1y ago

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

727 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.
- Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don't know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn't do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.
  We have a Legal section under admin settings, that's an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We'd need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.
  
  As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn't EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:
  Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
  If the former, delete all data of their data on the server, send it to them, and then (this was the important part) forward the data deletion request to every single partner we were working with.
  For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between "we're thinking about it" and "we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we'll get to it sometime within the next month"), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.
  As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that "no, it's anonymous" - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.
  So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you're not doing that, you're not fully compliant.
  Kind of shitty, but that's how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)
  Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don't recall what the time was for a "see my data" request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.
  
  It's often too expensive to support GDPR for Europeans and disable it for other people. Most services just support GDPR for everyone.
- Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?
  
  Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social's privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy
  As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.
- You don't have to bother with GDPR until you're a certain size company
  
  That's what I thought too until I looked it up. It applies to individuals as well.
  If an individual runs a web server and processes personal data of individuals within the European Union, then they are subject to the requirements of GDPR. GDPR applies to anyone, including individuals, who processes personal data of EU residents, regardless of whether they are operating as a business or on a personal basis. It's important for the individual running the web server to comply with GDPR's data protection principles and obligations to safeguard the personal data they process.
  
  That's not true. You might be thinking about the German network enforcement act. Every little ecommerce website, even when it's a one-man operation, has to follow GDPR guidelines when they aim at people in the EU.

How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?
- Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:
  https://startrek.website/c/news
  https://starwars.website/c/news
  This also isn't unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.
  Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.
  There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.
  Overall tho, I'm against the concept of "combining / merging communities" that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.
  
  Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !news@startrek.website
  
  Are there any plans for a “multi-community” (pka multi-reddit) to allow users to combine multiple communities into one? This could give users a neat way to browse/participate in similar communities across instances without having to navigate to each one manually.
  
  I agree that community structure should not change to handle duplicates. If anything, having a feature similar to hashtags or topics that can aggregate a stream of posts from multiple communities would be nice.
  
  What do you mean by combining in this context? If they mutually agree to combine because they have aligned interests I don't see anything wrong with that. An external entity combining them I agree would lead to a bunch of problems.
- I'd imagine it would be the same way it worked on Reddit when there were multiple communities with identical topics/similar names:
  One gets a bit larger, therefore shows up in feeds more, appears higher in search results, etc.
  Unless the other community has some kind of differentiation, it will wither and die.
  And everything will be fine.
  I keep seeing people being this up as if it's some huge problem. There's tons of /c/memes out there, but !memes@lemmy.ml is clearly the place to go. It's not confusing, IMO.
  
  For me it's a problem for the exact reason you think it's fine: I don't want centralization. If I did, I'd go to reddit. I do want each topic of discussion to be spread out amongst different instances and communities. But for that to be viable, you need a way to get all the content as easily as if it was all in one place.
- Aside from any impracticality that could arise in implementation, I like the idea of federated communities between servers. I mean why not extend the possibilities of federation even further? Community mods or users could de/federate from communities on other servers with the same names or core themes should they so choose. In consideration of difficulties with moderating spam and other materials from other communities generated with the same name, I think it makes sense for that kind of community federation to be opt-in rather than opt-out.
  If it goes the Reddit route, one of those communities will definitely border on dead and the risk for moderators/servers having too much power/influence within the larger communities continues.

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!
- Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there's anything else needs to be added, we're open to PRs.
  Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn't be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I'd rather focus on improving lemmy's search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.
  
  Would you please consider having only local post/community/users indexed by search engines? A lemmy.ml user complained that their username is first result on Google with lemmynsfw.com domain name. Also implementing this would decrease chance of duplicate content.
  It can resolved with a simple noindex meta tag.
  
  edit: This start bit is wrong; Lemmy does SSR so Javascript-free/spiders should see at least some comments.
  ~~Lemmy is currently pretty terrible at SEO, in large part because the comments don't load until the JS has run.~~
  This isn't just a problem for search engines, it affect things like archive.org and offline reading. Earlier today I loaded a page from an instance that had dropped offline - while they had Cloudflare Always Online enabled, the page loaded without comments so it was almost useless.
  I think it's a mistake to consider all the SEO-related concerns as irrelevant just because you don't care about Google, etc. Most of the things necessary for good SEO are just good practices, with benefits for all users, especially in the areas of accessibility and third-party tools.
  
