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

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.

Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?

You don't have to bother with GDPR until you're a certain size company

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wow lots of questions here.

• Im doing well, its exciting to know that so many people like the software Ive worked on for the last years. The first month after the migration was really stressful, but by now its calmed down a lot. Plus there are many contributors now which are helping a lot.
• Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
• I think the "breaking bugs" were really minor considering how we had to constantly rush out performance and security fixes. This should get better as we dont need to make emergency fixes, and have more time to let the community test release candidates before making the full release.
• Supporting downgrades means that someone has to test them and report/fix problems. We dont have time for that, but feel free to do it.
• Like I said, our recent releases had urgent performance/security fixes so we didnt have enough time for testing. We also didnt find out about these problems until later. Part of the problem is that keeping up with issues is almost a full-time job on its own, so I rarely read them anymore. If you see something important reported, do let me know.
• No concrete plans, but I definitely think that admins are the main actors who should have a voice in development. Its impossible for us to listen to all the individual users, because there are too many and they often dont have the necessary technical knowledge. If you have some ideas how to facilitate communication between devs and admins, let me know.

Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.

Alright second part:

• The biggest problem is definitely that there are too many things to do, but only the two of us working on it fulltime. The day only has so many hours and its impossible to keep up with everything. Thats why community contributions are really important.
• The amount of contributors is very high compared to a few months ago, its not easy to keep up with all the pull requests. Its going to take some time for processes to adjust to the new scale, and for new contributors to learn how everything works.
• This is a question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml
• People work on whatever they are passionate about. Generally that works quite well.
• I am only working on Lemmy and thats already a lot. So another question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml

These are great questions

Haha youre a very curious one :D

1. See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2348893
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Basically my previous reply, I dont know enough about journalism to give a more specific answer.
8. 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.
9. It feels great, I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.

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.

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.

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.

Account migration is not in the works, and I consider it very low priority. Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy isnt focused on individual users, so it doesnt matter much if you start posting from another instance one day. If its important for you, you can always put a link in your profile to your other accounts. I would rather implement a way to export/import account data. Thats much simpler and can also be used as a backup in case your instance goes down.

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

See here

Yes theres an open pull request for this.

1. The best way is to look at the open PRs on each repo, to see the things that are being worked on / fixed.
2. 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.

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.

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

Thanks for your help :)

I appreciate you a ton comrade, you've been such a great help in getting this instance off the ground. Personal stuff should always be more important, so I hope all goes well. If you ever decide you want to admin again, lmk!

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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
4. Currently, performance and security, so that we can focus on the above.

Thanks!

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...

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

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.

YES! 150GB of image archive with only 94 users 🤡

Like any instance admins, we just have to remove illegal content as it comes up and gets reported.

Do you have to take certain measures to keep the platform clean from illegal activities and CP/gore? If so, what has been done?

You can report posts, so that admins / mods can see and remove them quickly.

GDPR-related stuff we've answered in other comments, but neither of us are familiar with its details.

See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2337049

Is it hard? Didn't seem hard.

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.

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.

Monday. It's on Monday.

Similar question here.

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.

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.

Could you expand on how video game guilds are governed for those of us unfamiliar?

Performance.

For web services, check out https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

For front-end, check out https://github.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark

At the time of making lemmy, actix (for back end), and inferno, were two of the highest-performing in their areas.

1. Stegosaurus looks really badass
2. No, I only found out later on Lemmy that it is apparently similar (though I still dont know any details)

1. Brachiosaurus
2. Not for me either.

Curious about how irc and lemmy are similar could you add examples?

We can't ban communities, because they aren't people and don't do actions. iirc there is a proposalto "temp-block" sites in the same way admins can "temp-ban" users, but we haven't been working on it.

Lemmy's bot problems used to be muuuch worse than they are now, and I encourage most instances to use the registration application method of signups, which has been time-tested by older forum software, and which we've found to work the best for blocking bots.

As far as admins notifying others, we don't want to reinvent the wheel by creating a chatroom in lemmy, so we recommend admins / mods use matrix or something else to communicate with each other about these things.

As an admin you can remove a remote community, then it shouldnt federate anymore. Though admittedly this isnt very intuitive.