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.
What do you think of the neoliberal hell that lemmy.ml is right now?
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.
Comrade Dessalines, you rock. Your audiobooks and essays are great. No questions.
Chances that hexbear emojis become the Lemmy standard across all instances ?
Thank you for your service.
Each instance should be in control of their own emojis IMO, for example a star trek instance would have only star-trek related emojis.
If they tried to have any non-Star Trek emojis Dessalines would press the secret instance destroying button and eradicate them
Resistance is futile, your emojis will become part of the collective.
thanks for your work. That kind of online posting is praxis and is quite helpful. Hope you get as much in your personal life as you give :)
First, just want to say thanks for building and maintaining Lemmy. It's an incredible project, and it provides an incredibly valuable public forum that's completely open. This is the way internet was always meant to work before it got hijacked by corporations.
The questions I'd like to ask would be whether the platform is developing in the way you originally envisioned, what surprised you in terms of how the platform ended up being used in the wild, and what were the biggest technical and non technical problems that came from the rapid growth after the Reddit migration. And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.
I mostly imagined the slow but steady growth we'd been having, and def didn't anticipate that reddit would mess up so badly that a massive chunk of users would migrate from a multi-million dollar enterprise software, to a hobby project developed by a couple of marxist-leninists 🤣 . But so it goes, with all these late-capitalist social media companies alienating their users, monetizing them in any way possible in search of declining surplus.
The biggest non-tech problem, is just the overwhelming amount of notifications. Companies have multiple layers between devs and users, to separate, order, and create a more controlled explosion. That doesn't exist here, so we get hundreds of notifications every day, with everyone treating us as their personal issue tracker.... and I basically would get nothing done if all I did was respond to them. Luckily things are calming down a bit now.
The biggest tech-problem was the performance and security issues of so many users joining the network all at once, and luckily we had so many wonderful community contributions to help stabilize that.
And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.
We should be ambitious, and wantthe fediverse as a whole, on the long term, to replace big-tech. Every user we draw away from them, is one less person exploited for their data and treated as a commodity.
Technically, I'd just like us to continue making the software better, maintaining the code, and adding features.
The point regarding notifications is really important. Managing a popular open source project can be really overwhelming in that regard, and it's easy for individual users to forget that it's only a couple of people dealing with all their issues on the other end.
People stepping up and contributing is a great development. Community involvement is key for the success of open source platforms in my opinion.
And love the long term vision, I completely agree that the fediverse replacing corporate platforms would be the ideal scenario in the future. From what I can see, fediverse has already reached the point of sustainability. It's still niche compared to mainstream platforms, but I think it's clear that it can exist in its current form indefinitely. And I think this provides an important advantage over corporate platforms. Commercial companies have to continuously demonstrate profit and growth to their shareholder or die. This means having to constantly chase new ways to attract new users and monetize the platform leading to the sort of behaviors we see happening with Reddit. On the other hand, open platforms can grow slowly and sustainably. This allows the fediverse to evolve on a completely different time scale. I'm optimistic that the fediverse will likely outlive every single corporate platform that's around today.
Thanks again for all the hard work you're doing, it's very much appreciated!
The biggest non-tech problem, is just the overwhelming amount of notifications.
Is there anything users could do to help mitigate this? I think the recommendation for reporting bugs is to use the GitHub page. But for other issues?
Maybe a numbering system would help: so if a user tagged a dev, they start with a 1 for urgent, 2 for neutral(?), or 3 for 'ignore if you're busy'. There will be a problem of some users overemohasising their issue but it still might save time/attention overall as most users will likely respect such a system.
Or maybe a novel use of a dev community, which would allow the user base to help determine which issues are noteworthy?
Feel like having a gpt summarize the bulk of issues might be the viable way to handle it
To be honest I never had any long-term vision, and still dont have. I just thought that decentralized software in general and Activitypub in particular is very exciting and lets us take power away from corporations like Reddit, Google, Facebook etc.
Biggest technical problem was implementing Activitypub, when I started there was no implementation in Rust yet, and it was very hard to find detailed information how everything is supposed to work. Over the years I had to rewrite the federation code at least 4-5 times, each time making it a bit cleaner.
Biggest nontechnical challenge is dealing with all the people who are suddenly joining and want to contribute, so that it doesnt turn into total chaos. Luckily there are many helpful community members who helped to organize things. Another challenge is with funding, now we dont have as much time to work on the paid NLnet milestones. And its not clear if NLnet will grant us another funding round once this is over. Hopefully the user donations will grow over time so that they can cover our full salaries.
Thanks again for all the work you're doing on the project, and hopefully the funding situation will continue being sustainable after the NLnet grants run out. It would be great if community manages to step up and fully cover the salaries through donations. It's been an exciting ride using Lemmy and seeing the community grow. I can't wait to see what the next few years will bring!
What's your opinion on app developers making Lemmy clients with tracker-infused ads on their free version? Is it something you ever anticipated when you were first developing Lemmy?
EDIT: Also a similar one, what about instances potentially deciding to display ads out of nowhere? Could defederation be a tool here to discourage that?
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.
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.
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!
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!
Thank you so much comrade! I loved working with you and the other admins and am very grateful for the experience!
Im glad its finally working, took a long time. Welcome to the federation!