  Fair enough. I'm currently focused on creating my own Lemmy web UI, but later I might have room to submit some SEO-related PRs. While I'm not yet sure what needs to be done, instance owners can get tailored recommendations from Google. I have a hunch that Lemmy is currently being penalized for duplicate content, which we might be able to mitigate by adding `` to federated posts.
  I'm fully with you on not wanting to cater to Google. On the other hand, if someone writes a helpful Lemmy post, I would like people who don't know Lemmy to be able to find it.
  
  and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for,
  This is one of the most true statements I've read in the past years. Internet search is unusable.
  
  It's also all about to change as soon as Google drops the new generative search feature.
- I second this. I know SEO is a controversial term with Lemmy's core audience, but being able to find posts through a search engine is pretty darn helpful. It'll also help more people find their way to Lemmy, which will diversify the range of communities.
  If you're not sure where to start, Google's free Search Console can give you insight into how your site ranks, how people are finding you and which factors are preventing instances from appearing in search.
- To a certain extent lemmy is inherently at a disadvantage because of how Google ranks things. Google gives a lot of weight to site trust which works on a per host basis, and lemmy is distributed meaning the trust of the system as a whole is diluted across instances. It's a really stupid system that just helps big sites get bigger. It's made even worse because big blog sites are actually only owned by a small handful of companies and since single companies own many properties that can collude between them to funnel their page ranks between their network of sites.

Right now, instances with transphobic and racist content like exploding-heads are still listed on join-lemmy.org. Are you planning to implement a Server Convenant like on joinmastodon.org? To be listed on joinmastodon.org, an instance needs “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.

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 ...
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?
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?
Arguably the fediverse has so far sought to replicate the corporate big-social platforms ... should new design evolution occur now and if so how?
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?
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)?
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?
Journalism and journalists ... should they be on the fediverse (like the BBC recently with their own mastodon instance) ... and if so, how?
What are the biggest or proudest moments you've had with Lemmy so far, and the worst or most embarrassing?
How does it feel to have so many users using and developing against your software?!
- Haha youre a very curious one :D
  See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2348893
  It sure isnt perfect, partly because Mastodon makes no efforts to be compatible and expects everyone else to cater to their way of doing things. Regardless, the fact that you can interact between different platforms is a huge improvement over current social media platforms. And Im certain that interoperability will only get better over time.
  Its already happening, look at Kbin combining the concepts of Reddit and Twitter into one. Or mitra which adds cryptocurrency integrations. There are probably others which Im unaware of.
  Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements.
  Its really genius because it combines the best aspect of centralized (simple login with username/password and an admin who manages technical stuff) with those of p2p (no central point of failure). Real p2p is great in theory, but it requires way too much technical knowledge for the average user, so its unlikely to ever gain mass appeal.
  Personally I think the Fediverse is really the future of social media, so it will grow whether we want it or not. And its much healthier than the corporate platforms with their tracking, advertising and manipulating algorithms, so the more people leave them behind, the better. I dont see a way to influence this growth, we just need to adapt and deal with it.
  Basically my previous reply, I dont know enough about journalism to give a more specific answer.
  The biggest and proudest was definitely when tens of thousands of Reddit users suddenly came here, and most of them actually liked it. Cant say there was anything bad or embarrassing, the experience for me is really positive.
  It feels great, I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.
  
  ... I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.
  Honestly heart warming to hear!

