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

I've just updated the post body with some updates about this, but if we get approved for another year of funding from NLNet, the the two new devs will be working on these milestones in 2024 (still a draft at this point).

Being an open source project, we can afford to be less strict about a roadmap, as anyone (including ourselves) can take on any of the open issues on the issue tracker. Part of the fun of these is getting to pick which things you'd like to work on, and that you personally think are important.

Outside of maintenance-related tasks and merging PRs (which does take a significant chunk of our time) of course @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I both have things we'd like to prioritize this year. My main priorities are:

• Getting Jerboa as fully functional as lemmy-ui.
• Notifications (Unified push).
• Working on lemmy-ui-leptos, our proposed replacement web UI for lemmy-ui written in Rust.
• Performance improvements (DB, federation code)
• Stabilizing the API
• Becoming fully funded by donations, and growing our dev co-op.

I think a lemmy roadmap for the next year is hard, because scope and even individual features depend on funding (for example, nlnet funds specific features).

Maybe something like Mastodon's roadmap would be possible though (with no specific timeline)? https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap

Check the NLnet milestones in updated OP.

That would actually be nice.

Nope, never.

I'm pretty sure all user data is public already.
PMs might be the only thing not everyone can see.

For me it was long before the reddit migration (which was ~7 months or so ago). I noticed lemmy slowly but surely gaining traction. It felt more dead than it does now, but the trend was slow and steady growth, which is always a great sign. People were using lemmy, liking it, and sticking around.

At the same time, it was clear that we weren't making the mistake of all the other reddit alternatives, by promising to be a free speech haven for bigoted communities. Those people actively did our work for us by warning their communities to stay away from Lemmy and its tankie devs, thereby making Lemmy a much more enjoyable place from the very beginning. That was a crucial test: we were not willing to sacrifice our values for growth's sake.

It's great to see that positivity confirmed by a researcher who did a qualitative and quantitative analysis about Lemmy migration, and finding that >90% of people saw themselves using Lemmy in the long term. We can all be very proud of that, and it means we have a bright future.

Lemmy was meant to be a Reddit replacement from the beginning, so it was always supposed to take off. Even in the early days the tech was working quite smoothly and users were happy so there was no real doubt about it. The only thing missing were more users. However I had no idea how a real migration would actually look like, so it was really overwhelming when last year people started to flood in and everything got overloaded and broke down.

There have been lots of compatibility improvements with Mastodon from our side. However Mastodon seems to have almost no interest to make improvements from their side. I dont think there is much we can do about that, in the end project maintainers always care about their own users most.

With dansup there was some communication years ago, but it seems he lost interest in Lemmy.

Mastodon's main dev isn't really open. Have a look at the "Ego" part of this article: https://cassolotl.medium.com/i-left-mastodon-yesterday-4c5796b0f548

Misskey forks, whatever their names are today, seem more interesting

Interoperability is great, but sadly there isn't really any organized group effort to standardize more aspects / extensions of ActivityPub. AP is really "thin" in that it barely prescribes anything. There's not even a test suite to test whether software complies to the spec of AP.

So everyone kind of does their own thing, and fixes interoperability on a case-by-case basis. This makes it kinda frustrating to spend time on - lemmy already has special cases for many different softwares (peertube, mastodon, ...) and every one increases the complexity.

Very interesting question since mastodon introduced groups very recently which are a direct competitor to lemmy

Its definitely a concern. IMO the lemmyverse is far too centralized at the moment. The big questions are:

1. Is there a trend toward centralization, or away from it?
2. How are people being introduced / onboarded onto lemmy?
3. What can we do to combat centralization?

(1) I'm honestly unsure, and I'd def appreciate if anyone has done a study of it. We've seen a big growth in single person / smaller topic-focused instances, which is a great thing, but if their communities aren't growing, we need to figure out how to reverse that trend. I'd have no problem with the current large instances, including this one, as long as the long-term-trend is away from them.

(2) Is mostly word-of-mouth, join-lemmy.org, and apps / web-ui's which show an instance by default.

