hendrik

For what it's worth... I think there are useful AI tools. For example the offline translation feature that doesn't send your content to google is something they recently introduced. I'd also like to see someone compete with a decent and open text-to-speech solution that gets wide adoption... And the idea of flagging fake reviews doesn't sound too bad (I haven't tried it.) I mean people are complaining about SEO making google unusable and fake news only ever getting more. I can see some benefit there - if done right.

But we definitely don't need a Clippy 2.0 or another smart assistant. And I don't think everything has to be embedded in a browser and make it yet more complicated and bigger, or implemented in the operating system. An add-on will probably do.

(Edit: And I sometimes don't understand Mozilla. Why not focus on their core product and make that exceptionally great? If they're already struggling... What's with all these side-projects and dabbling in AI anyways?)

And I think there isn't a good solution to this. Ideally you would enable people to make good choices for themselves, know how to handle the tools they use...

Interesingly enough they come to me to fix their printer and antivirus anyways, and I have no idea of what I'm doing since I haven't used Windows in like 15 years, except for updating my GPS and filling out time-sheets for work and stuff like that. And in the meantime Microsoft switches things around every few years and bolts on a new interface onto their office suite and then moves it to the cloud. I don't think it would make any difference if my relatives were using Linux in the first place. They would still need to ask someone to fix their printer drivers and handle big version upgrades. And if it was me at the other end, it would be way more convenient to me to help them.

I stopped advertising Linux to people who didn't ask me to... I'll tell them I use different things on my computer and why this software is way better. If they pick up on that and want to try out of their own motivation, I'll gladly help.

Your answer is in the official Debian installation guide:

D.3. Installing Debian GNU/Linux from a Unix/Linux System

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apds03.en.html

Just let 'em. Splitting a community isn't nice but i don't see another solution here. Maybe this is kind of a diet for us and slimming will be a chance for us.

What alternatives?

Maybe ask this question again if there actually is something better. But i'd agree. The UI should be accessible for people with disability. But maybe we need to work on lemmy and make that possible instead of waiting for something else to come along.

How's development going? Do you have enough funds to pay your salaries? Did the EU fund run out? What's your workload? Is the amount of full-time developers enough to work on new features? Or is it barely enough to keep up?

How do you like Lemmy and the people on it? (As of now)

I don't know where you live, just wanted to say if you're dabbling in this new hobby, make sure they're not keeping logs after your contract ends. Your IP of today might still be traceable back to you, if they keep the logs for a fixed time after the contract ended. Or use protection.

No it doesn't. If you don't care and just want anything that runs Steam, don't bother. Just pick anything, it runs fine on most Linux distributions, Windows and probably Mac. You're fine with tossing a coin. I'd choose Linux in that case since it's cheaper.

A proper conversation would be like this:

What shall I use?

Depends... What do you want to do with your computer?

Play games with Steam.

Alright, then use XY. Wanna know more?

No.

Fine.

Since I read a few comments here... What is your oppinion on more democratic platforms? I mean something like electing moderators. (Or dropping them in a democratic process.) Or voting for other things in a community.

(This is more a hypothetical question. I guess with the architecture as is, it can easily be exploited. And there is no way to implement this properly without severe changes and consequences.)

Have you put measures into place to assure the quality of future updates? In the past several updates have caused issues. And recently 0.19.x broke federation for the most of us. And it took weeks to fix it and make Lemmy usable again.

• make-or-break (adj.)
• all or nothing (phrase)

To me perfect is the enemy of good is: you don't arrive at good, because you set unrealistic goals for example. But theoretically you all want to go in the same direction.

All or nothing is taking chances, gambling. It's a different category. It doesn't have to do anything with one solution being good or bad. It's saying I want that, no compromises. Like if you say 'I want to go to Disneyland or I'm not coming with you.' There's not necessarily anything good or perfect or bad in it. With political parties it's often they have to show their voters they're determined and not taking shit. So they say 'we're not compromising'. And that way you have a clear winner and loser. Can be beneficial or detrimental to a goal. The motivation could be entirely different. But both things can also be at play at the same time.

When and how are you going to address the thousands of open issues in the Github repository, that contain UI bugs, missing error messages (something looks as if it was sent for example if you send a direct message with too many characters, but actually isn't), backend issues and other assorted bugs?

I think they're trying to get rid of rfd party apps. It's more 'die or die' for them.

I think out of the 3 kitchen and recipe managers I know, Grocy sounds most like it.

• https://github.com/grocy/grocy
• https://github.com/mealie-recipes/mealie
• https://github.com/TomBursch/kitchenowl
• https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes

Don't start with the most complicated distro and then fail.