Any plans to improve the sorting algorithm so that there's a good balance of fresh posts at the top that's also fairly active? And to help promote smaller communities that would have otherwise been dominated by the posts from bigger instances.
Any concerns about duplicate communities across multiple instances? People have made the argument that it's like having different flavors of subreddits on Reddit, but it's a flawed analogy. Individual instances have incentive to make their own communities flourish, whether or not there's a duplicate already available.
- Its been bothering me too, that the large communities have been swamping out smaller ones.
  As one solution, the closed PR linked in this issue has some more context, but we plan to add a Best sort, that retains the qualities of hot, but gives a boost for small communities over larger ones. This shouldn't be too difficult to add, as its very similar to hot.
  Another benefit of lemmy being FOSS, is that we have the option to add many more sorts as time goes on.
  Any concerns about duplicate communities across multiple instances?
  See here.
  
  As an aside, linking to comments appears to be bugged and only shows any replies to it and not the main comment, like so:
  
  Might be worth copy/pasting the content for now, I assume it's a bug in Lemmy UI. Unfortunately hitting show context just refreshes the page.
  I am suspecting this is related to issue 2030.
  
  I'm very interested in this feature. It has been of of my biggest complaints about Lemmy. My feed is almost entirely memes and cat pictures, which I love seeing, but I'm also subscribed to a hockey community, and I will only see those posts if I scroll past dozens of adorable cats.
- So far I like the idea of having potential duplicates. I think it's unlikely that a community would stay split across several instances for long, people tend to gather up.
- So if I have a successful community, someone on another instance should get to ride on my work and flourish by setting up a community with the same name? This makes no sense.
  
  Isn't that one of the side effects of having a federated universe? I don't feel it's so much riding your work as it is combining conversations within a single deduped community.
  Also, if nothing is done about it, wouldn't we keep having issues like this: https://lemmy.ca/post/2821804
  
  You're enjoying the benefits of federation, by having the ability to grow "your" community with people across the fediverse rather than with only the people on the same instance as yours. So that's the price you have to pay. Also, in the long run, communities will grow naturally based on the quality of the content and not just because they have popular names!

As some instances grow, server costs are becoming significant. Right now, servers are only funded through donations. Do you see the development of anything else to help fund server costs?
- If lemmy is working as intended (many small, connected servers), hosting costs should be small: like < $10 USD / month. (images are another issue, but I'll answer that in other comments).
  Of course we don't plan on adding any monetization directly into lemmy or its UI, including ads, or required payments. Right now at least the best way is to put donation links in your site sidebar.
  
  I'm on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month, which is above your costs.
  Beehaw reports costs at over $500 USD/month.
  I would imagine lemmy.world is in the thousands.
  I know the idea is that there should be more instances, but we are already beginning to see server costs that are higher than what you think. User numbers seem to be settling down now, but who knows when the next spike will happen.
  
  Sorry for stupid questions and doubts 😭 but you said you don't plan to add any plan, monetization or ads. SO never ever right? I'm willing to donate a hell lot to support the lemmy. So it'll always remain like this innocent, inherently open source and always have the same "our"/ "people's" internet, and never like a platform that is above us like it feels when using Twitter or reddit? (I said stupid question cus idk if having activitypub adopted and being decentralized makes lemmy and other platforms inherently "people's" open-source and free internet?

I'm not asking anything because I'm a potato when it comes to software. I just wanted to drop by and say: thank you both for Lemmy. The platform is amazing, and it's clear that you guys are pouring some heavy love (and labour hours) in it, as it's improving at an amazing pace.

I asked this in the original thread but I’ll repeat it here:
Are there any limitations with the ActivityPub protocol you find limiting? Do you have recommendations for future versions of the protocol?
Do you have any thoughts on the AT Protocol (a potential competitor to AP)?
- Limitations no, if anything the protocol is too extensive and lets you do too many things (or do the same thing in different ways). But thats somewhat expected for a protocol which can handle all types of social media platforms. I think the protocol is fine as is, but it needs minor changes here and there to keep up with how it is being used in the real world. The FEP process is doing a good job of that.
  From what I know the AT protocol used by Bluesky is entirely centralized, so it doesnt look like a competitor yet. They claim that it will be decentralized in the future, but I will believe it when I see it. For now the decentralization seems more like a marketing gimmick.
  
