This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky@lemmy.world about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
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Is there a public roadmap of some sort?
Maybe a blog post like “a year in review and what’s up for this year”
I’m not talking about bugs or minor tweaks. Just a general where are we, where are we coming from and where are we going to? What are important milestones?
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
I wouldn’t put a timeline to it. Just a list of features, broad and specific. As time goes on, they can be marked as “in progress” or “included”. New things can be added over time, or made more specific. All without timetables. For now call it a wishlist.
That would actually be nice.
The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this threadEdit: Leaving this here
It’s OK to post questions here:
Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
I stand corrected!
“Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.”
:)
I stand corrected!
Something tells me you’re gonna be pasting this a lot 😄
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.
Has Lemmy.ml been contacted by law enforcement yet to hand over user data? If yes, when was it, and what did you hand over?
I’m pretty sure all user data is public already.
PMs might be the only thing not everyone can see.IPs and access logs, plus email addresses aren’t public and are the kind of thing law enforcement wants.
Nope, never.
whats that thing where a company has a ‘we have never been contacted by law enforement or have been forced to disclose data’ sign on their website that theyll take down to implicitly inform users theyve received a request and a silencing order
Warrant canary. I doubt those really work because law enforcement could easily require you to keep updating it.
What could be done to improve interoperability between federated platforms?
mainly talking about Mastodon since it is the biggest one.I have seen the Peertube dev is quite nice and approachable. And willing to improve the experience cross-platform.
Have you tried to approach @Gargron@mastodon.social? Is he willing to contribute? How could we get Mastodon to improve the user experience with federated content, eg. communities and article posts?
What about @dansup@lemmy.ml / @dansup@mastodon.social and Pixelfed?
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
I think there’s a risk of lacking a coherent direction if decision-making is outsourced too much to the community. Furthermore, core developers might lose ownership of the project and then lose interest. As long as it’s open source, I’m pretty happy to have the core maintainers develop projects according to their own vision, and the community fork it should this vision differ too much from their own. :)
the community fork it should this vision differ too much from their own. :)
Definitely :)
As long as it’s open source, I’m pretty happy to have the core maintainers develop projects according to their own vision
The problem is, after we as users helped Mastodon to grow strong the dev thinks it is better to do stuff outside of the standards so nothing works for other fediverse platforms. He has too much power and most people are mindless.
While I agree with the content of that article I don’t know if we should give up on Eugen just yet. The Mastodon team has not disclosed what their plan is regarding the groups rework currently on the mastodon roadmap. There is an old proposal here, but I think we have good reason to believe that implementation will be revisited. To that end, it is very important to advocate for the adoption of FEP-1b12 which is the standard that Lemmy uses.
It may also be a good idea to advocate for the adoption of FEP-d36d both here and on lemmy. This is a standard for group-to-group following. Effectively allowing communities to subscribe to other communities.
Here’s a slightly older but fairly comprehensive write-up of the situation: https://blog.erlend.sh/group-convergence
Mastodon’s main dev isn’t really open. Have a look at the “Ego” part of this article
That article was over 5 years ago now. I would expect that there has been massive change now that Mastodon is way more popular, and the project is way more involved. Also, blocks and mutes do work now.
Also something to be said about how a thing or two has happened in the last five years. Whatever Mastodon is doing seems to be working for a large number of users.
It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine. The freedom of choice is why we’re in the fediverse in the first place. But the fact is that quite a few people want what Madison is offering. :)
Quote posts are still not there, they are on Misskey forks
https://fedi.tips/why-cant-i-quote-other-posts-in-mastodon/
They are on the roadmap, but that doesn’t say much.
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Very interesting question since mastodon introduced groups very recently which are a direct competitor to lemmy
TIL, I’ll have to have a look
https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse/
Of course not mature but mastodon can have groups without lemmy
Worth noting, we are not totally sure the upcoming groups rework will actually improve federation with Lemmy. To that end, we should all be advocating for the adoption of FEP-1b12 which is the standard that Lemmy uses.
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.
There are such efforts on SocialHub and on a W3C mailing list. However devs of major Fediverse projects are rarely active there, because they are all busy working on their own software.
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.
So many apps die before getting any users. For Lemmy however, when was the first time you really thought “Damn, this thing really might actually take off”?
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.
Do you think Lemmy is decentralized enough right now, or are you worried about some of the bigger instances growing too much?
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.
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.
What prevents from visiting /c/books@anotherserver?
Genuinely asking, because this is one of the core concepts of Lemmy and federation
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Doesn’t !books@lemmy.ml and !books@lemmy.world direct you to yourinstance.org/c/books@lemmy.ml and yourinstance.org/c/books@lemmy.world respectively?
Yes, syntax link like /c/community@server is incompatible with http.
I already posted to anotherserver/c/books and no one ever saw it.
Posting anywhere but biggestinstance/c/biggestcommunity is functionally the same as not posting at all.
And of course, the owners of biggestinstance/c/biggestcommunity believe in everything you don’t believe in and they really don’t like you in particular.
Welcome to new reddit, same as old reddit
I already posted to anotherserver/c/books and no one ever saw it.
Did you promote that community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and other promotion communities? Did you actively post on your new community, to attract users to your new one?
I’m going to take two examples I personally had
- I’m not a fan of having all discussions on LW, so even if !movies@lemmy.world was the most active one, we decided with a few others to start animating !moviesandtv@lemm.ee. It is now the most active community on that topic.
- I like the show “the Office”. !dundermifflin@lemmy.ml is the historical community, but as some people are not fans of lemmy.ml, we moved to !dundermifflin@lemm.ee, which is now the most active community on this topic.
