.
I wonder what the devs of Lemmy think of this hesitance. Is it unreasonable and itself biased? Or do you see any potential for finding a way to facilitate a platform that would allow for a more neutral space?
They can run their own lemmy server, and they don't need to federate with any servers run by or for proles or anyone else they find distasteful.
Also, the deepest faith you can have in a political ideology is when you don't recognize you have one.
If anyone considers themselves a historian and thinks anything is unbiased, their experience and insight will be dubious at best. Understanding that everyone has a distinct worldview and therefore bias is literally high-school history class, years before History 101. Do they think reddit.com, or any reddit alternative for that matter, is unbiased or neutral??
Not only is it irrelevant in context (FOSS, forkable, the devs in question only moderate this single instance), it's especially unreasonable coming from /r/AskHistorians. They of all people should be able to understand bias, context and causation. If anything, this bias is just a guarantee that they won't sell out and extort the userbase.
"Neutrality" as a concept doesn't exist. People who claim to be neutral are usually pro status quo, so they don't need to express any political views because things are going well for them so far with the current politics.
They can definitely run their own server, and we'd even help them get set up. There's no such thing as a neutral space, but people can set up an instance if they'd like to moderate / control it how they see fit.
Doesn't the federation part fix that? Couldn't they host their own server or be on a more neutral instance? or am I missing the point?
They could, if they cared to research that much, which many don't seem to want to do.
What the hell? This is open source. The minute the devs do something to the product that people don't like, a bazillion forks will appear. While they are the developers of Lemmy, the code isn't theirs, it's everyone's.
Could you please create a middle ground between the nuclear option (banning sites) and the whack a mole option of banning users. It would be effective to be able to ban communities (at least temporarily) during bot spam attacks while you wait for admins to police up their site. Could there also be a way for admins to notify other admins that their site is spamming garbage so that admins know that their board is the cause of a problem and what that problem is?
We can't ban communities, because they aren't people and don't do actions. iirc there is a proposalto "temp-block" sites in the same way admins can "temp-ban" users, but we haven't been working on it.
Lemmy's bot problems used to be muuuch worse than they are now, and I encourage most instances to use the registration application method of signups, which has been time-tested by older forum software, and which we've found to work the best for blocking bots.
As far as admins notifying others, we don't want to reinvent the wheel by creating a chatroom in lemmy, so we recommend admins / mods use matrix or something else to communicate with each other about these things.
A few questions:
Why is lemmy licensed under the AGPL3? What prompted you to take that decision?
Most other Fediverse platforms use the same license. Its the only logical choice if you want to prevent corporations from taking your code and making a profit with it. AGPL is essentially the same as GPL, with the addition that code changes also need to be published if you provide the software on a server and not on a users own device.
I love that you guys use AGPL, the best license for networked software. This is exactly how Truth Social (the Donald Trump social site) was forced to release their source code, since it was just Mastodon, which is AGPL. The links to their sources are available here (warning, fash website link), but I do not know if they are actually compliant and up-to-date with whatever code changes they've made to it.
Of course, as we can see, AGPL is not about disallowing monetization, even by corporate actors. It's about giving back. A thing that reactionaries and big companies are exceptionally bad at doing. The AGPL is anathema to the all-consuming, anti-social goals of silicon valley tech companies. Consider Google's Anti-AGPL policy: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy. Compare that to how they treat Android, which is Linux (GPLv2) with the entire userland stripped out and replaced with non-copyleft code so as to ensure their continued control over the devices once they sell them to you.
OK, I'm hopping off the soapbox, now 😆
Its a good hard copyleft license, and since its used in a network setting, the AGPLv3 over the GPLv3.
Will an AMA comment sort type be added? Would be convenient to scroll by new replies from OP so we can easily keep up with AMAs
Thoughts on a GPL4?
Many examples indicate an even stronger license is needed, I will list a few
The current RedHat debacle
MuseScore's closed source Musehub (after being acquired by Ultimatw Guitar)
Google commiting copyright infringement by combining free (as in freedom) software with code under Apache license for Android
We clearly need a stronger, more all encompassing license.
I'm not too familiar with it, but I'm always open to moving to stronger copyleft-licenses, if the AGPLv3 is proving inadequate.
Any regrets during your time working on Lemmy? Like implementing a feature and then later on thinking "Shit. This sucks, but I can't remove it now or it will fuck up everything later."
Probably infinite scrolling in jerboa, as its a very harmful psychogical anti-pattern. Now that I've added it, people have been extremely resistent to my insistence that it should be done away with.