I'm not a hardcore capitalist. Also i can't watch all the ads the corporations would like to feed me every day. So i'm fine with using an adblocker. Don't give stuff out for free on the internet if you don't like this. But since you ask: I really don't like that strategy to commercialize everything, to finance everything by selling ads and user data...

I'm not sure they are. I bet lots of them use Linux servers, Solr, several open source databases and so on. I think it's mostly the small and medium companies who are afraid of missing support and stuff.

The big companies just don't like selling open source to their customers. Or getting them too close to the concept of it.

We like it that way. And he is a hurensohn.

Thank you. A follow-up question: You sound like most things have to be done by full-time developers. Is there a healthy open-source community around Lemmy development? Do people submit enough pull-requests to fix bugs? Do people from the community contribute a substancial amount? features?

If it's since then you might be affected by something else, too. But there definitely is the federation bug since version 0.19.0 (early December). So no matter what you do, until the developers fix this, you currently won't be able to see all the posts/comments.

FLOSS. 99% better anyway. Why would i pirate something else?

Okay. Maybe i would pirate games, but my laptop is old and games that run on it are 15 years old anyways and cost next to nothing.

Hehe, I think it's more the Windows people who spread that urban legend. While I completely agree with you, I didn't learn anything new here 😉

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.

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.

What about features like automatically kicking of moderators / revoking their ownership. In the early days of the Reddit exodus, some people reserved lots of communities just so they'd be the owner of the community, but they don't do anything with it. I think admins mostly already dealt with that. But there are ideas floating around to migitate for things like that and other common annoyances. I think good moderation is key (and the tools that go with that and the whole architecture of the platform should favor a good atmosphere.)

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.)

Yes. And i'm always stunned by how many people buy loads of bottled water at the Getränkemarkt. Just drink it from the tap or get one of those machines that make sparkling water if you like that?! There is no chlorine in ordinary german water and it tastes just fine.

Glad I could contribute something.

If you want more tips: Choose the channel that suites you best. If you like arch, you probably like rolling distros. You could skip the stable channel and go for testing or unstable and that'd provide you with an experience alike a rolling release model. That isn't officially supported... Debian focuses on getting security patches into stable, not necessarily the other channels. That's why only stable is recommended. However, the other ones work great and Debian usually do a good job with keeping them well-maintained, too. I run testing on my laptop and I like it.

(Edit: And Debian should have a good amount of customizability... You can (re-)configure the package manager not to install recommended or suggested packages, and you can also skip the manpages and documentation if all you want is a small system.)

If I might ask: Who is leaving and what for? Mac? I've seen some developers buy the newer M2/M3 Macbooks. I think they're nice. But not nice enough to pay the price for one with a decent amount of RAM and storage myself.

Not under normal circumstances. I had some issues recovering damaged harddisks that had lots of errors and retries and sometimes either the USB adapter or the mainboard SATA would crap out or handle it better. But for normal copying of HDDs, both should copy the exact same data.

No. 0.19.1 was supposed to fix it, but it didn't. And people said it syncs at least every 24h hours, but that also wasn't the case.

The bugreport got re-opened, and I already saw some workarounds and tags for another upcoming bugfix release.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4288

And seems it's kind of a false accusation because the bug wasn't even introduced by an PR. (If you follow the recent discussion on github.)

and RMS. And we need a third person to get to the holy trinity. Greg Kroah-Hartman? Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie? Bjarne Stroustrup? We could choose Lennart Poettering, that'd certainly annoy a few people. Maybe we need some more apostles and additional people since all of that is based on the work of so many different people.

I'm afraid it doesn't work this way. Developers generally don't have a shortage of ideas or problems to solve. People suggest ideas all the times. Usually they have no idea if it's super difficult to implement or already a solved problem. And if people do the programming in their spare time: They need to be involved or personally motivated somehow. So you need to find people who also want it.

My advice is: Find out where those people mingle, who would have some personal motivation or involvement with your topic of interest. That is the right place to ask. My personal oppinion: Feel free to also spam the internet and places like this with your idea. I'm a proponent of "Don't ask to ask, just ask". People can always not read your post or can guide you into some direction. It's probably okay if you do it a few times too many. Just don't ask in a hundred places at once and then don't read the replies. If you're better than that, you're fine.

Thank you very much for explaining, and the whole AMA.

Concerning the "providing the project for free"... I think that's too simplistic. I mean users have expectations anyways. And you must have some motivation to maintain an open source project. Otherwise you wouldn't put it out there, engage with your users, fix their issues and incorporate their requests. Or you'd make that clear in the first line of the Readme as some people do.