We've made the sort for the join-lemmy.org instances page be by random active users, and tried to emphasize on that page that it doesn't matter which instance you join, since most federate, and can subscribe / connect to any community. I hope that helps, and we need to replicate that wherever we can.

Apps and webUI's mostly just show lemmy.world rn, where they should show random instances. I'm guilty of this in Jerboa as well (showing lemmy.ml by default), and I've just opened up an issue that it should be showing a random server for anonymous users.

But I think we need to do more, and I'd def appreciate yours and anyone else's ideas on how we can combat centralization. We need to get ahead of this problem before it gets worse.

I think its totally normal that instance sizes follow a power law distribution. Its similar to many other things, for example there are few large cities, some medium cities and lots of small cities. The wiki article lists many other examples. So I think its fine as long as there are no intentional attempts to lock in users into large instances or limit federation.

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.

As someone who is on a medium sized instance, I can say its a little awkward when Lemmy[.]world goes down

Thank you! Its great that you have been around all these years.

Thx a ton!

Thx! Its pretty wild to me how much these algorithms, and formats, affect our mental well-being. Those giant US tech companies employing Psychology PhDs to figure out how to keep people angry, engaged, and watching ads, is doing so much harm to so many people, not just in the US, but the whole world, and unfortunately very few countries are doing enough to protect their people from these companies (who also act as surveillance arms of the US state) by blocking facebook and the rest.

I've seen two professors I respected turn into angry children on twitter, in a way that would never happen in real life. Reddit, twitter, and Youtube platform reactionary rage-bait to get people trapped in a downward spiral of negativity. These companies do not care how much damage they do; all that matters to them is their profits.

We don't have those same incentive structures, so we can and should be doing everything we can to make this a positive and enjoyable experience, not about arguing constantly, but about learning, laughing, and understanding.

what would be the best and worst things that could happen to lemmy from your perspectives? And as an extension, what are your goals for it?

The best thing would be that we continue our slow and steady growth. Every user that migrates away from big tech to the fediverse is victory, so while we shouldn't emphasize growth at any cost, its still a good thing when we can get people away from all that negativity.

The biggest concern for me about Lemmy, would be a centralization onto one big server, that tries to replicate all the worst things and behaviors about reddit: its combativeness, xenophobia, bigotry, pro-US-foreign policy agendas, and advertising. There is a noticeable chunk of Lemmy's users who don't really see any problem with those things, they just want a reddit that lets them use 3rd party apps again.

The best thing would be if Reddit goes the way of Digg. Seems that will happen sooner or later. The worst thing, maybe if funding stops and we are unable to keep working on Lemmy. But even then admins could still host Lemmy instances.

Couldn't agree more. I'm still hopelessly addicted to the format but at leat now I'm sticking it to the man at the same time lol.

Yes thank you. Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming when there are 10+ questions in a single comment, and each of them requires a little essay.

also people should search the issues on github, a few of these questions already have issues filed with discussions in them, put a thumbs up on a github issue if it's something you want

Some company (dont know which) wanted to make a one-time donation of 500 Euros to get listed as donor on join-lemmy.org. Rejected because thats only for recurring donors. Does this count as weird?

A few, mostly harmless tho, just about working on pet features they'd like to see in Lemmy. None panned out.

I imagine the more parasitic companies avoid us as soon as they see the AGPLv3 license.

If you've been following our code commits / PRs, we've been adding a lot of mod tools improvements not just lately, but over lemmy's entire life. I would even go so far as to say we have the strongest mod tools of any project in the fediverse, all the more necessary for us because of the community-focus.

The upcoming roadmap for 2024 includes some mod additions, such as mod warnings, attaching report counts to items, viewing mod actions for items, etc.

Instance owners currently gets notified when someone has reported a user for spamming or trolling, but frequently it’s a user that is not on his instance, so he can’t do anything about it. Wouldn’t it be better if instance owners got notified only when they can take actual action (like the user being registered on their instance)?

Instance admins are responsible for what content their users see, so if a troll is visible to their users and ruining their day, then it should be taken care of everywhere necessary.

I have seen this first hand. I think when someone hits report it needs to go to the moderator of the community. From there the mod should be able to forward it to where it needs to go.

Instance admins should be able to intersect this process.