I didn't realize that you developes jerboa too! Thanks for not branding it something like "the official lemmy mobile client"
I use jeroba and I would at least love the option to turn off infinite scroll
Federation, because now there is no going back now. Just kidding
For me the whole point of fediverse is not depending on a single party for your socials/subs. But the current climate in each instance forces users to have accounts in multiple instances.
As a Lemmy user I believe account migration should be a default Lemmy feature which enables true federation for end users. Any plans for this feature in the near future?
Why are Lemmy devs so opposed to a Follow Thread feature? (The feature request is always immediately closed on github with the message: not planned)
Users being able to opt in to receive updates whenever a thread receives an edit to the post, a new comment, or a reply to a comment thread would be extremely useful.
First off. How dare you‽
how often will you do AMAs?
We could make this a regular thing if ppl like it.
Why isn't there a feature to allow individuals to block whole instances?
Is there a plan to improve search and federating communities between instances? My biggest hurdle joining and using Lemmy was without a doubt the search functionality and subscribing to a community on my own instance, it was severely off-putting. Let me walk you through it: you find a community you like, say !vinyl@sopuli.xyz. You paste it into the search of your instance, as instructed. It immediately tells you "No results". If you don't click off, sometimes it changes it's mind within a few seconds. Sometimes it never loads. You try manually creating the URL by going to example.com/c/vinyl@sopuli.xyz but it gives you an error. If you're lucky it works the next day, if you're not then I don't actually know the next step. Not to mention the lack of feedback on subscribing to communities. I have "subscribed" to communities before then realised a week later that despite appearing in my list of subs it didn't actually work and I have to redo, the only feedback you get is "pending". This is the #1 issue that stops me from recommending Lemmy, or at least smaller instances that haven't federated with much yet. Is the search a priority?
I know you've been asked about splitting NSFW already, but is there any chance of a specific NSFL tag or a generic spoiler/blur tag? Gore and nudity are such different topics they really don't deserve to be under the same banner.
Are proper inline previews something on the roadmap? What I mean is items like YouTube videos, Streamable links, and just about anything that isn't a Lemmy image is not expandable and requires leaving the website. It's one of my most missed features from old Reddit with RES.
I read as much of the thread as possible, so hopefully these are new questions. Hope I didn't come across too negative here as I've been enjoying my time overall and I know y'all have been swamped these months and never expected this popularity.
Any thoughts on overhauling cross-posting, to allow more interaction with the source interaction?
As far as I'm aware: currently when you cross-post, only the recipient instance gets all interactions (comments, upvotes), instead of duplicating to or having the origin solely receive those.
The current implementation hampers the growth of smaller instances when reposting something to a bigger one. Discoverability is still there due to seeing from which instance the post originates from, but that's arguably not enough.
With instances already disappearing (eg. vlemmy), content is being lost. Are you considering a lemmy archive?
For communities that have been federated, their historical data, posts, comments, etc should still be available on other instances. So in a sense they're already archived.
Besides that, we have a backup / restore guide on the join-lemmy docs that show how to backup your DB, which every server should be doing.
Every instance automatically archives content from other instances that it federates with (though this doesnt include images). An archive sounds like a good idea, but we certainly dont have the capacity to take on another project. It would have to be done by someone from the community.
Something that trips me up a bit about federation and instances is the overlap of identical communities from different instances.
So for example, I'm an atheist, but it's be years since that was a part of my identity that moved me to care about atheist memes or patting myself on the back for not being religious, which (sorry guys), is what I feel like happens in those communities. So I get them out of my feed by blocking them the way I block plenty of other communities I'm not interested in. In Apollo I was spoiled by the 'hide subreddit' feature that I don't believe existed in Reddit itself, but which was crucial to my enjoyment of that particular app. But since there are multiple instances hosting a version of any given community, I must've blocked at least three 'atheist' and two or three 'atheistmemes' communities, which look the same to me, but are hosted on different instances.
Is my All feed destined to continue having different instance versions of all the topics I don't want to see, no matter how many times I block them, as long as there are more and more instances hosting those communities? I don't want to sound unimpressed by this new technology or ungrateful for the amazing service you all are building, but this feels like either a pretty big flaw in the federated user experience or a pretty big gap in my knowledge of how to work the platform. I'm entirely receptive to the idea I may just be doing something wrong.
Just curious. Thank you for everything you do.
No thats just how it is, and I dont think there is a general solution. Maybe sharing blocklists with other users, but that might create even worse problems. Hopefully the users of such similar communities will over time move to the largest one so its all in one place.
Thanks!
As for fragmentation, see here.
Is there anything happening in the Fediverse that makes you concerned for its future?
