My Love-Hate Relationship With Lemmy – Gavi's Blog
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623718
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623713
I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.
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There is a lot of misleading information in this post.
Something that I notice said consistently by those who have little experience in Lemmy admin spaces is “why not just contribute then?”And the answer people try. And this happens. This unfortunately leads into the next point that is the developer teams behavior.
Dessalines and I had some discussion whether the linked issue should be closed or not. Anyway we decided to leave it open in the end. Then some weeks later a user came along and made a completely offtopic complaint that this decision making process is somehow wrong. I admit that I overreacted by giving a temporary ban for this, but mistakes happen and its completely disingenious to spin this as some sort of general toxic behaviour from our side.
There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.
This is your opinion and I doubt it is as widespread as you think.
Another aspect of this is that the Lemmy devs run two instances: lemmy.ml & lemmygrad.ml
What makes you believe this? I can only speak for myself, and I am not involved with lemmygrad in any way.
The biggest piece that broke all confidence in the Lemmy developers amongst many admins including myself is that during the CSAM spam attacks there was complete radio silence. The developers made no statement on the matter. And when Github requests were made to try and propose ideas about how to fix what happened, the developers explicitly stated they didn’t have time to focus on that. No dialogue.
Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.
As well, when a post was made about Sublinks (A project I will touch a bit more on, and am involved in due to the reasons I have highlighted above) the comments that were made by Lemmy’s lead developers were extremely petty. This lessens peoples confidence in your project, not improves it.
Why do you consider it petty? Its a fact that jgrim never opened any issue for the features he wanted, not did he attempt to contribute with a pull request. Its also true that it took multiple years of fulltime work to get Lemmy ready for production, and I dont see how Sublinks can be any faster when it has only volunteer contributors. That doesnt mean I wish for Sublinks to fail, in fact I hope it will be successful so that admins and users have more choices available, and to improve resilience through independent codebases and development teams.
Generally you seem to have an extremely entitled attitude. Lemmy is an open source project that is provided for free. I would also love to fix all the problems that users report, and implement all those features. But unlike Reddit we are not a billion dollar company with thousands of employees. We are just two individuals funded by donations and working from our homes. There is only a limited number of hours in each day and only so much work we can finish in that time. If you are unhappy with Lemmy then by all means switch to a different platform, because we dont get any direct benefit from having more users.
It is unfortunate that this is what you have decided to take away from the blog post instead of reflecting on the criticism I have provided. Instead of reflecting on my list of legitimate criticism you have decided to call me entitled and hone in on small aspects of the blog post in attempt to dismiss it completely. Per usual, it is everyone else that seems to be the problem but you. I outlined my own issues with lemmy after a LOT of patience and goodwill. That's lost, and this comment solidifies further why I will switch away from lemmy as soon as I get the chance. Whether you decide to accept the points I have made is on you but ultimately your refusal to recognize the issues I have outlined will cause this project to fade away completely. And that's really sad. I love lemmy as a project and an idea.
Responding to false criticism is important. For example you were under the mistaken impression that we reject pull requests or issues, or don't care about moderation? All of those are provably false. Look at all the moderation PRs I've closed in the past MONTH alone. This is all easily verifiable if you go to our github accounts and see what we're working on.
You also heard second hand that the sublinks developer is making sublinks because they got a bad reception from us, or were told that we'd reject features? They've never opened a single issue or PR.
Your post seems to mostly be 2nd-hand rumors from people who already don't like us, and not from any people that are actually working on Lemmy. That's perfectly fine, but it'd be wrong to not address these false criticisms.
Entitlement in open source is a real thing, and you would know our pain if you ran a codebase currently in use by > 40k people monthly. To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person. It'd be like if I criticized my grandmother's free meal for it not being to my liking, and demanded she make it my way.
To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person.
I don't know how you managed to do this in one thread but I'll leave these two contradictions here:
Like, I'm not going to deny that entitlement in open source is a thing - it is a thing and it is awful.
However, people are giving you their time, effort and money - you keep dismissing that and doubling down on erasing this work.
I mean, unless you want to tell me how I'm acting entitled to your work despite spending countless hours trying to support my community, spending hours sorting through issues that Lemmy has to label them, spending countless hours advocating for people to make issues and for change in the Lemmy project.
And after all that, trying to have any input on prioritising moderation was met with : (paraphrasing) "I will not change my priorities", "I think you're exagerating moderation issues, they work fine" and plain out refusing to acknowledge lolicon pornography as CSAM, refusing to acknowledge my request to put moderators in Lemmy's matrix channels despite obvious problems during weekend.