I don't think we found any specific groups of people attacking Lemmy. I personally just saw one or two what looked like individuals trying (and succeeding) to take Lemmy down with a few very simple requests that forced Lemmy to do lots of compute (something like fetching the next million posts from page 10000). The fixes for those were simple because it was just missing limits checking.

I'm not sure if there actually was a larger organized attack. Lots of performance issues in Lemmy simply appeared simultaneously and compunded each other with a rapidly growing number of active users and posts.

We're paid up on our current registrar for a few more years, but I honestly don't know how much that can be trusted. Its pretty difficult to get clear information on which ones are safe, and which ones aren't.

If lemmy.ml goes down, it will be a major annoyance as we migrate domains, and will likely have a day or two of downtime. Even outside of DNS yanks, we do daily DB backups, and have our pictures backed up locally as well, so a full restore is possible, but federation would definitely have issues, and would probably need to do a lot of re-subscribes. Overall tho, it wouldn't destroy the lemmy project or anything, and if people migrate to smaller servers in the process, that would give us a lot more time to code 😄 .

I apologize for that tho , it was something I didn't forsee and wasn't even thought of many years ago when I registered.

They stay in the bunker except for emergencies like facebooks threats.net . You get to drive one when you can recite the first section of the communist manifesto from memory.

Maybe the real tankies are the comrades we made along the way

Migrating accounts between instances

Isn't that implemented in the 19.2 and later versions? I just migrated using that feature a few days back, worked quite well

For migration we recently added a feature to export your user data. But "real" migrating accounts is something I put on our "todo" list, though it probably also first needs a proposal to define how it should work exactly (should it still work when the original instance is down?) As soon as we start giving users more control over their private key issues start appearing like not having any infrastructure for key rotation / revocation. Without that it will only work when the original instance still exists.

I'm not sure if by tagging users you mean linking / mentioning them? Or adding tags to them like you can tag posts / users on other platform. For tagging in general there's a pending proposal https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4 . So far it focuses on post tagging though to reduce the scope. I think the goal is going to be to start with one kind of tagging and add more kinds of tagging later.

For improving cross-instance linking (both communities, posts, and users) we also have a open milestone. There's a few spitballing issues about it, but no real concrete proposal on how to build it yet.

Can you add one to your list? Linking posts across instances? Like you can do !community@instance and the community will open viewed through your instance. But for linking posts there is no such equivalent. Like if I make an HTTP link it will be through my instance or possibly the one the community is hosted on which would be annoying for users of other instances.

Also, linking communities across instances is possible already, but you can leave it up since it's confusing. I still see a lot of folks try to do the reddit approach if c/community

As @phiresky@lemmy.world mentioned we have improvements coming down the pipe for linking content across instances.

Community linking and user linking do work currently (for example I just linked phiresky above), and a community example would be !risa@startrek.website , but we could improve this by extending it to posts and comments, as well as creating a url link standard that would work across apps.

Check the updated OP. We can definitely use more donations, at the moment we are getting around 4000 Euros per month which is not much for two fulltime devs. And code contributions are also helpful, there is an almost endless amount of open issues.

Thx!

I see why people think that's a problem, but in reality, its more of a feature. For example, take communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics, or locations, based on their instance:

• https://startrek.website/c/news
• https://starwars.website/c/news

or

• https://hyderabad.website/c/news
• https://canberra.website/c/news

These are all news communities, yet should stand on their own: each with their own creators, moderators, users, rules, posts, comments, culture, and topics. It makes no sense to combine or "merge" them given all these differences, in the same way that it makes no sense to "merge" two completely different users because they have the same name.

Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit’s multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?

Sure! Multi-Communities are an open issue, that I'm sure someone will take on eventually.

There's also FEP-d36d which is a standard for group-to-group following. In Lemmy terms, a community could subscribe to another community.

I'm not aware of philosophical disagreements with that feature, I can just think of logical and technical issues. Like how moderation would federate, etc. If all the mods come to an agreement then the mods on one instance could lock their community and link to the other one. If the mods disagree, then moderation is going to be chaos in any case, no?

I think multi-community views would be a great idea.