  I’ve been following BlueSky closely for a while and I’ll just add a few points here:
  There is currently a federation sandbox for developers, it’s definitely on the way but it is a significantly different model than AP. Severs are really “dumb” and it has an emphasis on using a handful of services to crawl the network and generate a pipeline of all posts.
  Moderation and custom algorithms are also a part of the decentralized model. Custom algorithms are out now, and custom moderation services are also under development.
  Having played with both AP and ATP a fair amount they definitely both have strengths and weaknesses, very different approaches to decentralized social networking.

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.

Comrade Dessalines, you rock. Your audiobooks and essays are great. No questions.

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 agree with this, but I find it amusingly ironic that questions on the issue itself are also many lol
- See here

What do you think of the neoliberal hell that lemmy.ml is right now?

Have you considered a feature like “sibling community”?
What I mean is, for example, car community on server 1 marks itself as a sibling community to a car community on server 2. Similarly server 2 marks itself as a sibling community to server 1, ie it is two-way.
When communities have been linked bi-directionally, any post and comment are shared between the two sibling communities.
This would allow bigger communities to form out of smaller communities, thereby preventing discussions from being fragmented and showing the true size of Lemmy, across servers.

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

Are there any plans to make an upvote history log available for users to view? I loved looking back over my upvoted content occasionally, but now I have to specifically save them to be able to keep track of them.
- Yes theres an open pull request for this.
  
  🥳

Since you're very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?
Thanks for your work, it's projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive.

Thanks for both of your work on Lemmy, join-lemmy, lemmy-ui and Jerboa.
Can you tell us about any upcoming major features/issue resolutions in development currently, if there are any?
Will Lemmy have any form of cross-instance community/post grouping, similar to multi-reddits, hashtags, "alliances" or categories? Although some Lemmy apps have implemented something along those lines, it could be more fully-implemented in the official backend/frontend. I've been thinking Lemmy has desparately needed it to help solve some of the fragmentation problems across instances. It would also help avoid one instance necessarily having all the content, ballooning in both running costs and control.
- The best way is to look at the open PRs on each repo, to see the things that are being worked on / fixed.
  We have an open issue for community collections, but its not being worked on currently. We have cross_posts come back through the GetPost endpoint, to see where else specific posts have been posted to.
  The fragmentation issues I've addressed here.
  
  Alright thanks for the answers! I've looked through them, and maybe I was looking for more of what you thought personally of what major features you had in mind. Rather, it sounds like (but don't let me put words in your month) you're more focused on just keeping the overall work together and stable. I can respect that.

Are you proud/happy/satisfied how Lemmy progresses and its current status?
Does it make sense to spend your time to develop client apps when there are so many other already (including open source)
What are your ambitions/goals/hopes for Lemmy in one year from now?
What do you see as the biggest issue for Lemmy (as a platform) which must be addressed?
Ps: thank you for your work!
- For sure! I'm just glad we can provide an alternative that some people enjoy and get some use out of, and to not feel like they're just adding to a company's market cap. Development has certainly picked up with this massive migration, and people have helped us find and fix so many security and performance issues that just two people would never have found before.
  The current official UIs (lemmy-ui and somewhat jerboa), have had a ton of developer contributions, and more people added as direct contributors besides me, and they've made those apps better than I ever could. So while I never want to be completely hands-off from those, its wonderful to have the help.
  A few I can think of: I hope that performance issues stabilize, that we can create a better onboarding site / improve join-lemmy.org , do lots of code maintenance, become financially stable and grow our little developer co-op into more than just us two, learn how to scale handling issues better, that we can add notifications / unified push, better sorting, and move the web-ui over to a more stable app in rust / leptos : lemmy-ui-leptos
  Currently, performance and security, so that we can focus on the above.
  Thanks!

