Finally, Lemmy appears to be run by developers who appear to be interested in their own issues and regularly appear to dismiss issues raised by users. This is not sustainable.

I would love to fix all the issues that users report, but for that we would need about ten times as many developers. The way it is we simply don't have enough time to work on everything, and need to prioritize things.

That instance list is built completely automatically by a crawler, no one approves instances before they are listed. In this case it was removed as soon as we became aware of it. Next time please make a pull request like that one, its much more effective than complaining.

I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side. This is not how journalism should work.

Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free. You also completely ignore that this is an exception, there are thousands of issues and pull requests in the Lemmy repos which are handled without any problems.

Besides you claim that we dont care about moderation, user safety and tooling which is simply not true. If you look at the 0.19.0 release notes there are numerous features in these areas, such as instance blocking, better reports handling and a new moderator view. However we also have to work on improvements to many other features, and our time is limited.

Finally you act like 4000€ per month is a lot of money, however thats only 2000€ for each of us. We could stop developing Lemmy right now and work for a startup or corporation for three or four times the amount of money. Then we also wouldnt have to deal with this kind of meaningless drama. Is that what you want to achieve with your website?

That particular improvement is actually mine. Lemmy was storing a lot of federation data which was completely unused so I removed it. However the 80% improvement is actually overstated, because not all data was migrated to the new table. So the db will grow a bit bigger over time, but still much smaller than before.

Phiresky made a lot of other sql optimizations which make Lemmy snappier and reduce CPU usage on the server. We don't have any benchmarks in that regard, but server load on lemmy.ml has gone down a lot since upgrading.

We are a bit unlucky with this server

I definitely didnt expect it, nor did I expect that there would suddenly be more than a dozen different apps. But its not a problem, the more choices users have the better. Those who like such clients can use them, thout it affecting anyone else. Plus monetization of apps could potentially help to fund development of Lemmy itself.

For instances with ads its pretty much the same, more choice for users. But I really doubt that model can have any success considering how many free instances are around which are run by volunteers. Defederation should be unnecessary assuming that ads are only shown to local users.

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.

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.

Wow lots of questions here.

• Im doing well, its exciting to know that so many people like the software Ive worked on for the last years. The first month after the migration was really stressful, but by now its calmed down a lot. Plus there are many contributors now which are helping a lot.
• Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
• I think the "breaking bugs" were really minor considering how we had to constantly rush out performance and security fixes. This should get better as we dont need to make emergency fixes, and have more time to let the community test release candidates before making the full release.
• Supporting downgrades means that someone has to test them and report/fix problems. We dont have time for that, but feel free to do it.
• Like I said, our recent releases had urgent performance/security fixes so we didnt have enough time for testing. We also didnt find out about these problems until later. Part of the problem is that keeping up with issues is almost a full-time job on its own, so I rarely read them anymore. If you see something important reported, do let me know.
• No concrete plans, but I definitely think that admins are the main actors who should have a voice in development. Its impossible for us to listen to all the individual users, because there are too many and they often dont have the necessary technical knowledge. If you have some ideas how to facilitate communication between devs and admins, let me know.

Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.

Haha youre a very curious one :D

1. See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2348893
2. It sure isnt perfect, partly because Mastodon makes no efforts to be compatible and expects everyone else to cater to their way of doing things. Regardless, the fact that you can interact between different platforms is a huge improvement over current social media platforms. And Im certain that interoperability will only get better over time.
3. Its already happening, look at Kbin combining the concepts of Reddit and Twitter into one. Or mitra which adds cryptocurrency integrations. There are probably others which Im unaware of.
4. Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements.
5. Its really genius because it combines the best aspect of centralized (simple login with username/password and an admin who manages technical stuff) with those of p2p (no central point of failure). Real p2p is great in theory, but it requires way too much technical knowledge for the average user, so its unlikely to ever gain mass appeal.
6. Personally I think the Fediverse is really the future of social media, so it will grow whether we want it or not. And its much healthier than the corporate platforms with their tracking, advertising and manipulating algorithms, so the more people leave them behind, the better. I dont see a way to influence this growth, we just need to adapt and deal with it.
7. Basically my previous reply, I dont know enough about journalism to give a more specific answer.
8. The biggest and proudest was definitely when tens of thousands of Reddit users suddenly came here, and most of them actually liked it. Cant say there was anything bad or embarrassing, the experience for me is really positive.
9. It feels great, I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.

All the code is open source, everyone is welcome to look through it for potential problems and report/fix them. we dont have any money to pay for a professional audit. Maybe there are some organizations which would do audits of open source projects for free, might be worth searching for.

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).

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.

Im glad its finally working, took a long time. Welcome to the federation!

It was actually easy because a lot of data was stored which was never used at all.

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.

Simple, no one has implemented it. Dessalines and I are busy with lots of things, so we rely on community contributions.

1. Manjaro for me.
2. Impossible to choose, there are too many.
3. I didnt have the time or motivation to try different clients yet. The web ui works just fine for me.

Thanks for your help :)

Yes theres an open pull request for this.

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.

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?

Thanks for the concern. Personally I took plenty of time off during summer. Now Im motivated to code again, and honestly I would get really bored if I did nothing.

We are not lawyers so we dont know much about licensing. To be honest I doubt that such bad actors would care much how posts are licensed, they are going to scrape it anyway.

Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?

And some developers are bad at design/css (like me).

Instance blocking and user blocking are features, not problems. Most users want to block trolls for example. If you dont like that, you can make your own instance without, or just go back to commercial social media. The rest of your rant seems exclusively to Matrix, not Lemmy. I think you should spend more time here (or on another instance) before you really judge it.

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.

This is not true, Lemmy can definitely have plugins and there is an extensive discussion about this topic. The conclusion is that plugins should be implemented in webassembly, so that they can be written in many different languages. See extism for details. Whats needed is someone with a clear use case who can implement a proof of concept, as it wouldnt make sense to add plugin hooks that no one uses.

Also mod tools can be implemented as api clients such as LemmyAutomod.

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.

Available Soon.

Dansup is well known for making grand announcements and delivering on them very late or never. I think it was more than two years ago that he announced federated groups for Pixelfed and still nothing. So I wouldn't get my hopes up yet.

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.

It was always normalized, but recently there seems to be more backlash from maintainers.

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.

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.

Thank you!

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.

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.

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.

Mediawiki is an extremely complicated project with 1.2 million lines of PHP. For me it was much easier to implement this project with technology Im already familiar with. But of someone wants to create a Mediawiki plugin I would be happy to see that.