One that I can think of rn, is @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml 's lemmy-bot, as well as ridoukousage's TLDR bot.

With the web being so ad-infested and completely owned by google, people have noted how the TLDR bot means they often don't have to leave their lemmy app at all, and can stay behind its privacy shield.

While of course I do think we can code a lot of functionality directly in to lemmy in a way that we couldn't with reddit, there's undeniably a lot of potential with bots that can do different things for us.

0.19 was a bit of a special case because there was a set of breaking updates that had to be done at some point, and trickle releasing breaking changes isn't really great either. Usually hopefully the breaking changes are rare, so releases can be more frequent.

Would people really pay for Lemmy merch?

May canvas event posters?

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.

I linked a timezone convert link (before I updated the post), which I think I'd have to do even if we used the UTC offset format. I must be just far away enough from UTC to not know what my offset is at any given time.

No, I can not read an offset. Because we have summer time and winter time here, and I dont instantly know what the offset is for which one.

Something tells me lemmynsfw has the largest disks. :)

The SQL table for posts is 1.6 GB on lemmy.ml, and 5.7 GB for comments. That probably accounts for a majority of content on the Lemmyverse.

I don't think it's that large. Text is very small and compressible compared to images. Well it depends on if you mean the actual database storage (uncompressed, with indexes) or a compressed copy of all the posts. You can see the post number in the URL, which on lemmy.world for this post is 11169622. That means there's around 11 million posts total in lemmy.world's database. If you assume each of them takes 0.5kB of storage that would be only ~ 5 GB of posts.

Very excited, and then very overwhelmed because everything started breaking left and right.

Excited, but also extremely stressed out and exhausted. For about 2 months I was getting an average of 4 hours of consistent sleep a night after that happened. We were very happy when things calmed down.

Personally I came with them so I guess they are my people ;)

We are getting about 4000 Euros per month which is not much to pay for two developers, so more donations would definitely be nice. From NLnet Dessalines and I still have a few milestones leftover from 2022 but those should be finished very soon. We could definitely use more developers, its impossible to keep up with all the issues so we have to try and prioritize the most important ones.

The people on Lemmy are generally very nice, so I cant complain.

AGPL was already used by most existing Fediverse platforms, and ensures that all code changes need to be published. Its basically an improvement over GPL which also takes effect when the software is hosted on a server, not running on the user's computer.

The Anti-Capitalist Software License is not an open source software license.

That alone rules it out.

To me, AGPL is the most pragmatic choice. As a hard copy-left license, it enforces derivative works to adopt the same license, unlike the more open and "soft" copy-left licenses that let corporations capture and digitally enclose your labor as they see fit.

It works pretty well on Peertube, only lacks users and quality content.

I have ambitious plans about how to turn lemmy into a true Youtube / Spotify killer. But that might not be what you're asking, which might just be simple browser / app video support (IE mp4s, webm, etc).

If that app / web UI has trouble with videos, you might need to open up an issue there.

but the Fediverse as a whole.

FWIW video playback on Mastodon has been seamless for me.

Strengths are federation, comment threads, mod tools, app ecosystem.

Weaknesses are lack of notifications, DB code, and lack of funding / donations. We need to support much more that just one or two devs if we want to take on reddit, which is a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of employees.

I discuss more things I'm going to work on this year in this comment

Strengths: Its open source, decentralized and working quite reliably

Weaknesses: Theres not enough funding/developers to keep up with all the issues

Registration applications, and user reports are the best way to handle trolls. The first stops 90% of them, the second means we can ban and remove all their spam at the click of a button.

I don't see how you could prematurely know about spammers or trolls until someone reports them. We don't plan on adding any text-analyzing AI or anything like that into lemmy's codebase.

How would you suggest to make it more efficient?

Its a great thing, and its exciting to have @rmayayo@lemmy.world creating an app for Lemmy.

He did? That's awesome. I've been using Jerboa and Sync mostly. How does the Boost app compare to those? Sorry if too unrelated lol.

So far these problems are mostly theoretical, in practice Github works fine. But once Forgejo gets federation working we will probably migrate to a selfhosted instance.

