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We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST

This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

721 comments
  • I asked in the other thread about GDPR.

    Nobody thinks it's very interesting but if instances don't follow gdpr, the entire network is at risk of legal consequences.

    So please bring this up, even though it's not very fun.

  • Any plans for improving SEO? One of Reddit’s biggest strengths was being able to get very relevant results with a simple internet search. In time can you see something similar for Lemmy, even with its decentralized nature? I really you for doing this, thank you for your time!

  • I'm gonna be asking hard questions, I think, sorry about that. I hope you consider it tough love considering our past interactions.

    As an instance admin, I have some questions:

    • How are you doing? I know there was a lot of pressure when things blew up and it seems to be calming down a bit now.
    • How is Lemmy doing financially?
    • Considering past releases and their associated breaking bugs (including 0.18.3), what measures are you taking to help prevent that?
    • Can we consider the possibility of downgrades being supported?
    • Why are bugs affecting moderation not release blockers? Does anything block releases?
    • Are there plans to give instance administrators a voice in shaping the future of Lemmy's development?

    As someone who is trying to help with Lemmy's development, I have some other questions:

    • What do you think are the biggest problems with Lemmy as a software project and what are your priorities for Lemmy?
    • Considering fairly low amounts of developers contributing to Lemmy, how are you working to help new people get into the project?
    • Do you worry about the message it sends to potential contributors when the main developers are working on a different project which competes with the former? (Example: Lemmy-ui vs Lemmy-ui-Leptos)
    • Considering most work is done voluntarily, how are you trying to organize and prioritize work?
    • Do you believe you are stretching yourself too thin between Lemmy, Lemmy-ui, Lemmy-ui-leptos, Jerboa and Lemmy.ml? If so, what are you doing to help you focus?
  • Hope multiples are ok ...

    1. As platform developers, do you have any thoughts about ActivityPub? Positive/negative critiques, needed developments (in your opinions), usage gripes or tips for other platform devs, future predictions?
    2. As devs of (now) the second largest platform next to mastodon (by some metrics), which are probably as distinct platforms can be in terms of format, do you have any views on interoperability between platfroms over ActivityPub, where a common critique (AFAIK), from *diaspora devs for example, is that sharing posts/information of different formats just doesn't work well over AtivityPub and so is one of its major flaws?
    3. Arguably the fediverse has so far sought to replicate the corporate big-social platforms ... should new design evolution occur now and if so how?
    4. Much has been made by some of how the lack of user-friendliness of the fediverse really isn't anything to celebrate and should be taken more seriously by users and devs alike (see, eg, Erin Kissane who focuses on mastodon). However much this applies to lemmy (where issues of user mobility probably do apply), do you think the fediverse needs a better story around catering to user needs?
    5. Do you have any thoughts on the server-based architecture of the fediverse (where all user accounts are bound to a particular user) and whether alternative architectures have a future or could be better (p2p, more single-user based for instance)?
    6. Should lemmy and the fediverse seek to grow with any and all users or seek to stay relatively small and limited to ensure a healthy cutlure?
    7. Journalism and journalists ... should they be on the fediverse (like the BBC recently with their own mastodon instance) ... and if so, how?
    8. What are the biggest or proudest moments you've had with Lemmy so far, and the worst or most embarrassing?
    9. How does it feel to have so many users using and developing against your software?!
  • I asked this in the original thread but I’ll repeat it here:

    1. Are there any limitations with the ActivityPub protocol you find limiting? Do you have recommendations for future versions of the protocol?
    2. Do you have any thoughts on the AT Protocol (a potential competitor to AP)?
  • First of all, I'd like to say thank you and that I appreciate your work. Lemmy is great and I've found a new home (at least for the foreseeable future). I first joined lemmy.ml once I learned about lemmy, and I have to say I had a good experience there. You guys even responded directly to my noob questions, and I honestly felt welcome which helped me decide to stay.