I think open source is giving and taking. It's not about legal obligations (we usually waive every responsibility in every open source license.) But perhaps ethically. I as a user feel obligated to honor and respect your work and the time you've put in. And I shouldn't expect anything except for everyone abides by the license. But the devs aren't the only one putting in time and effort. Downstream are admins who run the actual instances. There might be an ethical obligation to not waste their time either. And there are moderators and users who make the platform become alive. They also offer their time for free and are part of the ecosystem, like the developers are. And ethically it is correct to treat people nice who put in a few hours to prepare a proper pull request and work towards the same goal as core developers.

And there are a few unique circumstances. This is a social network/link aggregator. And as such it relies to some degree on the network effect. It won't work without a certain amount of users and them being happy here. Lemmy devs seem (to me) invested in the project and not just coding something for money. So you want it to be successful and catering for users is part of the equation. Additionally the users of a social network trust the platform with their private data. You can't take legal responsibility for that. But if you accept users doing that, it's at least an ethical obligation to make good choices.

And the situation is: Since you have a few full-time developers... It's not a hobby project anymore. So it's a bit more complicated. And money might come with expectations. I personally differentiate between donations that are meant as a bounty, this money comes with obligations. And donations for the great work you've done so far. These come without.

I think you're doing a good job. I especially like that Lemmy development doesn't seem to be focused on growth above all. You could implement things differently and completely focus on not showing user-facing issues, in order to assure fast growth. Or write a Reddit clone like some people would like, including gamification, awards and stuff. But you don't seem to be interested in that. And that aligns well with what I like. I want a nice place to engage with people. I don't need another platform that is commercial and does things in order to be successful at the market.

I'm grateful. There are still bugs and a few more complicated annoyances I'd like to see being addressed. But I really enjoy spending some of my time here.

Where did you get your certificates from and what's the exact error message? Maybe you're using self-signed certificates. Those don't get accepted by anyone else. Your path doesn't look like the default letsencrypt/acme path...

Refurbished Dell 7390? ~$250 has an 13" display with relatively small bezels. I think if you want it even smaller, you'd need some mini laptop or a tablet or steam deck. But that has other downsides. And having a device with an full-size keyboard is nice if you want to type / code.

developers are notoriously bad at testing their own code, so I dont see what we can improve in this regard.

Sounds like software development... I mean automated tests help. But you're developing a distributed/federated platform. Unit tests won't do it. Maybe infrastructure that spins up a small fleet of instances and checks their ability to federate posts, delete comments and simulates interaction. That'd assure the most important aspects keep working. And I think there are tools for that available. But I get it. It's complicated, there are real-world instances with special (niche) setups, you're constrained, it has to be worth the effort and there are other important things to do.

Maybe just do your best not to break too many things and we (users) can complain and have another discussion only if it's a reoccurring problem. 😉

I hope those wants and needs aren't mutually exclusive. I think most open source projects do a good job in catering for both. I'm not involved in Lemmy development so I don't really know what's going on here. But I've sent one-off contribution to various projects, sometimes contributed single features or helped to sort something out. It always felt appreciated.

Sure, a drive-by commit every now and then and no responsibility is a completely different level than maintaining a (large) project and putting in that effort and dedication. I think a healthy open source project has both. Maintenance and the responsibility/decisions by a core team. And the community contributions make up by adding diversity, being close to what the user needs and adding manpower by a larger group of people, meaning the individual contributions might be smaller, but by many more people. Good communication between the devs and the community usually helps to get quality contributions.

I think people will vent and quite a decent percentage will return to reddit eventually. Like it happened with twitter since Elon did his thing. But lemmy will stay. It has been here before all the people migrated from reddit and the fediverse in general will keep having a right to exist. And it will.

nice. +1

I'm sorry, I really don't get all the innuendo here. Are we talking about a Macbook or another laptop here that gets support for 10 years? I like to pay about 1200€ for a laptop and it usually lasts me like 6-8 years. But 1 TB SSD is a bit short of what I'm comfortable with. If I configure a M3 Macbook with 24GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD it comes down to 3149€. That is about $3.400 after taxes. Another laptop I really like is the frame.work laptop. The AMD Ryzen 7 should be plenty fast. The price including 32GB of memory and 2 TB of storage is 1918€ or about $2.070 after taxes. And in the years to come you can fix it and upgrade it however you like. So your $1900 sounds about right if it's blazing fast and lasts you 10 years. I just wonder which laptop you're talking about.