I guess that shows that community takeover is possible, and does not need additional tools, just some time and dedication.
No, that defeats the entire point.
What point ?
The point of becoming a moderator that decide what everyone can and can’t say ?
The point of “making another reddit but I’m /u/spez” ?
The point of me having my own control over my instance. The bad moderator thing will always be a problem.
I don’t see how agglomerating vuew of all same name communities for the user impact you as a server owner ?
You still have totalitarian control over everything happening on your server.
You can still
Delete all post and comments
Change any text in any post or comment even if made by other users and without their notice
Ban any user
Ban any community
Even ban all users and all communities (whilte only model)
I must’ve read your comment wrong. Sounds like you just want a multi Reddit type feature? I agree that that should be implemented some apps have already did it. I don’t agree that the same word community should be lumped together universally and automatically.
No multireddit cannot solve this problem.
They are not a default agglomeration view so they will never make a difference as most users never change their defaults.
Covered in more details here
https://lemmy.ml/comment/7734804
A community cannot escape the stranglehold of moderators with a multireddit, because most users will simply not have it the backup community setup in their multireddit. They will never see dissenters posting in the backuos. And that makes multireddit largely useless
I kind of get where you’re coming from, but to me it sounds like you’re looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like “books”), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you’re interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.
I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, “ownerless” topics, instead, it’s built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.
IMO it’s totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it’s totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn’t really seem like a useful feature, but that’s kind of analogous to what you’re suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.
Thst makes lemmy , a reddit with many /u/spez , but in practice it will end up like the actual internet of today, where only 5-10 sites control everything.
This process is already far along on lemmy, already very centralized and all the incentives are in place to make it even more centralized.
I expect the settlement of the defederation war, will create 2-3 cliques of the largest servers that each silence the rest of the lemmyverse on their property.
Give it a little time and they’ll probably make themselves fully private cliques.
maybe communities should be able to flag that they’re the same community as one on another server, and if they mutually do so be combined into one metacommunity that people can search for
If it requires the owner’s consent, it defeats the purposeof my proposal.
It is expressly to disempower the owners in favour of the users.
I really don’t hate this idea from a lemmy centric UX perspective but how do you handle federation with other platforms?
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This isn’t the first time I have proposed this, but the pushback leads me to believe the owners do not want to relinquish power to the users. Lemmy it seems, is a community for owners. The interests of instance owners and their delegates come first.
I think we will need the digg & reddit story to play out all over again so that in 10-15 years the next exodus out of lemmy might lead us somewhere we can actually be free.
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This isn’t the first time I have proposed this, but the pushback leads me to believe the owners do not want to relinquish power to the users. Lemmy it seems, is a community for owners. The interests of instance owners and their delegates come first.
That is true because admins pay for the servers and are legally responsible for the content they host. However anyone can quite easily become an admin, the hosting cost for a single user instance is very low.
As someone who is on a medium sized instance, I can say its a little awkward when Lemmy[.]world goes down
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.
Not a question, just wanted to let you know I how much we appreciate and love you all for making Lemmy happen 🥰🥰
Thank you! Its great that you have been around all these years.
Thx a ton!
People, avoid to ask repeated questions and keeping it one question per comment is generally better.
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.
What happened with the domain Lemmy.ml when Mali took back controls over its domains and some sites went offline? Are you confident that the .ml domain will be reliable in the future?
First, I want to say thank you for the incredible job you already have done in this area. However, do you have any thoughts on further improving some fundamental Lemmy UX painpoints? Examples such as:
- Migrating accounts between instances
- Tagging users across instances
- Linking communities across instances
- Finding communities across instances
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
That would be awesome if true. It’s progressing faster than I thought. I’m still just learning about the scaled sort and enjoying that new feature lol.
I’m pretty sure it is there, you can export and import your subscriptions in the settings
It’s only subscriptions, blocks, and user settings iirc. Your posts and comments don’t migrate for example.
Still that’s not bad. Wish they could get saved posts to transfer, too. That would be useful.
Importing posts and comments could cause a security risk if someone would to abuse that function.
Even Mastodon doesn’t support it
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.
Can you add one to your list? Linking posts across instances? Like you can do
!community@instanceand 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/communityTurning the fediverse button into an “open on my instance” with similar functionality to subscribing may also be a solution here. Bonus points if it’ll also open a comment on mastodon.
Yup that’d be sick
Really like your protocol handlers contribution here. Seems tough to square with multiple accounts though.
What are the plans around admin tools?
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)?
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.
The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this threadEdit: Leaving this here cause why not
But it says in the OP that this thread should be used for posting questions for the AMA?
I stand corrected!
No worries :)
Back when the first Reddit exodus happened, there was a group heavily DDOSing many of the popular Lemmy instances. While it was a great opportunity to optimize Lemmy, did you ever find out who that attacker was?
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.
Were you ever approached by any kind of organization making some weird proposal regarding lemmy?
Firstly, thank you so much for providing the means for me to cut Reddit out of my life, I feel like I’m engaging with content in a much more deliberate way since, and honestly it’s been a massive improvement to my mental health in a way that I was completely oblivious to there even being a problem before.
Anyway, the question—regarding things happening entirely out of your control, 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?
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.
What are some cool “Lemmy Adjacent” projects you know of and want to share? (Things like LemmySchedule or Toast.ooo’s Canvas)
A lot of people say there are a bunch of tankies on Lemmy which really begs the question: Where do you all keep your tanks and can I drive one?
Maybe the real tankies are the comrades we made along the way
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.