Do you think 'normies' (people with very very little technical knowledge/experience) will be able to come to a decentralized platform like lemmy? Can a platform be successful long term (especially in niche areas) without that super huge low effort part of the user base?
- I’m an over-50 white Southern lady with no tech skills and I’m loving it. The apps help, and I’m sure I’m missing out on something, but it honestly isn’t that hard to figure out in a general sense.
  
  Great response. Love to see that it is not just us nerds on here!
  
  @VantaWhite @JohnDClay how did you start using Lemmy? Did someone introduced you to? How could you pick the instance where to register?
- One of the things up next on my agenda, is to re-do join-lemmy.org . We have the mockup for it done, I just need to complete it.
  Also as someone who grew up before the "use this single US-based site to connect to everything", I don't see how lemmy is too different from older forums. You go to a site, click the signup button, and wait for approval / log in immediately. You don't need to know anything about activitypub, federation, or the fediverse to sign up and start using a lemmy site.
- I think an already established player like Sync or Boost should provide an experience that hand holds newcomers, by leaving little to guess work.
- For me its already a huge success that Lemmy got where it is today, with over 50k users. If you had told me that a few months ago, I hardly would have believed it. When I started working on Lemmy, there were a couple dozen active users at most, yet the project didnt die. Instead it kept growing and growing steadily. So I think it will keep growing, and there will be more improvements which make Lemmy more accessible for normal users.
- Sync makes it as simple as any mainsfream social media
  
  I haven't tried sync yet, how does new account creation work through their app?
  
  So this is an ad. An ad for a platform with ads.

Is there a reason we don't have users ability to block entire instances, or is it difficult to code? (I don't mean to sound ungrateful)
- The only reason is that no one got around to it yet. Its not that difficult, in fact I plan to work on it soonish. There have just been tons of more important things to work on recently (like improving performance and keeping up with all the pull requests).
- FYI: I use this usercript to block whole instances: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469297-block-lemmy-instances
  You need to edit line 17
  Here adapted to work also with MLMYM (https://old.lemmy.world): https://pastebin.com/z0mShfDP
  
  This is why I love Lemmy. Just a genuinely helpful comment. I do use that script on desktop but I'd rather it was built in

The only thing I think is missing is that we can't group subscriptions to communities. Do you have plans for that in the future? Really happy here regardless.
- We have an open issue for it, but have had too many other priorities. Anyone is free to work on it though, and figure out how best to do community groupings / collections.
- This would be great...

First off, thank you for this awesome platform and for being my first real experience with contributing to FOSS, I learned quite a bit and I had a lot of of fun! I really hope Rust ends up becoming the new standard in web backends instead of Java with Spring/Springboot.
The only question I have that hasn't already been asked is about the legal side of things:
What are you responsible for as the developers of Lemmy, and what are you responsible for as the owners of a Lemmy instance?
Do you have to take certain measures to keep the platform clean from illegal activities and CP/gore? If so, what has been done?
The same question applies to GDPR rules for Europe.
Thanks for doing this :D

What is the best Linux distribution?
Favorite instance outside of lemmy.ml?
Best and worst Lemmy client?

Maybe I'm completely misremembering things, but at some point wasn't there a hotfix to Lemmy that hard-limited how many comments a thread could have? Does anyone know if there's a maximum and if so how many?
Just wondering, cause uh, I could see this one having a lot of comments.
- The fix you are referring to only limits how many comments can be retrieved in a single API call (300). This limit is only used when specific parameters are passed, not in all cases.
- Tree-paging is a pretty complicated issue, and we really do need some DB / SQL experts to help us with figuring out how to page them correctly. The limit is 300, but only for the top-level comment fetch, which could also have different slices whether you sort by top, or new, and doesn't apply to the nested comments, which could have thousands.
  The limit is a kludge, because ppl were creating thousands of comments, and without proper paging, it was affecting performance.