Seriously, I kinda expected better from you. I have no trust in Lemmy's leadership and your response here just examplifies that.
I appreciate your work in organizing issues and helping to label them, and I'm sorry if I did not give some things proper weight. But are my priorities not my own? Why is this such an affront that I choose what I think is important? Would you like it if I did the same to you, demanded that you change your priorities to do what I want you to do? What if there are thousands of other people asking you the same thing?
Scale is also left out of the equation here. Thousands people are asking 2-4 devs for features. It is simply impossible to please everyone, unless some people do the open source thing, and work on a feature they'd like to have. Many people have and continue to do this, rather than dismissing the project because the small number of developers can't keep pace with issues.
But are my priorities not my own? Why is this such an affront that I choose what I think is important? Would you like it if I did the same to you, demanded that you change your priorities to do what I want you to do? What if there are thousands of other people asking you the same thing?
When you accept donations and grants for Lemmy's development and when you work with other people, I think it is normal and good to think about priorities in a more collaborative fashion. I cannot write rust code and many other people cannot do that. When their issues are left ignored, dismissed and repeatedly told that they have no input towards Lemmy's direction - people tend to not want to work with you because they feel that their work is pointless.
Why make an issue if developers admit to not reading them and not changing priorities? Why help towards a collective goal if everyone is just working on their own personal thing? As someone who is not good at writing code - it just feels like shit. My work felt entirely pointless because there was no way for my effort to amount to anything I wanted. Only people who can write code can actually influence the Lemmy project.
I understand feeling burned out but I tried contributing, I tried making things better and all I was met with was "I will not change my priorities" or "I do not think it is valuable to try to bring direction in the Lemmy project" or straight up dismissal or silence. If what you wanted all this time was for you to work on your own thing with no outside input, well, all I can say is you've done good work to make that happen.
I don't think there's anything left for me to tell you.
because the small number of developers can’t keep pace with issues.
Maybe there'd be plenty more devs if it wasn't written in a new, up and coming, difficult language to understand let alone master. Maybe there'd be more code contributions if existing ones weren't closed because you don't see this being an issue. Maybe there'd be more developers if you'd let there be.
This is a tremendous amount of cope. Implying there are Lemmy users just lining up to contribute PRs if only it wasn't written in Rust. Give me a break!
If someone was competent enough to author code that's fit to pull into a project like Lemmy, they're more than capable of translating those skills to Rust. No language seeing modern significant use is so esoteric that a reasonably seasoned developer couldn't make something competent in it within a week of starting to learn its syntax. Maybe a day, even, if the language you are trying to learn is highly similar to one you already know.
If someone was competent enough to author code that’s fit to pull into a project like Lemmy, they’re more than capable of translating those skills to Rust.
With time, perhaps, but why is someone going to do that as a prerequisite for a spare-time FOSS contribution? People tend to contribute to the projects they already have the skills for.
No language seeing modern significant use is so esoteric that a reasonably seasoned developer couldn’t make something competent in it within a week of starting to learn its syntax.
Knowing the minimal syntax of a language to get past compilation errors is not even remotely close to being "competent" in it. You need to learn the language's structures, you need to learn how the compiler works, you need to learn the libraries that the FOSS project is using, you need to learn the security pitfalls for the language... The language used can be a HUGE hurdle to overcome.
"You know Python and Javascript, so you can write competent C++ code that is FOSS-contribution-acceptable if you take a week to learn!" (inb4 memory management and pointers and templates and 'oh no every input field I wrote is a trivial buffer overflow'...)
People tend to contribute to the projects they already have the skills for.
People also tend to pick up new skills when they have a driving incentive to do so, like supporting a project they have a vested interest in seeing improved.
You need to learn the language's structures
Most of the bread and butter ones have analogues in other languages you should readily understand. More language-unique structures are rare; the more niche they are, the lower the odds your ability to contribute in a meaningful way hinges on your understanding of them.
you need to learn how the compiler works
You really don't, though? Modern compilers, particularly the Rust compiler, are designed to abstract away as much of the details of compilation as possible. If the project really does need to tickle the compiler a certain way to get it to build, it will almost certainly have a buildscript and/or a readme.
you need to learn the libraries that the FOSS project is using
This is true regardless of the language in use. I'm not sure why you brought it up.
you need to learn the security pitfalls for the language
I would imagine most of these language-specific security footguns are either A) so specific that you will never hit the conditions where they apply, B) are so blazingly obvious that code review will illuminate what you did wrong and you can learn how to fix it, or C) so obscure that even the project owner doesn't understand them, so you'd be at minimum matching the rest of the codebase quality.