I agree that it's not ideal to be hosted on a platform controlled by Microsoft, but it's just a fact that you lose 90+% of contributors if you are anywhere else (there's an article where someone compared, can't find it right now). It's not great that that's how it is, but you need to choose your battles.

I'm not really very concerned, since git itself is decentralized, and if Github starts causing visible problems moving somewhere else is not a huge problem. Also VPNs exist.

Its unfortunate that we (and it seems like 99% of other Rust projects), do their issue tracking on github. We have multiple mirrors set up for Lemmy, so the code is safe from takedowns, but the issue tracker is a concern.

The main issue I've had is: if we migrate, I want that migration to be permanent, and for me a requirement for that is federated collaboration. I've had codeberg remove a torrent project of mine to comply with German law, and gitlab has most of the same problems of github. Self-hosted gitea instances work, but many people just don't contribute to them when they have to make an account on each one.

You'll see below that Lemmy's two main devs are in favor of migrating our issue tracking to forgejo, once federation gets reliably up and running.

I think it's fine. You won't influence anything about US by using a worse collaboration platform. If Lemmy becomes more and more popular, it may eventually become a real alternative for the masses. That's what the goal should be - not avoiding github.

It's better to be smart here.

No, I guess they only care about Mastodon. I will just wait and see how that goes.

We also blocked threats here already, and encourage other servers to do the same. FB is a rabid wolf that would love to be let inside the fediverse.

So far it doesn't seem like any company actually wants to compete in this space (longer-form somewhat text-focused communities). Even reddit is trying to become more twitter and less reddit.

I think Lemmy is a tiny blip size wise.

There can definitely be improvements, but I agree that they're low priority. I'm hesitant to put too much work into Lemmy's private messages or its interface, as they're inherently insecure and not E2EE (we even have warnings in the lemmy-ui interface about this).

Its best to rely on messaging apps like matrix and xmpp that were made for that job, which you can add to your profile. We also added a specific matrix_id field to your user settings, which enables a "Send secure message" button.

This is already possible in many Lemmy apps. I built the Quiblr web app and messages are more similar to a messaging app. Many Lemmy apps probably do similar as it's just a front-end change.

Maybe, if someone implements it. Basically the same answer as all other low-priority feature requests.

Thx!

1. Jerboa has another major contributor now besides me. But I'd also like to keep a hand in it, simply because I made it and its also the main app I use for lemmy. Besides a few other people, no one has stepped up to get involved with it enough that I'd. Plus I'd eventually like to add it to the LemmyNet repo, as it will soon implement all of the features in lemmy-ui, making it an "official" and native app.

2. Reddit has been banning communist / leftist communities for a while, so a lot of us were looking at different reddit alternatives. I found that none of them had a great tech stack, none of them had federation, and a few were unwelcoming to contributions. It made sense to do a "what if reddit, but open source, made in rust, and self-hostable". It was a great opportunity to teach myself rust also.

I mainly like Hip-hop, but also good music from other genres. I like all sorts of movies if they are well made, but especially adventure and comedy. Since the quality of Hollywood movies has gone steeply downhill, I mainly watch movies from different countries across the world, and older movies from the 70s or so. I also like video games, at the moment Im playing Baldurs Gate 3 as everyone was praising it on Lemmy (and they were right its a great game).

They were posting spicy memes but thats how the internet works. If you dont like it then dont visit there, just like you wouldnt visit 4chan. Lemmy is open source so anyone can use it for any purpose.

I very much dislike it obviously, and I'm happy that one shut down. There have been others, but for the most part they've stayed away from Lemmy as "that software made by tankies."

Outside of making sure that we don't platform them anywhere, there isn't much we can do. Lemmy is open-source software after all, and a tool can be used for good or ill. As @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml mentioned, coordinating on adding them to our blocklists and isolating them is the best option.

We publish multiple release candidates and run them on lemmy.ml before the final release. That allows the community to test changes. We dont have a quality assurance team, and developers are notoriously bad at testing their own code, so I dont see what we can improve in this regard.