Can we get the show context bug fixed? Pretty please? :3 Possibly the most frustrating bug we've ever had.
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.
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?

Which are your 3 favorites lemmy instances besides Lemmy.ml?
also thanks for the work you do

Is it possible to disable the caching of images from other instances onto my server?

Opinions on hexbear finally federating?

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?

What are your opinions on third party apps for Lemmy using ads on their free version?
- Similar question here.

Firstly, I just have appreciation for you and nutomic for this amazing platform that you've created. This has become my favorite source of reading discussions and looking at memes. I know it's small, but I love it and want it to succeed. My question is Do you see Lemmy or any other federated platforms reaching the level of audiences that other big Social Media Platforms currently have? Do you want it to grow big like them, or remain as it is, An amazing platform hidden in one corner of the Web?
- I don't know that we'll ever replace big tech, but none of us can see the future. These giants will likely have a slow decline, whilst open-source and federated services will grow at their expense. But of course in the long term I do want the fediverse to replace the US tech giants, who treat us and our data as commodities to be bought and sold.
  Any case where we can draw users away from that exploitation, is a victory.
  
  Yeah, I'm with you, Open source forever over the Monopoly of Few Corporations on the Web. Thanks for the reply, Lemmy Creator.
- For me Lemmy is already extremely huge now. For a long time it was possible to keep up with all new comments in less than half an hour per day of browsing. So I wouldnt mind if it stays small, but anyway its not my choice. On the other hand its also great to see the project finally grow after we put so much work into it. And getting more users is actually necessary in order to get more donations so that we can make a living.
  
  Yeah, the work that you guys have put into this platform deserves to be acknowledged and appreciated. Personally, I love it, and thank you both for doing the brilliant work. I'm been here only a month, and even I've seen it grow. All the new apps, and few of Reddit's apps transferring to Fediverse, and the new communities popping up. I'm optimistic about Lemmy, and Fediverse. Thanks for the reply.
- Monday. It's on Monday.
  
  They posted the thread now so you can start filling it with questions before the devs get here.
  
  I'm confused, it's on Monday, How? In my Time Zone, it's 4 hours to Monday, So, they'll start answering then? Edited: Also, I love your Username.

Any plans to make it easier to interact with links to other instances?
The QoL value to automatically open links to other instances inside my current instance would be enormous.

How do you plan on improving the onboarding/sign-up process for newcomers, especially when they have little to no understanding about the Fediverse?
- See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2337049
- Is it hard? Didn't seem hard.
  
  “Join a server” was enough to kill all interest for plenty of Twitter users looking at Mastodon.
  
  For me it, wasn't too hard since by various metrics I am what'd you call a "power user", but for those who aren't, it could take a while to get their head around the Fediverse.

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

Thanks for the software!
What is your and others Devs opinion on the pre-emptive de-federation of 20k hexbear users by 120k user instance lemmy.world?
Would you think Ranked Choice voting for admins i.e. with the Schulze method - which Debian
uses - integrated into the sites would mean that better community supported decisions can be made for both moderation as well as in comments/communities about stuff?
Also: is there a remind me in 2 month of this post option?

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?
- 1.0 is not about features, but stability. It means there wont be any breaking changes to the api or federation for a while, until 2.0. In fact we were thinking to make some breaking changes and then release 1.0 later this year. But then the Reddit migration happened and those plans had to be scrapped.
  Chat simply orders the comments in a different way, newest first without any nesting.

Why did you choose Rust for the backend and Inferno for the frontend?
P.S. Thank you for your work!

What's your favorite dinosaur?
The way lemmy instances are organized reminds me of IRC. Was that any part of the inspiration?
- Stegosaurus looks really badass
  No, I only found out later on Lemmy that it is apparently similar (though I still dont know any details)
- Brachiosaurus
  Not for me either.
- Curious about how irc and lemmy are similar could you add examples?