    My questions are about account migration. As you may have already seen, I'm not with lemmy.ml anymore. The reason is I saw you guys stickied a post encouraging users to use different instances (since the server was having trouble with the influx of redditors at that time). I figured I'd help by first moving to a smaller instance. I have no regrets, although switching was a bit tricky since I had to start from scratch.

    What are your thoughts on account migration? Is it in the works or is it something that's a little far into the future? No pressure since I know you guys are busy with other stuff.

  • Hi! This isn't really a question, but I was a former admin on Lemmy.ml and I just want to say that I really appreciated the opportunity to be on your team and it was a really valuable experience for me! I'm no longer an admin due to inactivity and personal life events causing me to no longer have the time to serve such a role, but I enjoyed the time I was and I really hope I was able to make a positive contribution to the instance!

    Thank you for your continued work developing this project and running your instance comrades! This is still by far my favourite fediverse platform, actually, favourite social media in general. I intend to continue using both Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad and I hope I can continue to contribute by using Lemmy when I have the chance!

  • First, just want to say thanks for building and maintaining Lemmy. It's an incredible project, and it provides an incredibly valuable public forum that's completely open. This is the way internet was always meant to work before it got hijacked by corporations.

    The questions I'd like to ask would be whether the platform is developing in the way you originally envisioned, what surprised you in terms of how the platform ended up being used in the wild, and what were the biggest technical and non technical problems that came from the rapid growth after the Reddit migration. And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.

    • I mostly imagined the slow but steady growth we'd been having, and def didn't anticipate that reddit would mess up so badly that a massive chunk of users would migrate from a multi-million dollar enterprise software, to a hobby project developed by a couple of marxist-leninists 🤣 . But so it goes, with all these late-capitalist social media companies alienating their users, monetizing them in any way possible in search of declining surplus.

      The biggest non-tech problem, is just the overwhelming amount of notifications. Companies have multiple layers between devs and users, to separate, order, and create a more controlled explosion. That doesn't exist here, so we get hundreds of notifications every day, with everyone treating us as their personal issue tracker.... and I basically would get nothing done if all I did was respond to them. Luckily things are calming down a bit now.

      The biggest tech-problem was the performance and security issues of so many users joining the network all at once, and luckily we had so many wonderful community contributions to help stabilize that.

      And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.

      We should be ambitious, and wantthe fediverse as a whole, on the long term, to replace big-tech. Every user we draw away from them, is one less person exploited for their data and treated as a commodity.

      Technically, I'd just like us to continue making the software better, maintaining the code, and adding features.

      • The point regarding notifications is really important. Managing a popular open source project can be really overwhelming in that regard, and it's easy for individual users to forget that it's only a couple of people dealing with all their issues on the other end.

        People stepping up and contributing is a great development. Community involvement is key for the success of open source platforms in my opinion.

        And love the long term vision, I completely agree that the fediverse replacing corporate platforms would be the ideal scenario in the future. From what I can see, fediverse has already reached the point of sustainability. It's still niche compared to mainstream platforms, but I think it's clear that it can exist in its current form indefinitely. And I think this provides an important advantage over corporate platforms. Commercial companies have to continuously demonstrate profit and growth to their shareholder or die. This means having to constantly chase new ways to attract new users and monetize the platform leading to the sort of behaviors we see happening with Reddit. On the other hand, open platforms can grow slowly and sustainably. This allows the fediverse to evolve on a completely different time scale. I'm optimistic that the fediverse will likely outlive every single corporate platform that's around today.

        Thanks again for all the hard work you're doing, it's very much appreciated!

      • The biggest non-tech problem, is just the overwhelming amount of notifications.

        Is there anything users could do to help mitigate this? I think the recommendation for reporting bugs is to use the GitHub page. But for other issues?

        Maybe a numbering system would help: so if a user tagged a dev, they start with a 1 for urgent, 2 for neutral(?), or 3 for 'ignore if you're busy'. There will be a problem of some users overemohasising their issue but it still might save time/attention overall as most users will likely respect such a system.

        Or maybe a novel use of a dev community, which would allow the user base to help determine which issues are noteworthy?