Go through the issue tracker for lemmy or lemmy-ui and look for some simple bug or minor feature that you care about. Then look for the relevant part of the code and try to fix it. You can also make a comment or post in the dev chat on matrix if you need help. Honestly there are so many issues which could be solved in less than an hour, especially in lemmy-ui. That way you can make Lemmy better and also get familiar with the code to make larger changes in the future.

First, thx for working on LemmyNade! The ecosystem of apps growing up around lemmy, learning from and benefitting each other, is really great to see.

The main thing would be to get involved with lemmy's back-end code. Even if you're not a back-end developer, its still useful to us to learn from devs about wanted features, API improvements, and bugs. Many app devs have suggested features that I've tried to implement based on their usefulness, because it used to be just myself who was the one requesting and adding things on both sides.

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.

Wait for Reddit to implode, more users to migrate and donations to increase. It worked last year :D

We could definitely use some help with ideas there. Lemmy currently has ~40k active users, and it should be able to support more than ~1 average dev salary, especially if we want to take on a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of employees like reddit.

1. Im 31
2. Not yet, hopefully that will change in the future
3. North of Spain
4. Im not really anonymous, it would just feel weird to post here with my full name
5. No
6. Maybe less than 50%
7. Im terrible with names so no

I'd hope that they are at least 18

I'm not sur eif it's bad form to answer these questions but for this one I think the github issue page is the answer.

if you don't want to make a github account, then probably !lemmy@lemmy.ml

but you can still search and read the github issues without making an account, so you could check if it already exists, or link the issue if you're starting a lemmy discussion about it

I think flairs would be the same as user-tagging. There's an open proposal for post-tagging https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4 and the discussion there was so far to add tagging for one type of thing and then later expand to others (like user tagging).

It's a bit of a complicated feature because it needs decision who can tag whom, and what is the scope (who is it federated two), and how does it transfer / interact with other ActivityPub software.

When we have about a dozen more developers. So far only dessalines and i work on Lemmy fulltime, and besides solving issues we also have to review pull requests, prepare releases and much more. So its just not enough time to keep up with all the new issues let alone resolve the whole backlog.

The fact that there is no boss telling me what to work on. Instead I get to decide myself whats most important. Last year before the Reddit migration I was temporarily working for a company, and it was extremely demotivating to be told how to do every little thing as if I were a junior developer.

As a software dev, mainly that people enjoy using it.

99% of the proprietary software work I did for companies was work that was societally useless, and eventually thrown in the trash. Here I get to make software that improves peoples lives in a tiny way, and is a form of social media that hopefully 🤞 doesn't destroy people's mental well-being: is easy to put down, and enjoyable to use.

You can already interact with Peertube videos and follow their channels. Thats possible because Peertube also federates groups (communities). With Mastodon thats not possible because it doesnt have groups, and Lemmy doesnt support content outside of communities. At least not without a full rewrite, which doesnt make sense considering that KBin and dozens of different microblogging platforms already exist.

I think most of that can be taken from here: join-lemmy.org/donate. If you click through each donation method they each list goals/monthly intake.

EDIT - Minus crypto of course!

From NLnet we had three funding rounds with 50.000 Euros each.

Lemmy is somewhat protected by being an AGPL-licensed project, preventing proprietarization. If there's ever a relicensing effort, ba fearful.

I'm not sure what exactly becoming a organization would entail, but so far I'd say the development part is not really large enough? For me I would start being suspicious when a significant amount of dev power came from compan(ies), but so far no company has shown any interest afaik.

There's already been a few forks, for example lemmynsfw has made some changes on their side, which nutomic is now looking to integrate back into lemmy.

If Lemmy does become more of an organization, it would be nice to have a level of public assurance over any control exerted by the organization. A lot of people see that the lead developers of Lemmy are communist and shy away from it based merely on that. I have one of the oldest accounts on Lemmy, I've seen plenty of them, and my impression is that they have conducted themselves with only the utmost ethics. However, it can still help newcomers who don't want to feel like someone might be breathing down their neck.

As a multi-national open source dev team, it would only complicate our lives to try to set up a more formal legal structure.

I wouldn't be too afraid of hostile takeovers: this is a dev-run-and-controlled project. People will go where the development is, and the federated nature of lemmy protects against the kind of attacks its possible to make against centralized entities.