Mind, I am not insinuating that one can simply bang out a whole new submodule of a project in an unfamiliar language with minimal learning time. Large contributions to large projects can be hard to make even when you're a veteran of the language in use, as the complexity of the project in and of itself can be its own massive barrier. But not every contribution needs to be big. And for most contributions, I don't believe the language is the most significant barrier to entry. It's a barrier, sure. But not the biggest one.
I'd wager it's not having a significant impact on the volume of contributions to Lemmy in particular.
This is true regardless of the language in use. I’m not sure why you brought it up.
Because if you know Python, you know requests already. Or flask, or configparser, or itertools, or maybe even pyqt.
Languages all have their own 'most common libraries', which add to the time it takes to learn how to be competent in that language. If a python dev tells me they know all the syntax, but have no clue what itertools or requests are, my eyebrows go up.
There's a lot of language-specific knowledge that needs to be learned before you'll be competent in it, that people don't even think about.
Maybe there'd be plenty more devs if it wasn't written in a new, up and coming, difficult language to understand let alone master.
Sorry but this is a pretty weird criticism to have. It's like saying that a squirrel would be a better fish if it were a trout. A squirrel is a mammal, not a fish. Lemmy was intentionally written in Rust when the devs started the project. It's clear that it's in Rust by looking at any of the documentation. Yet this comes across as criticizing their project for what they've always said it was, while using said project to do so. Just a bit boggling.
If you like Java, contribute to Sublinks, if you like PHP, there's kbin or many other AP projects. Pick, use, and contribute to the project(s) that use languages and tech that you get excited about. Noone is forcing you to use someone written in Rust. No need to piss on other peoples' parades over language choice (it's not like they're using C# or Perl - kidding there, nothing wrong with Perl :P ).
Yet this comes across as criticizing their project for what they’ve always said it was, while using said project to do so. Just a bit boggling.
No I'm criticising the Developers complaint that there's only a few active developers for Lemmy, and the rest of you freeloaders don't contribute and code.
The number of people who understand Rust, can code in it, know of Lemmy and want to contribute is very few. There would be More developers contributing to Lemmy if it weren't written in Rust.
I'm not sure that it's a complaint from them, so much as an explanation. It's important to realize that developers are human beings with human needs, wants, and feelings. The popularity of Lemmy is not their "fault" and the language choice is rather fundamental to the project itself. Would it be nice if some features were taken up more quickly or implemented in other ways? Yes. But others needs, wants, and feelings are not more important than those of the devs. They need to eat, sleep, provide shelter for themselves, and, importantly, do things that are not coding (for physical, social, and mental health).
The number of people who understand Rust, can code in it, know of Lemmy and want to contribute is very few. There would be More developers contributing to Lemmy if it weren't written in Rust.
And there would be more developers if more people wanted to learn Rust. The low number is just a fact to accept. If one can't accept it, there are plenty of other platforms.
Would you be criticizing them equally if, instead of Rust, they created the project using FORTRAN and made a point of mentioning explicitly that using FORTRAN was the main intent? It's just a weird criticism to me - Lemmy is fundamentally a project started so that the devs could work with Rust. You are criticizing them for their project not fundamentally being a different project. Maybe another comparison would be criticizing specialty water-based paint manufacturing for using a water rather than a VOC-solvent for water-based paint - they're not trying to make other types so, the criticism doesn't make logical sense.
Thanks for the insight and well thought out response. I'll think on it.
Entitlement in open source is a real thing
Goes both ways, from/by developers and from/by users.
demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person.
Demands:
And the entitlement is pretty damn strong from your side too. It's an open source project that is your baby; I get it. What makes you entitled to other people doing everything except the actual code portion, for YOU? If it gets to the point of needing an 'RFC' to contribute code to Lemmy or even request a change...
Well, good luck. Why should people do your work that you get paid to do (as said often by yourself and Nutomic), when they aren't getting paid a cent?? That is the epitome of entitled. You want free work, but you don't want to give your work for free
It is absolutely impossible for 2-4 devs to please everyone in a codebase used by >40k people. If you ran a codebase used by this many people, you'd understand our pain. You cannot make everyone happy.
You want free work, but you don't want to give your work for free
Check out our github profiles if you think we aren't doing work. This is easily verifiable.