    • To be honest I never had any long-term vision, and still dont have. I just thought that decentralized software in general and Activitypub in particular is very exciting and lets us take power away from corporations like Reddit, Google, Facebook etc.

      Biggest technical problem was implementing Activitypub, when I started there was no implementation in Rust yet, and it was very hard to find detailed information how everything is supposed to work. Over the years I had to rewrite the federation code at least 4-5 times, each time making it a bit cleaner.

      Biggest nontechnical challenge is dealing with all the people who are suddenly joining and want to contribute, so that it doesnt turn into total chaos. Luckily there are many helpful community members who helped to organize things. Another challenge is with funding, now we dont have as much time to work on the paid NLnet milestones. And its not clear if NLnet will grant us another funding round once this is over. Hopefully the user donations will grow over time so that they can cover our full salaries.

      • Thanks again for all the work you're doing on the project, and hopefully the funding situation will continue being sustainable after the NLnet grants run out. It would be great if community manages to step up and fully cover the salaries through donations. It's been an exciting ride using Lemmy and seeing the community grow. I can't wait to see what the next few years will bring!

  • With so many growing instances, were finding a lot of duplicate communities within each one, wich results in a lot of duplicate posts by cross posters.

    Do you think it will be possible to aggregate similar communities together in some way?

  • I'm gonna ask some tough questions, but I am hopeful to get a response. Thank you for all that you do.

    1. Do you envision NSFW content having a place in the federation safely? And if so, would lemmy.ml ever refederate with NSFW instances? What would it take for that to happen?
    2. How do you feel about lemmy.world being the proto "default" lemmy instance right now, especially on Sync app. Some have expressed concern about it causing centralization on the platform, others are hoping that people will spread out.
    3. Do you anticipate making a distinction between NSFW and pornographic content at all? And taking that a step further potentially, is implementing activitypubs content warnings on the road map?
    • Thanks!

      1. There isn't a good way to do it: your All tab will be full of potentially illegal content if you federate with NSFW instances. We want to focus on dev, and not on legal issues, so for that reason we won't federate with NSFW ones.
      2. I'm guilty of this also w/ jerboa, showing lemmy.ml content before you log in. We obvi don't want single points of failure, and want lemmy to be as distributed / spread out as possible. If some of the bigger instances go down, I'm sure people will write premature articles about "the death of lemmy". We're still in the early stages, and I think we'll have to see how things evolve, and what promotes decentralization the best. We've tried to rotate the signup sites at the top of join-lemmy.org , but there are likely other things we could do.
      3. Creating multiple types of NSFW would be possible, its just not something we've implemented yet, and there are also issues with how that would be handled with activitypub, which only has one type of sensitive field.
      • Maybe it should be like a tiered NSFW tag system. It might add too much complexity, but posts could be classified for Nudity or Violence (N, or V) and then a number for category 1 being the softest stuff and 3 the strongest stuff. Then instances and/or users can choose the type of content that's to be displayed in their front page.

    1. Can we get the show context bug fixed? Pretty please? :3 Possibly the most frustrating bug we've ever had.
    2. Also, on crossposted threads can we get the first thread marked as "original post" so it's clear what the originating community is for people that might want to subscribe to it for similar content. The indication of the originating community is a considerable source of subscriptions over on reddit and one of the primary methods that crossposting functions as a growth tool for new communities.
    3. When you started this project did you think it would get where it is now? Was it a sort of daydream thing or a serious belief that it would get this far?
      1. Its fixed in a back-end PR, we'll try to get a bugfix release sometime soon.
      2. Hrm... haven't thought about that. Could you open up an issue in lemmy-ui . I think the cross_posts field is sorted by published, but I'm not totally positive. In that case it'd just be marking it in the UI in some way.
      3. I def didn't anticipate it would get this far this fast... we've become the 2nd most popular fediverse software recently. I'm super-excited about the impact we can have on global media, and getting ppl to break their dependency/addiction to US-tech dominated spaces.
      • Hrm... haven't thought about that. Could you open up an issue in lemmy-ui . I think the cross_posts field is sorted by published, but I'm not totally positive. In that case it'd just be marking it in the UI in some way.

