This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml , or @phiresky@lemmy.ml about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
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Super excited! Will you be answering all questions, including hard ones?
What happened to the fedlink?
No longer appears in the topic
I see it on 19.3, your server is still on 19.2, maybe that’s why?
Yep that was a regression which was recently fixed.
Will Lemmy ever have another source of income like official merch or will it rely on donations for the foreseeable future?
Bomber, Ace of Spades or Overkill?
A lot of people say there are a bunch of tankies on Lemmy which really begs the question: Where do you all keep your tanks?
Firstly, thank you so much for providing the means for me to cut Reddit out of my life, I feel like I’m engaging with content in a much more deliberate way since, and honestly it’s been a massive improvement to my mental health in a way that I was completely oblivious to there even being a problem before.
Anyway, the question—regarding things happening entirely out of your control, what would be the best and worst things that could happen to lemmy from your perspectives? And as an extension, what are your goals for it?
When will there be default view agglomeration of posts sent to identically named communities. For example /c/books. The current setup cntralizes power into the hands of whoever gets traction first on the platform. If I go to /c/books on any server, all posts of all federated servers’ /c/books should be visible. This way no server owner gets the stranglehold on the community that they host.
Another option here is FEP-d36d which is a standard for group-to-group following. This looks to me like a slightly more organic and opt-in approach.
Any opt-in approach will be irrelevant. Most user never change the defaults.
Example are “multireddit” feature. Statistically speaking, nobody used them and they never mattered.
Imagine a combination of /r/books /r/books2 and /r/books3
Owner of /r/books goes mad with power (as tgey all do) abd sells out the community.
So you post in /r/books2 because you use the multireddit, and if everyone else did, the defective owner would be transparently bypassed.
But what actually happens ?
To 99% if users in /r/books, you have simply ceased to exist. New users still to biggest /r/books and never know of the alternatives.
Multireddits are socially irrelevant.
The default MUST whole fediverse aggloneration which the users filters out what they don’t like out of
By manual removal of individual communities
By including or subscribing to circulating blacklists of communities (think spamfilter lists)
And by the owner of their instance defederating from other servers.
I think one thing you’re missing here is that under such a system the defaults would likely become your locally hosted /c/books rather than the largest one. Even still you’d probably see posts from the largest books communities because /c/books@your_instance follows multiple /c/books@big_instance. Community blocking would likely still work as it currently does so any books communities that you were not fond of could still be blocked.
There is still the issue of where do you post and I think the answer looks something like:
- Post in /c/books@your_instance if you want to talk to your neighbors
- Post in /c/books@big_instances if you want to talk to everybody
Which is more or less how most people would decide where to post book stuff anyway.
Yes, the majority of content would still come from bigcommunity/c/books, the crucial difference in that system is that posting in otherserver/c/books would get the same probabibility of being viewed by random and non logged users.
I cannot emphasize enough how important that is. It is the only way to break the stranglehold that bigcommunity/c/books will always have over almist every lemmy users.
Without this, this is just reddit all over again. Meet the new boss, same as old boss.
Meet the new boss, same as old boss.
Who’s Lemmy’s spez?
- The Lemmy devs operate lemmy.ml, but it’s far from being the most active one (it’s currently the 5th): https://lemmyverse.net/?order=active_day
- Large instances admins? The most active communities are spread across dbzer0, lemmy.world, programming.dev, lemm.ee, feddit.de, etc.: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
The main difference of Lemmy compared to Reddit is the ability that communities have to walk away, as I explained in another comment: https://discuss.online/comment/5393546
The problem is communities could just as easily walk away from reddit as they do lemmy. Yet they don’t. Lemmy has the same issue with critical mass of users.
The communities should be fediverse wide, not under the grips on one mod team.
Then who would moderate this? And what if lemmygrad.ml/c/books wants to have different discussions from lemmy.world/c/books?
Lemmygrad still can send all the kulaks to the gulags. But only when the discussion happening inside their hard drive. Aka “I take my ball and go home”
They do not get to silence the rest of the fediverse/c/books
I’d like that. I think some other platforms/projects have features like this. And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw.
And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw
Are they not allowed to?
Beehaw exists for people who wanted a heavily-moderated space, and they seem to be doing well activity-wise. Do you want to force them with the rest of the instances?
Sure, that’s not the point at all. But wouldn’t it be great if the knitting community (for example) on beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and feddit.de would be merged for me into one entity for a better browsing experience? And people wouldn’t post the same breaking news 3 times and the cross-posts always showed up 3 times in my timeline? (And sometimes it’s the same 30 people anyways that are subscribed to all of them so the cross-posting doesn’t add anything?)