How can you think that this tiny group of people, fielding the requests of thousands, is entitled? We're simply requesting that people do the open source thing, and contribute a PR, when we don't have time to work on an issue. Would you like it if I made you change your priorities and work on what I wanted you to work on?
It is absolutely impossible for 2-4 devs to please everyone in a codebase used by [...] people [...] You cannot make everyone happy.
I agree, you are correct.
Check out our github profiles if you think we aren’t doing work. This is easily verifiable.
Not what I said. You are paid for your work on Lemmy, right?? I didn't say you weren't doing any work. You're being obtuse and putting words in my mouth.
Good job entirely dismissing everything my comment said without actually responding to anything in it.
No we arent getting paid, there is no employment contract with anyone. We are working on Lemmy in our own time, and receiving donations from some users. It may seem like a minor difference but its important, because donations dont include any obligation to give something specific in return, or prioritize specific tasks.
How do I put this? If this is how you respond to criticism, and that's what you've clearly shown repeatedly to do, then you should not be in any leadership position.
You do not apologize even when you admit to be wrong, you blame others instead of taking responsibilities for anything that was said here. It's entirely a dismissive response. You might not have noticed but people do not feel valued at all when they speak to Lemmy's developers. Their input is dismissed, they are told to make issues that you do not care for and when they ask for something to be better prioritized, you effectively tell them to fuck off. You make people feel that their time and effort towards Lemmy is worthless.
With the way you've acted, you have pushed back people from making issues, from contributing in code or otherwise, from wanting to host Lemmy and wanting to be associated with the project. Sincerely, all I can hope at this point is for Lemmy to be forked by better people or to be forgotten about.
I remember Beehaw wanted to switch away from Lemmy to another platform months ago. I encourage you to do that and point your demands and entitlement at someone else. We have enough users who actually appreciate our work.
I encourage you to do that and point your demands and entitlement at someone else.
respectfully (and as someone who has not paid attention to this thread outside of my one comment): i am continually failing to understand how asking you guys to give us better moderation tools to do our jobs--which is our primary reason we're even looking elsewhere and, if resolved, would likely placate about 90% of the problem we have with continuing to use your software--is entitlement. we're basically handing you a silver platter entitled "hey, here is our problem, and here is how you can keep us on Lemmy in the long term" and you guys seem to just not take that seriously at all? and now you seem to want to debate us out of thinking it's an issue while simultaneously telling us to fuck off for investing in your software at all!
What makes you think that I want you to to keep using Lemmy? As far as I remember, Beehaw admins have only brought negativity and complaints to Lemmy development. You have never made any code contributions and based on your attitude I doubt that you donate any money. You need to realize that having more users on Lemmy gives us zero benefits, in fact more users means more work. So if you leave Lemmy it means less work and less complaints for us. Meanwhile Beehaw users who like Lemmy can easily switch to another instance.
i mean, if your response to a community which has stuck by your software for over two years now and hasn't even publicly committed to leaving is "fuck you" because you don't like that we are vocally opinionated on our problems, frictions, and perceived deficiencies with your software—yeah, why would we ever do anything to help you guys? you're strongly vindicating us here in supposedly "never ma[king] any code contributions" or "donat[ing] any money" (and i'm just going to grant you that for the sake of argument, i'm not even sure it's true). i'm not going to contribute to someone's software when they're openly contemptuous of me for trying to make their software better.
if i was on the fence previously about the upthread critique that you guys are kind of assholes to anybody who dissents about what you think should be the way forward, i am no longer. all i can say further is that you are acting severely out of pocket here as a spokesperson for the software and as a community manager and i would strongly encourage you to log off at this point before you say something that make your community relations even worse than they already are.
We gain nothing from you using Lemmy. It's free software, a free meal that we're providing freely to anyone as a public service.
Don't like it? Don't eat it!
You really think I should be grateful that you stuck by my software? Why arent you grateful for the years of work I put into this software, and for allowing you to use it for free? There are many instances which have "stuck by" Lemmy for years, such as hexbear or lemmygrad, and none of them ever showed the sort of entitled attitude that beehaw admins have.
Again I dont have any obligation or even incentive to do any work for you specifically. If you dont like how I act as "spokesperson" or "community manager" (in reality Im an open source maintainer), then stop using Lemmy and go to Sublinks, Reddit or any other platform.
i don't care about debating this with you. i will, as a concluding remark, just note incredible irony in lecturing about entitlement while simultaneously demanding gratitude for your work from people you literally just told to fuck off from this service three replies ago. in very blunt terms: i think you are getting the exact level of gratitude you deserve from us after this exchange, which is none. my experiences with you have been thoroughly unpleasant, unkind, and paint you as a toxic person and it is my view that your "years of work put into this software" are meaningless in the face of the blatant disrespect you show members of your community.
