I dont follow /c/worldnews so I dont see much of that. Also hexbear is federating now, so it might easily swing back the other way again.

o7 comrade. I'm glad I can help out in any way.

Show

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.

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.

I'm personally a hard copyleft developer, so I'd prefer that people making apps and tools for the lemmy eco-system, open source them, to benefit the community as a whole. Nearly all lemmy projects have adopted that standard, and are using the GPL and other hard copy-left licenses, and sharing their code freely with the community.

One example: various devs of lemmy apps have asked me how we build comment trees. Because lemmy's source code is open, I was able to share the exact code from lemmy-ui (typescript) and jerboa (kotlin). This is not something closed source developers are able / willing to share.

So I continue to recommend that developers heed calls to open source their applications. I developed my ThumbKey android keyboard, specifically because my requests to the MessageEase developers to open-source their codebase, after development had stopped, went unheeded for years.

Side note, but I've seen a lot of the discourse around Sync confuse FOSS, with making money. Of course developers deserve to get paid for their labor time! The thing is, FOSS makes no demands on how you monetize your software: "free as in freedom, not free as in beer", is the saying. So its entirely possible to open source your app, and still charge for it if you like. And If someone wants your app for free (say via an unlocked APK), they'll get it, whether its closed source, or not.

And yes, if an instance decided to insert ads, or becomes full of blog/cryptospam, I'd def recommend other instances defederate from them. I'd rather not lemmy become the ad-machine that other social media has become.

I definitely didnt expect it, nor did I expect that there would suddenly be more than a dozen different apps. But its not a problem, the more choices users have the better. Those who like such clients can use them, thout it affecting anyone else. Plus monetization of apps could potentially help to fund development of Lemmy itself.

For instances with ads its pretty much the same, more choice for users. But I really doubt that model can have any success considering how many free instances are around which are run by volunteers. Defederation should be unnecessary assuming that ads are only shown to local users.

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!

Im glad its finally working, took a long time. Welcome to the federation!

Its rad, and I'm super-pumped yall are here 💓

I love all my children equally 🤣 . Haha no I don't want to play favorites. So far every instance has something great about it, and something to add. I also really like startrek.website, and would love to see more topic-based instances. I would love to see a ravelry-type site in lemmy.

For obvious reasons, we don't want to be involved in inter-server conflicts. Admins are free to run their servers however they see fit.

Would you think Ranked Choice voting for admins i.e. with the Schulze method - which Debian power-genius 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?

I don't know how the debian one works (I'm also personally a fan of olympic score / range voting over ranked choice). Because of the possibility of weaknesses of these community-moderation proposals(people creating fake users to vote, and gaming them in hundreds of other ways I can't think about) I'd rather not stress-test them in lemmy.

We don't have a remind-me, but someone could implement it, it'd def be useful. I don't even think there's an open issue for that one yet.

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.

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.

Show context is working on hexbear again.

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.

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.

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.