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 , @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml , or @phiresky@lemmy.ml about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
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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.
Are you incentivized by the burning smell of Reddit like I am?
Regarding funding - Can you give a detailed breakdown of what you’ve gotten per year and from which sources since you started Lemmy?
From NLnet we had three funding rounds with 50.000 Euros each.
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!
It also doesn’t have historical data on i.e. how much NLNet contributed (which iirc, was a lot*)
*(a lot in terms of donations - Lemmy devs are living below poverty line. Please donate)
Is federated authentication being considered for the future? The federated model of the fediverse is great, but it runs into problems when instances “die”, you want to access different servers as they federate with different things, etc. leading to the need of having multiple accounts. If there were a decentralized network of auth servers, could use the same credentials everywhere.
Cool! I had some personal questions in mind, apart from Lemmy. These won’t be a problem right?
Sure
No problem, thats why its called AMA. Of course its possible that your questions wont get answered.
Looking forward to it. Hopefully people will stay respectful.
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)?
The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this thread
But it says in the OP that this thread should be used for posting questions for the AMA?
I stand corrected!
I’ve been wanting to change how the existing admin options are organized on the admin page for awhile now to be easier to understand. As for improvements beyond that, I’m open to suggestions from instance admins for improvements.
Regarding your last point, even if an offending user is registered on another instance, banning them will prevent them from bothering users on your instance.
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.
There’s some more context for this in this issue, and we each have different views on it, because there are tradeoffs no matter what.
My personal view (based on experience modding and admin’ing), is that we should prioritize handling a report ASAP, by the first eyeballs that see it, rather than whose jurisdiction it is. On all but the largest communities, admins are generally more active, and more likely to see the report and take action on it.
Maybe make it go to everyone?
That’s what we currently do ( as in the report goes to both mods of that community, and instance admins).
Problem is that reports don’t go the mods if they are on another instance.
People, avoid to ask repeated questions and keeping it one question per comment is generally better.
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
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.
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 talkung 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.
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.
Thx! Goodluck and enjoy the path
Check the NLnet milestones in updated OP.
The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this thread
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!
Something tells me you’re gonna be pasting this a lot 😄
“Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.”
:)
I stand corrected!
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 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.
could you try regardless?
Super excited! Will you be answering all questions, including hard ones?
Any words for Zuck and Threads?
No, I guess they only care about Mastodon. I will just wait and see how that goes.
I think Lemmy is a tiny blip size wise.
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.
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.
What happened to the fedlink?
No longer appears in the topic
I see it on 19.3, your server is still on 19.2, maybe that’s why?
Yep that was a regression which was recently fixed.
Regarding server architecture - How many users can the Lemmy network, or the fediverse as a total scale to, assuming the average person posts once per day and reads ~50 comments/posts a day?
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.
In the future it could make sense to make a protocol extension to send multiple activities in a single HTTP connection. But for now its probably not worth the effort, considering that it would break compatibility with other Fediverse platforms.
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.
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.
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 already done 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 agree, I want to echo this. This needs to be rectified. Same communities across servers should be possible to engage with in a metacommunity format. This will be a game changer for Lemmy.
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.
This is not that big of a problem. A third party can always make a bootleg version of metacommunity post viewer. Lemmy can already view posts across all federated instances using “All” tab, so all that would be needed is some method of meta labelling of same (not similar) communities across instances and to be able to view unified communities under such tags, and this tagging be done appropriately by all instances’ admins in synchronisation, ignoring their personal and ideological differences.
A third party can always make a bootleg version of metacommunity post viewer.
yea Summit for Lemmy can do this already https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idunnololz.summit
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.
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.
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
I’ll say this is really clunky to do and often means being redirected to that instances site where you are no longer logged in. Mobile apps mostly solve this themselves, but its sometimes a pain on desktop. I’d like the ability to somehow group similar communities, but I’m fine if its like Multireddits or playlists on the user end.
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.
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.
Its definitely a concern. IMO the lemmyverse is far too centralized at the moment. The big questions are:
- Is there a trend toward centralization, or away from it?
- How are people being introduced / onboarded onto lemmy?
- 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.
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.
I am admin of the biggest Brazilian instance, but I am welcoming more local instances and talking to the admins we should spread the load. But what I notice is the users are concerned they will miss out if they are not in an instance that already have everything.
Could we have an easier way to auto-federate every new communities from a given instance? Even an “auto-federate everything possible” option. as @nutomic@lemmy.ml said lemmy DB isn’t too big, most instance owners could have it on their servers. And making it opt-in won’t hurt the small instances.
I know lemmings.world has a bot that subscribes to the most popular communities to make sure those are federated
Maybe not auto-federate / auto-subscribe, but we do have an issue to federate a lightweight list of communities among servers, that could help with this.
Its true that the disk space required isn’t too big a deal, but it would unecessarily increase the CPU and network requests by auto-federating the entire lemmyverse, rather than using explicit subscribes.
It would be relatively easy to write a script/bot which fetches the list of communities from a given instance, and then subscribes to all of them from another instance. In fact I heard something like this already exists, but dont know the name.
I think it’s worth bringing a solution in house. A recommended migration route. If you want people to feel confident to pick any instance, you have to give them the confidence to move easily and not fear picking a small instance that might die when their owner gets bored. A simple setting option to migrate from, then you select the account and either (through communities accessible, or through automated request, pull that data and subscribe to communities. Maybe blocks etc also.
boost.lemy.lol?
Lemmy Community Feeder? https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
Maybe hide the big instances behind a few clicks? Like you could sort/filter for them, but you’d have to navigate a bit? The average user isn’t going to bother. Like have a default sort that hides the big ones, and a default filter that filters out the top five or whatever.
People join lemmy.world because it gets linked directly on Reddit and other places, they dont even go through join-lemmy.
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.
As someone who is on a medium sized instance, I can say its a little awkward when Lemmy[.]world goes down