I currently don’t have a good idea for a UI design for that. But I think a feature like that would add to federated platforms (if done right.) But nobody said you’re not allowed or it’s bad to open a dozen communities with the same name and topic on different servers. That’s perfectly alright. In the real world we also sometimes discuss the same topic with different people at different locations.
But wouldn’t it be great if the knitting community (for example) on beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and feddit.de would be merged for me into one entity for a better browsing experience?
Why wouldn’t they merge on one instance? Seems easier, and can be done today compared to having to ask the developers to implement a complex feature.
I think this is interesting but should not be an automatic feature.
If it is not the default and automatic, then lemmy is a pointless reddit clone.
You have to filter out what you don’t want because it is not possible to undelete what has already been deleted.
Users will just circulate ready made blacklists of spammer and thoughtcriminal communities to automatically remove them all from their feed.
The alternative is that only the biggest instance and the biggest community will matter and writing everywhere else is just a exercise in pointlessness
As I understand your suggestion this would mean one super community might get moderated from 5 different instances and 5 rule sets. It is definitely the right direction but not that easy to design…
Posts are moderated by the delegates of the owner of the hard drive who stores them.
Rule sets are irrelevent make belief justifucation for censors.
I just had a comment deleted “bevayse if rule 3”.
I hope you can see with this farcical example that rules do not matter , never have mattered and will never matter. It just the powerful telling you “because I told you so” with extra steps and while giving them the feeling that they are not a bad person.
The current setup cntralizes power into the hands of whoever gets traction first on the platform.
There are other factors at hand, such as the moderation and the instance politics
Which is another centralization incentive.
Don’t want to be ostracized because your user is registered on the wrong politic instance ? Join biggest instance instead.
Going to the biggest local community of the biggest instance is always the way of least resistance.
And that’s how you make a worse reddit with extra steps.
Don’t want to be ostracized because your user is registered on the wrong politic instance ? Join biggest instance instead.
There are plenty of politically neutral instance. Most of them are, actually, the only ones that come to mind as politically oriented are hexbear, lemmygrad and to an extend, lemmy.ml.
That leaves lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, all the feddit.country, discuss.tchncs.de, sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com, lemmy.zip as neutral alternatives
What is your take on right wing subs like !conservative@lemm.ee ?
Should they get the boot? Good for growth? What do you think?
Why should there not be right wing subs? Would we not just be becoming like Reddit by banning them?
important context: Lemm ee has a conservative c/ run by a pedophile who the admin of that instance protects.
Whether there should be right wing comms is up to an instance’s admins, and whether other instances should federate with it is up to the admins of other instances.
As for
absolutism, consider the paradox of tolerance.The USian obsession with free speech comes from the over-application of a first amendment right. That freedom is in fact a restriction on the State to suppress speech, and not a restriction on Lemmy mods or admins.
Do you think the problem with Reddit was that they removed the_Donald?
Regardless, this should be an instance decisions and others are free to defederate with any instance hosting content they don’t want to see. Just like what happened to exploding heads.
Not soviet, but that removal was unpopular for a reason.
I don’t think it should be an instance decision. The best part about the fediverse is that we can pick and choose what we want to see.
How do you see this playing out? Instances are free to set and enforce their own rules and standards. You can’t force them to host content they don’t want to.
The way it plays out is
I don’t know what mental model someone is working from to draw such a conclusion. A free speech absolutist one? A consumer rights one? 🤷
What’s wrong with a “right-wing” community? I’m not right wing but I’m definitely not afraid of them. Anything can be solved with education. Why would you censor based on what side of the political spectrum you’re on?
Because it signals to actual neo-nazis that it’s safe to set up here, and of course they take their pedophilia and toxicity with them. Remember all those CSAM attacks that were happening? They were all coming from those instances with a reputation for being soft on the right.
They treat passive tolerance as active acceptance, and then throw disastrous temper tantrums when they find out that isn’t actually the case.
Remember all those CSAM attacks that were happening? They were all coming from those instances with a reputation for being soft on the right.
Is this your opinion or do you have actual evidence for this?
I’ve done a little investigation in the matter but as the admin for lemmy you should have a way better information on the subject.
So you are making factual statements with zero facts to support them. Got it.
I apologize.
I would hope we aren’t going to start kicking people out because of there political views.
Perhaps you are not aware that some instances already do, and that some—for example hexbear & lemmygrad—have done so since their inception.
Conservativism isn’t a political view, it’s a crime against humanity. They have exactly one ““legitimate”” claim (lower taxes) and the rest is shit like “lets make child marriage legal”, “lets murder people for crossing the border”, “lets dogwhistle neofascist hatred” and “lets roll back every human right known to man” and that’s before you get into the MAGA shit which is every form of outright nazism stuffed into a trenchcoat.