        I can, will do it this evening. I don't think it does sort like that I'm pretty sure I noticed it just being in any old order, maybe alphabetical? Either way a clearly indicated Original post: separate to the Cross posted to: would strongly incentivise community owners to crosspost their content for the community promotion it provides, and reward them with subscribers for doing it. It generates a little bit of "hey stop advertising in our subreddit" from some modteams but it's worth far more than it takes away, and this is an extremely specific little detail of the system that I think only people that have tried to start many different new subreddits will understand.

        I def didn't anticipate it would get this far this fast... we've become the 2nd most popular fediverse software recently. I'm super-excited about the impact we can have on global media, and getting ppl to break their dependency/addiction to US-tech dominated spaces.

        Back in the Digg days Reddit just quietly sat in Digg's shadow as a sort of "dual power" if you will. Its community did its own thing, creating a culturally-unique space with its own community that liked it for its own sake. They just had to exist and Digg would eventually shit the bed. I think one of the major things that community owners here ought to be doing, which sadly the largest - lemmyworld - is not, is to create a space that is not just "we're reddit but without Spez". Better reasons for being here other than just spite are essential for longevity. Hexbear does a good job of this, Lemmy seems to be building that up too, I've recently become fond of the direction lemm.ee appears to be headed but we'll see.

        Ironically lemmyworld won't see this criticism because of their defederation, so their users are missing out on several ama responses.

      • If stuff as well as yours had existed in 2004 when IRC "died" and facebook etc. grew we might still have functioning decentralized boards as default right now.

    • Show context is working on hexbear again.

  • Thank you a lot for building such an awesome platform! Here are my questions:

    How did you get into communism? Were there any events that had an influence on you becoming communists and what personally motivates you to keep working on lemmy even though you could earn much more as developers working on proprietary software?

    • Growing up during the US war on the Iraqi people, the jingoistic coverage in media for all US wars, then the subsequent alienation I felt after I started working, is the main thing that turned me to Marxism. Essentially, when the extremely untrustworthy warmongers start calling everything they dislike, "communism / socialism", then it must be worth looking into. And I found that there was good reason they carefully steer populations away from Marxist literature, and deem it a heresy: because its a clear and straightforward description of how things actually work, and it threatens their fortunes. Nearly every communist grows up in liberal-dominated cultures, and goes through their own process of rejecting the world that enshrines property and profit over human lives, and how it affected them personally. Their stories are all worth listening to.

      I've worked in many different industries in software, and found the same issues in all of them, and just lost patience, especially seeing that all the work I did creating proprietary software was essentially thrown in the trash, and societally useless. I'd much rather be paid very little, and contribute something positive to the world; time is our most valuable resource, and we should spend it doing things that improve the world, because there is so much that needs doing.

  • What was your first reaction to the massive exodus from Reddit during the blackout? Was it something you were expecting?

    • It was

      On the negative side, for about 2 months, I got an average of 5 hours sleep a night, got 12k+ notifications on github alone, and every day was a new stressful emergency.

      But it also helped us expose a bunch of security issues, and help expose and optimize some of our DB issues, so in that sense a reddit-sized stress-test was of long-term benefit to the project.

      Luckily things have calmed down now, and we're able to cope with things a bit better.

  • what new feature would Lemmy have in the 1.0.0? I know it's quite a long way to go, but what is the vision you guys have moving toward it?

    Edit: bonus question: what does Chat supposed to do?

  • Why are Lemmy devs so adamantly opposed to a Follow User feature?

    This is the one feature that is the biggest hurdle for full federation between Lemmy and all the other fediverse instances. Mastodon (and its forks), Peertube, Pixelfed, and kbin all allow this and federate extremely well together while Lemmy is the worst at federating because its the only one to exclude this feature.

    (Please don’t reply with “use kbin if you want to follow users” again as its very dismissive and frustrating)

    Here’s my crude write up on a somewhat hacky way this can be implemented as is:

721 comments