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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Can there be an option to view deleted/removed comments? (this setting a user could configure in settings)
I can understand why mods want to remove comments, but being able to see the text that was removed could be very useful. At the moment, the only way to do this would be having each post uploaded to internet archive, and hope many other lemmy users do the same thing.
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What happened to the fedlink?
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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.
I didn’t ask early enough but I will shoot anyway.
What you intend to do with !anime@lemmy.ml? There isn’t an active mod there and community is unwilling to continue using it due to defederation with ani.social The problems with community will keep arise due to very nature of Japanese animation and differences in acceptable social norms in western world.
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
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.
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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.
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
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 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 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.
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
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.
As someone who is on a medium sized instance, I can say its a little awkward when Lemmy[.]world goes down
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.
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.
Lemmy Community Feeder? https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
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?
I know lemmings.world has a bot that subscribes to the most popular communities to make sure those are federated
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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. :)
Ah 5 years ago? That explains it. Early mastodon was rough but they seem to have gotten their shit together pretty recently.
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.
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 nit 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.
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.
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?
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. 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.
I’d be very curious how you guys migrate to a new domain if you ever need to, maybe there will be an open source tool to help with it, and maybe some improvements inside Lemmy’s code, like api calls from both domains to initiate the migration
There’s some instructions here, but I haven’t tested them recently: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/backup_and_restore.html?highlight=backup#backup-and-restore-guide
We might be able to make something inside lemmy’s code that could do a lot of that for you, but someone would need to open an issue and work on it.
I meant stuff like other instances updating your domain name for all its users/communities, fixing their subscriptions and stuff
Have you considered migrating while you still have control of the domain? You could at least make the domain redirect in that case. Though not sure if federation could somehow pick up that lemmy.ml has moved elsewhere.
Seems a bit too risky, because there’s always the possibility that our current registrar will be fine, and just make whatever agreements they want with Mali’s government.
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 processing faster than I thought. I’m still just learning about the scaled sort and enjoying that new feature lol.
It’s only subscriptions, blocks, and user settings iirc. Your posts and comments don’t migrate for example.
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.
More importantly it would make exports extremely large and would cause a lot of server load to import/export. Plus you would end up with duplicate posts and comments which seems like a bad idea.
Yes, that’s what I meant by security risk, that’s like a DoS feature.
Still that’s not bad. Wish they could get saved posts to transfer, too. That would be useful.
I’m pretty sure it is there, you can export and import your subscriptions in the settings
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.
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.
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!
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.)
In your opinion, what are the top strengths and weaknesses of Lemmy at this point in time?
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
As developers, what can we do (or not do) to best support Lemmy’s vision and goals right now?
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.
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.
How do you feel about extreme right-wing instances like the late Wolfballs using Lemmy to promote and spread hate?
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.
Not much that can be done to prevent them from using it. Mitigation on the maintainers’ part would be omitting them from suggested instances. The best way to combat it, I think, would be instance admins coordinating defederating from offending instances.
Wolfballs? Was it straight up hate or just run of the mill GOP talking points?
Wasn’t here back when it happened, but from what I know, it was straight up white supremacy shit. It got defed to death.
I hope they’re not too against it. I know they’re extremely left wing, which scared a lot of the centrists on Reddit. If they allow even right wing instances, then it emphasizes the project’s lakc of political bent, and encourages more mainstream people to join. The politics can be up to each individual instance to decide whether to defederate with those other instances or not.
But that’s just my opinion, I’m also curious how the devs will answer.
I’m sure they’re probably not okay with it but also there’s not much they can do about it other than defederate .ml - such is the nature of open source software.
Not that I’m suggesting it, but they could hardcode the defederation of those instances on the code and most admins wouldn’t bother to fork lemmy to remove it. Like in the past they had a hardcoded slur filter, but I think they disabled it because many slurs in English were regular words in other languages
Yeah that’s a very slippery slope
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.
I think you should be careful with political hate. Its a slippery slope and should not be handled by a developer.
Maybe we could simply focus on having clear rules for each community.