Instances with conservative /c are all full of notoriously toxic and anticommunist users who go around making the federation way shittier.
Lemmy is licensed under AGPL which states that everyone can use it, there are no restrictions based on politics. Besides, “right wing” is not the same as “evil”, the real world is much more complicated than that. If you ask me, the whole right-left classification is way too simplistic and doesnt make sense anymore (if it ever did).
I’m not a Lemmy dev but I’m interested in this question so I’m commenting so I remember to check up on this one.
I subscribe to that sub because I feel like it’s important to engage with people that I don’t agree with. Even though the two main contributors to that sub are peculiar in their views, I haven’t seen them break any rules of lemm.ee or post outright hate to any group but democrats.
I know sh.it.justworks had their own drama with a the_donald popup community which led to calls for defederation before the community was banned but if people are posting within the rules and properly moderate their own; we ought to let them post their politics even if we don’t agree.
I think the instance admins should handle that. Lemmy itself should be a open and agnostic platform. Admins should use defederation and block specific communities.
(My oppinion, I’m not associated with Lemmy development.)
Will private messages ever be displayed in a threaded or grouped manner?
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it is current web interface is just a reverse chronological list of all sent and received messages. This can be confusing to follow if one is messaging multiple users over an extended period of time. I think the ability to group messages by user would be useful.
This is already possible in many Lemmy apps. I built the Quiblr web app and messages are more similar to a messaging app. Many Lemmy apps probably do similar as it’s just a front-end change.
Cool! I haven’t tried out web apps, but many mobile apps have this feature as well. Would be nice to see this feature merged into the native web interface.
Maybe, if someone implements it. Basically the same answer as all other low-priority feature requests.
I’m personally annoyed with how the default UI shows messages and mostly work on the frontend, so changing that is definitely on my agenda.
There can definitely be improvements, but I agree that they’re low priority. I’m hesitant to put too much work into Lemmy’s private messages or its interface, as they’re inherently insecure and not E2EE (we even have warnings in the lemmy-ui interface about this).
Its best to rely on messaging apps like matrix and xmpp that were made for that job, which you can either add to your profile. We also added a specific matrix_id field to your user settings, which enables a “Send secure message” button.
There was a big time gap between 0.18.5 and 0.19. Have you considered adopting a release train model, similar to what Rust does? The Bevy game engine has also adopted the idea.
More frequent but smaller releases would probably cause less friction and make upgrading less of a “big thing” and “big things” are always things go wrong.
They normally do have smaller releases (18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 18.4, 18.5) but going from 18 to 19 was a big update that also required a database upgrade. Rust releases don’t have database upgrades or anything that is not backwards compatible, so it’s not really comparable.
Removed by mod
0.19 was a bit of a special case because there was a set of breaking updates that had to be done at some point, and trickle releasing breaking changes isn’t really great either. Usually hopefully the breaking changes are rare, so releases can be more frequent.
Were you ever approached by any kind of organization making some weird proposal regarding lemmy?
A few, mostly harmless tho, just about working on pet features they’d like to see in Lemmy. None panned out.
I imagine the more parasitic companies avoid us as soon as they see the AGPLv3 license.
Some company (dont know which) wanted to make a one-time donation of 500 Euros to get listed as donor on join-lemmy.org. Rejected because thats only for recurring donors. Does this count as weird?
Are there any plans on adding features that enable easier interaction with other federated platforms like mastodon and peertube (for example being able to comment/interact with peertube videos and mastodon posts)?
You can already interact with Peertube videos and follow their channels. Thats possible because Peertube also federates groups (communities). With Mastodon thats not possible because it doesnt have groups, and Lemmy doesnt support content outside of communities. At least not without a full rewrite, which doesnt make sense considering that KBin and dozens of different microblogging platforms already exist.
Where is the best place to propose new features for Lemmy?
I’m not sur eif it’s bad form to answer these questions but for this one I think the github issue page is the answer.
This is correct, its our issue tracker and its what we work from to close issues.
if you don’t want to make a github account, then probably !lemmy@lemmy.ml
but you can still search and read the github issues without making an account, so you could check if it already exists, or link the issue if you’re starting a lemmy discussion about it
I didn’t ask early enough but I will shoot anyway.
What you intend to do with !anime@lemmy.ml? There isn’t an active mod there and community is unwilling to continue using it due to defederation with ani.social The problems with community will keep arise due to very nature of Japanese animation and differences in acceptable social norms in western world.
Since I read a few comments here… What is your oppinion on more democratic platforms? I mean something like electing moderators. (Or dropping them in a democratic process.) Or voting for other things in a community.
(This is more a hypothetical question. I guess with the architecture as is, it can easily be exploited. And there is no way to implement this properly without severe changes and consequences.)