I'm sry I can't give a good answer there... but to me it seems like when we go a certain length of time (not sure how long) without any breaking changes. That will have proven that the API as it exists is stable and well-formed.

That seems a long way off atm, because of all the features and new fields we've been adding and modifying on existing data structures.

The ActivityPub protocol lemmy uses is (in my opinion) really bad wrt scalability. For example, if you press one upvote, your instance has to make 3000 HTTP requests (one to every instance that cares).

But on the other hand, I recently rewrote the federation queue. Looking at reddit, it has around 100 actions per second. The new queue should be able to handle that amount of requests, and PostgreSQL can handle it (the incoming side) as well.

The problem right now is more that people running instances don't have infinite money, so even if you could in theory host hundreds of millions of users most instances are limited by having a budget of 10-100$ per month.

Lemmy supports horizontal scaling, so in theory it is only limited by the amount of servers you can afford. Of course there are always unpredictable bottlenecks which need to be fixed, but no inherent limitation.

Overkill for me, but to me Motorhead's also one of those singles-type bands where the songs kind of stand individually great on their own, rather than the album. So I usually just relisten to a ~40 song greatest hits of theirs.

Then your (hashed) password would have to be copied to all servers, and the email as well for password reset. Seems very problematic for security.

No, Activitypub isn't based on a migrating authentication / single-sign-on model, but on server-to-server communication.

Instances with many users already on them dying should be a rare occurrence, and its unfortunate that it happens not just for us, but in the whole fediverse.

Lemmy is licensed under AGPL which states that everyone can use it, there are no restrictions based on politics. Besides, "right wing" is not the same as "evil", the real world is much more complicated than that. If you ask me, the whole right-left classification is way too simplistic and doesnt make sense anymore (if it ever did).

I'm not a Lemmy dev but I'm interested in this question so I'm commenting so I remember to check up on this one.

I subscribe to that sub because I feel like it's important to engage with people that I don't agree with. Even though the two main contributors to that sub are peculiar in their views, I haven't seen them break any rules of lemm.ee or post outright hate to any group but democrats.

I know sh.it.justworks had their own drama with a the_donald popup community which led to calls for defederation before the community was banned but if people are posting within the rules and properly moderate their own; we ought to let them post their politics even if we don't agree.

I would hope we aren't going to start kicking people out because of there political views.

I think the instance admins should handle that. Lemmy itself should be a open and agnostic platform. Admins should use defederation and block specific communities.

(My oppinion, I'm not associated with Lemmy development.)

What's wrong with a "right-wing" community? I'm not right wing but I'm definitely not afraid of them. Anything can be solved with education. Why would you censor based on what side of the political spectrum you're on?

Any breaking changes which get implemented in the meantime. There are no specific plans.

I dont know, should there?

I don't think we should bake in anything to the software, but instances having meta and feedback communities are a good idea.

Then who would moderate this? And what if lemmygrad.ml/c/books wants to have different discussions from lemmy.world/c/books?

As I understand your suggestion this would mean one super community might get moderated from 5 different instances and 5 rule sets. It is definitely the right direction but not that easy to design..

I think this is interesting but should not be an automatic feature.

The current setup cntralizes power into the hands of whoever gets traction first on the platform.

There are other factors at hand, such as the moderation and the instance politics

Another option here is FEP-d36d which is a standard for group-to-group following. This looks to me like a slightly more organic and opt-in approach.

When do we get advanced moderation features? And for example the ability to block all users from a single instance to prevent for example brigading? I mean for the user, so we don’t have to rely on defederation so much.

This could be added to the existing instance block feature, but so far no one has even bothered to open an issue I think.

Are you planning to revamp defederation? I mean it’s rather complicated the way it works and the triangle that is the user’s instance, the other user’s instance and the instance the community is located.

Its very simple and effective in that in prevents all network connections to the blocked instance. So I dont think it makes sense to change that, but other tools can be added on top for more fine-grained restrictions (eg user-level instance blocks in 0.19).

No problem, thats why its called AMA. Of course its possible that your questions wont get answered.

Sure

I see it on 19.3, your server is still on 19.2, maybe that's why?