Do you aim for Lemmy to become GDPR-compatible in the future ( see https://gdpr-info.eu/ for details)?

One of the major complaints on Reddit was the mod governance structure, with rank dependent on who showed up first. On the roadmap, do you see implementing other ways to govern mods, maybe something like how a lot of video game guilds govern themselves?
- As a communist, I'm also receptive to a more democratic and less-hierarchical style of moderation. A LOT of reddit communities have been wrecked by an absent top moderator, who suddenly and suspiciously "becomes active" and removes the moderators who have been keeping the sub going for years.
  We've had several people make proposals on github, but my issue has always been this: these are mostly untested, and potentially insecure. In the online space without any sort of real-person verification, If some kind of voting on mod actions were implemented, people could just create fake accounts to game the system, or find other ways.
  AFAIK there hasn't been any forum or community software that doesn't implement the top-down chain of trust model. And of course this is less of concern with decentralized software like lemmy, where people always have the option to host their own instance, or create their own community, and moderate it exactly as they see fit. That's not an option you have with reddit.
  
  Part of what you would need to create is a qualified voter system.
  For a meme sub, maybe the qualified voters are known participants in the community over a period of time.
  For a more technical sub like what AskHistorians is on Reddit, voters are those qualified to answer questions.
  It doesn't have to be open to everyone, just the interested.
  And you keep coming back to the federation model as a way to keep this in check, but it is still a dictatorial model and the only answer to dealing with a bad head mod is to destroy a community and lose the history of that community.
- Could you expand on how video game guilds are governed for those of us unfamiliar?
  
  You have different levels with guild defined titles and privileges. Some privileges are effectively mod abilities, but others are more enhanced user abilities.
  The idea is that a sub could assign mod ranks in a more transparent manner while providing means to kick out non-performing mods easier.
  You could also have a selected user base be able to vote on policy so that mods have a better understanding what the user base wants.
  It isn't a perfect system, but better than the first system we have.

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:

Who are you guys if you don't mind me asking. What's your background?

Why Unicode usernames aren't supported yet? After all, a big part of the world's population don't use the Latin alphabet in their native languages.

How much experience did you have with Rust when you started making Lemmy? What programming languages did you use before?

Will lemmy users be able to interact with Mastodon users in future and is there a roadmap for lemmy?

Sorry, no question, only: Thank you for your hard work :)

will uploading audio files become a thing? as a musician i need it
- One of the biggest burdens on people running lemmy servers, is the disk space taken up by images. Currently the internet has a massive problem with image (and other data in general) duplication: images get posted to 9 different platforms, copied everywhere, with none of them sharing any of the hosting costs.
  The static data distribution problem, is actually a completely solved problem: via torrents. The user experience of this tho, needs to be improved across the board in apps and web UIs. Lemmy's markdown fields do support torrent links, but there's no easy "upload audio" or "upload video" button, which ideally should hook in to an in-browser or system-wide torrent app.
  I'd love to see comment trees of audio and video replies, but to me this isn't doable, and would explode server costs, unless someone devotes time to the solution above. In the meantime, people will just have to use other services to upload their audio / video content and link to it, or ideally, create torrents and share magnet links.
  
  What are the current limits for image updoad (dimensions / file size). Are they being downscaled / turned into jpegs?
  
  This is interesting, I've never considered torrents for this exact case before. Has anyone done any groundwork to figure out what this would look like from a systems level? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the big picture - where the seeders come from, what are the incentives to keep certain kinds of data resilient, how to keep complexity away from the clients, etc.
  
  :torrent-worker:
  
  couldnt we just be only able to post under 3 minute compressed audios to our user accounts and pin the post to our users, that way it's impossible to duplicate and wouldnt exceed half a megabyte

727 comments

As an instance admin, I have some questions:

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