If my work on Lemmy is meaningless then please stop using it. You cant have it both ways.
There are many instances which have “stuck by” Lemmy for years, such as hexbear or lemmygrad, and none of them ever showed the sort of entitled attitude that beehaw admins have.
Interesting choices. Often it doesnt seem like they would be using the more advanced moderation tools anyway. Its just natural that they dont complain about something missing they dont need.
I think this is a pretty clear example of what I mean when I say that my work was never valued.
I did do work that was non-code - I labeled tons of issues, closed duplicates and those which had already been fixed.
I did try to write code contributions (here and here). One of which was rejected based on purely aesthetic preferences and whose follow-up PR was made dormant forever afterwards.
I tried to help and contribute in the ways I could - apparently this work is just "negativity and complaints".
Changing a total of three lines is hardly worth mentioning. The issue labeling was somewhat helpful, but in the end this task should be done by someone who is familiar with the code. And anyway it was too risky to continue this after relations with beehaw soured. So yes there were some positive contributions, but they dont outweigh the negativity and complaints.
Changing a total of three lines is hardly worth mentioning.
As a professional software I know that the actual typing is hardly any of the work - let alone on someone else's code!
And you're a developer too, so you know this. This minimising of his contributions comes across as you arguing in bad faith, not to mention backing up the complaints about your hostile attitude.
You have never made any code contributions [...] I doubt that you donate any money.
What a horrible take on being an open source community. If this is what you want for Lemmy instances or admin to become "worth it" to you, change your license; or your change your attitude. You keep bringing up that Lemmy is open source as your argument, but really not understanding how open source works, or the culture of such.
Stop using my Software says the developer of an open source/source available software.
https://beehaw.org/comment/884681
It doesnt really matter what you want. The software is open source so anyone can use the software freely.
“Anyways they would have taken too long to implement” seems like a very odd take considering this is an ongoing issue that is pretty damn important. Some features that should be available is for instances to wipe images from certain dates, “muting” instances to prevent storing any images from instances that are not on an approve list and prevent users outside this list from uploading images to your instance, and an option to prevent any user outside your instance from uploading images to your instance.
Theres many mod tools like these that need priority right now but it seems like they keep getting pushed away
You can already block federation with certain instances. And the only ones who can upload images are users that are locally registered to your instance.
I dont want to block full federation i want to block image federation from other servers so when the big ones are attacked with csam my server doesnt download it. If someone uploads an image to a community on my server does it not federate and get downloaded by my server?
Thumbnails from remote posts are stored on your server by default. However there is a setting to disable this.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/0.19.3/config/defaults.hjson#L54
mistakes happen
Mistakes happen, typically once or twice; and are learned from and not repeated. Habits are recurring. These things are a Lemmy Developer habit.
There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.
This is your opinion and I doubt it is as widespread as you think.
+1 user to their opinion.
no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard,
Really?. Does this relate? Not related, not a feature request. I mean there probably wasn't a specific feature request for the exact specific matter at hand. But plenty of noise and discussion around something needing to help address the problem.
Why do you consider it petty?
Look at your responses to instance admins on your platform and Github. And then ask yourself that question again. You sorely need some self-reflection.
I personally got kicked out of and banned on everything Lemmy Matrix related for daring to challenge you and and Dessalines. You are petty AF.
From the linked comment:
never even bothered to open an issue about it.
From the parent comment:
not did he attempt to contribute with a pull request.
READ the rest of the post. Literally the first damn thing YOU quoted from it.
And lastly, from you:
Really showcasing what Gabe said in his post, eh ?
Really?. Does this relate? Not related, not a feature request. I mean there probably wasn’t a specific feature request for the exact specific matter at hand. But plenty of noise and discussion around something needing to help address the problem.
All of these are resolved, what more do you expect?
I personally got kicked out of and banned on everything Lemmy Matrix related for daring to challenge you and and Dessalines. You are petty AF.
I dont remember the exact details but the reason you got banned was because you actively attacked a Lemmy maintainer. Someone who actually works on the project to make it better, as opposed to you who only complains. Such a ban is well deserved.
Anyway Im done talking to you. Please switch Beehaw away from Lemmy and use another platform so you can stop bothering us.