The whole philosophy of it is to give power back to the users and not be kept in a box, but do you think the current mindset of most people using the typical social media platforms will bring bad habits here and squander what the Fediverse stands for? This is more of a concern of mine, but I'm new here
There are certainly people who are only using lemmy, not because its FOSS, but because reddit has closed off API access (not realizing those are interconnected issues). To them it wouldn't matter if lemmy's source code is open or not.
Its not too big a concern for me, the fediverse isn't going anywhere, and it'll continue to grow, and be resilient to challenges.
Maybe I couldn't find it somewhere online, but is there a structured development roadmap for features you plan to implement? If not, what are the top priorities going forward? What are your long term goals with the project?
We don't have a written roadmap, but my current goals are:
Thanks for your amazing work, you guys are changing the world!
Thanks!
will uploading audio files become a thing? as a musician i need it
One of the biggest burdens on people running lemmy servers, is the disk space taken up by images. Currently the internet has a massive problem with image (and other data in general) duplication: images get posted to 9 different platforms, copied everywhere, with none of them sharing any of the hosting costs.
The static data distribution problem, is actually a completely solved problem: via torrents. The user experience of this tho, needs to be improved across the board in apps and web UIs. Lemmy's markdown fields do support torrent links, but there's no easy "upload audio" or "upload video" button, which ideally should hook in to an in-browser or system-wide torrent app.
I'd love to see comment trees of audio and video replies, but to me this isn't doable, and would explode server costs, unless someone devotes time to the solution above. In the meantime, people will just have to use other services to upload their audio / video content and link to it, or ideally, create torrents and share magnet links.
What are the challenges posed by moderation (and admin in general) that you didn't think of when launching the first instance?
(and: How can things get improved, how can people help?)
Is it possible to support search operators on Lemmy search just like on a typical search engine?
I don't really have any questions at the moment, just passing by to thank you for making this great product/service.
After the Reddit fiasco I felt like my internet life would be empty, then I saw a thread on /r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH about they joining here and making an instance, so that's why I'm here now (not with them at the moment).
Then I started to be more active here than on Reddit until today which my Reddit account is basically forgotten.
I have read many of your answers and I can't wait until that "best" sorting comes out!
I wasn't very active in the biggest communities of Reddit because my likings which are a bit smaller (I don't think niche) than the big masses.
Thanks again for your hard work!
will a search bar exist for searching through comments on a post
We haven't added a post filter for the search yet, but you could open up an issue on lemmy's github.
I have a suggestion about lemmy. Could there be a way where Lemmy can check for community names across instances to help reduce multiple communities of the same name? For example, say someone wants to create a Linux community on their instance and during the creation Lemmy searches an index of community names and finds one already named that name, it would then recommend the existing community which already exists be used or a new community name be made.
My theory is to help reduce the multiple communities of the same name posting the same article numerous times on the all feed.
Will you implement an sorting algorithm that would show more content from small, neglected, unknown communities/instances on the main /all/ timeline so that they are more discoverable and will be seen rather than only showing the most-liked posts from huge communities/instances?
@nutomic@lemmy.ml, can't reply to the thread here because the user was defed from us which is a pretty frustrating design for the purposes of reading a whole thread from another instance, but i'd just like to say that if you don't self crit here you need to delete your avatar, maybe upload a picture of spez instead, because he says the same shit :) like a lot of your other posts but by god this is liberal shit that basically no one wants to see
Yeah I don't appreciate being made to agree with an admin of Beehaw--it leaves a bad taste in my mouth--but there is absolutely no good reason to link to Nazi shit on join-lemmy, full stop.
agreed - whether to list nazi instances and whether to list explicitly left-wing instances are two entirely different questions. conflating them is lib shit.
Any thoughts on adding emoji (or custom) reactions to posts? Might be a fun free alternative to Reddit’s award system. Might just add clutter.
Edit: nvm, found an open issue where you said you'd like to add it but there are lots of other things to do first: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2541
Just as with reddit's awards it would just be clutter
Maybe i would approve of just one special award award that you can grant once per day to a post or comment. But not tens of different icons atop of every post that would be awful.
Now that right there is a very good idea. Thank you. Going to be a busy day for you guys.
How's progress on OAuth2? I know previously you (understandably) said it wasn't a priority this early, but is it on the greater roadmap?
Which instant messenger do you use and recommend the most for general use? I read Dessalines essay about why Signal is bad, from these options SimpleX looks best to me. Thoughts?
Matrix, preferably self-hosted.
I use Telegram. The company is based outside the EU/US, so its unlikely that it would give any data to my government.
Is there any coordination with The other fediverse projects (mainly mastodon) and mastodon client developpers to enhance the interoperability with each other.
for instance being able to flawlessly post to lemmy and get notified about replies to your mastodon instance in a more convenient and user friendly way. where mastodon and its clients recognizes that a reply is comming from a lemmy server and displays it in a threaded way.
With some other projects yes, but Mastodon not really. They often implement things in weird or nonstandard ways, and expect everyone else to deal with it. They even wrote an entire implementation for groups which is intentionally incompatible with Lemmy or other existing implementations. At least they had the good sense not to merge that.
Lemmy is obviously getting bigger and bigger. Especially with the revolts against Reddit, and it seems currently we are in a similar state to where Reddit was when it was first started. Are there any tools you currently plan on implementing for server admins to prevent bot accounts, server toxicity, etc?
Also, do you guys have any worries about the fediverse devolving into a toxic cesspool of politics and unhinged users, like Reddit did? My worry is that over time, Lemmy as a whole will devolve into Reddit and be like one big virus that just spread over time due to growth. Once idiots find a platform to settle on they stay there. I think most people don't want that.
No such tools, and Im not sure what might help in that regard.
Lemmy and the Fediverse are fundamentally different platforms, so I doubt that it will devolve in that direction. Reddit as a for-profit company makes money from ads, so all they care about is "engagement" which increases when people get angry. Lemmy on the other hand is run by volunteers who will not tolerate that. These volunteers have the power to ban or block toxic actors and I expect that they will make use of that power (see beehaw). Its more likely that there will be multiple parts of Lemmy with different levels of toxicity which are loosely connected. Then users can choose if they rather want a harshly moderated instance like beehaw, something loosely moderated or anything in between.
I know about your decision regarding Threads but what are your thoughts on the blog post from the Mastodon CEO? https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/ especially the address to the EEE concern
First of all, thank you for creating Lemmy!
Wish we could have the fediverse of instant messaging.
Fediverse instant messaging could work like email, just like how someone with gmail id can send mail to yahoo id.
username@whatsapp sending messages to username@telegram, that's how it could work
That's what xmpp is. It was embraced by Google and Facebook and killed.
Have a look at https://matrix.org
How was the upvote weighting system designed?
Where did it come from?
Any plans for it changing over time?
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
I commented about a sort called Best above, that should also help boost smaller communities, that we'll eventually add.
When the possibility to block instances will be implemented?
I will probably work on it soon. Can make any promises though as there are always lots of PRs to review and other things to do which prevent me from coding.
A bit technical question: how do you manage to build performant comment trees on frontend?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/main/src/shared/utils/app/build-comments-tree.ts
The scaling / actual trees are done using postgres ltree in the back-end, with a
pathfield representing a list of parent comment ids.Thoughts on the use of geographic domains for vanity purposes? I know that's come up recently as a topic of concern (including with lemmy, specifically), and personally, it seems like it's both extremely widespread and also maybe shouldn't have become super widespread given the actual implications.
I've talked about this elsewhere, but the whole DNS system seems US-controlled and broken to me, and is essentially a privatization of the commons. A lot of historically free ones now seem to be getting yanked. So far I think lemmy.ml has been safe because its a paid one, but its a concern. Either way, if any of these have to move domain names, it'll be an annoying hassle, but it won't mean the death of lemmy or anything.
What inspired you to create Lemmy?
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html
When did you first think of starting lemmy?
I have been interested for a very long time in decentralized software as an alternative to Google, Facebook etc. For my bachelor thesis I created a decentralized instant messenger using bluetooth connections. However it didnt go anywhere because its impossible to find enough nerds irl who want to test such a project. Thats when I realized that its much more effective to develop something that can be used by everyone across the internet, as its much easier to find some initial users.
Luckily I found Mastodon and used that for some years because I loved the federated architecture. However I realized that the twitter-like format isnt for me, its too focused on individuals and makes it very hard to follow specific topics. Plus it leads to pointless and annoying drama all the time. Thats when I found out about Dessalines starting Lemmy, and was immediately excited to start contributing.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html
Thanks for creating Lemmy! I like it a lot :) Do you have any ideas/plans on a privacy and user focused algorithmic view? If Lemmy wants to be big, I think we need something like this.
No, I dont even know what you mean by that.
I recently submitted a PR for stopping pictrs image federation. IMO the images themselves do not need to be downloaded when served by another pictrs instance. This would reduce the amount of diskspace and reduce the burden of hosting images that are unwanted by the instance owners.
What are your thoughts on this, and do you think this will be merged? https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3799