Which are your 3 favorites lemmy instances besides Lemmy.ml?
also thanks for the work you do
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.
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?
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.
Check out STAR Voting. It is range voting with a runoff step to avoid bullet voting
Do you know about majority judgement? If you know about it or check it out, what do you think about it? What do you wonder about it? Do you want to challenge something about it? What would you want to explore about it?
Looks like its a subset of range / score voting, but only scores of [1-4] are allowed (as opposed to range voting which doesn't specify the number of scores, but its usually 1-10 or 1-100), and it uses the median, instead of the average for some reason.
I see how majority judgement could be seen as a subset of range or score voting.
A crucial difference between range/score voting and majority judgement is that one uses numbers and the others judgements. A majority judgement ballot could list all the possible candidates or options, and for each of them, there'd be a list of possible judgements. You can say that you consider a candidate "terrible", "bad", "meh", "good", "amazing".
The idea is that humans tend to think in terms of judgements more readily than with numbers. A good ballot would find what words evoke useful judgements for candidates, as each group of voters has its own social language.
For example, with my partner we have a list of movies that we vote on. We have judgements that include "I'll leave the house if you play that sh*t", or "Omg yes!". It's great to add a movie to the list and find that one of the judgements in our made up ballot matches our personal judgements so well!
This is something I think majority judgement can do better than range/score voting: it can reflect human judgements better than with scores. In that way, it is more intuitive than range/score voting.
One benefit of majority judgement is that leaders chosen through it would know the judgement that they came into power with. If someone is elected into a powerful role knowing that half of the voters think they're "ideal" for the job, that's quite different than knowing that they were elected with half the voters thinking they were "inadequate". This means, ideally, that the legitimacy of incompetent leaders can be reduced.
Note that the amount of possible judgements in a ballot can vary. To make things quick and easy, I've had silly elections with three judgements, such as "nope", "ok", "omg yes". I've also had elections with nine judgements.
If you want to reduce the probability of having multiple winners, more judgements are a good idea. In general, the amount of judgements should depend on what the stakes are (higher stakes should go beyond just a couple of judgements), how many options there are (few options require few judgements), and the amount of voters there are (few voters require many judgements).
I think the reason for using the median is so that a judgement can be chosen as representative of each candidate. In the "nope", "ok", "omg yes" example above, if the median of the winning candidate is 3, you can tell the candidate that the score that they were chosen with was "omg yes". If the average of the winning candidate is 2.4, you can't really translate that as succintly, given that 2.4 is between "ok" and "omg yes".
I hope it's clearer why I love this voting method!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Can we get the show context bug fixed? Pretty please? :3 Possibly the most frustrating bug we've ever had.
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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.
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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?
- Its fixed in a back-end PR, we'll try to get a bugfix release sometime soon.
- Hrm... haven't thought about that. Could you open up an issue in lemmy-ui . I think the
cross_posts
field is sorted by published, but I'm not totally positive. In that case it'd just be marking it in the UI in some way. - I def didn't anticipate it would get this far this fast... we've become the 2nd most popular fediverse software recently. I'm super-excited about the impact we can have on global media, and getting ppl to break their dependency/addiction to US-tech dominated spaces.
Hrm... haven't thought about that. Could you open up an issue in lemmy-ui . I think the cross_posts field is sorted by published, but I'm not totally positive. In that case it'd just be marking it in the UI in some way.
I can, will do it this evening. I don't think it does sort like that I'm pretty sure I noticed it just being in any old order, maybe alphabetical? Either way a clearly indicated
Original post:
separate to theCross posted to:
would strongly incentivise community owners to crosspost their content for the community promotion it provides, and reward them with subscribers for doing it. It generates a little bit of "hey stop advertising in our subreddit" from some modteams but it's worth far more than it takes away, and this is an extremely specific little detail of the system that I think only people that have tried to start many different new subreddits will understand.I def didn't anticipate it would get this far this fast... we've become the 2nd most popular fediverse software recently. I'm super-excited about the impact we can have on global media, and getting ppl to break their dependency/addiction to US-tech dominated spaces.
Back in the Digg days Reddit just quietly sat in Digg's shadow as a sort of "dual power" if you will. Its community did its own thing, creating a culturally-unique space with its own community that liked it for its own sake. They just had to exist and Digg would eventually shit the bed. I think one of the major things that community owners here ought to be doing, which sadly the largest - lemmyworld - is not, is to create a space that is not just "we're reddit but without Spez". Better reasons for being here other than just spite are essential for longevity. Hexbear does a good job of this, Lemmy seems to be building that up too, I've recently become fond of the direction lemm.ee appears to be headed but we'll see.
Ironically lemmyworld won't see this criticism because of their defederation, so their users are missing out on several ama responses.
If stuff as well as yours had existed in 2004 when IRC "died" and facebook etc. grew we might still have functioning decentralized boards as default right now.
Our wild emotes showing up on other instances must be something lol
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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?
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.
I asked this in the original thread but I’ll repeat it here:
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Are there any limitations with the ActivityPub protocol you find limiting? Do you have recommendations for future versions of the protocol?
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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:
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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.
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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.
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Thank you a lot for building such an awesome platform! Here are my questions:
How did you get into communism? Were there any events that had an influence on you becoming communists and what personally motivates you to keep working on lemmy even though you could earn much more as developers working on proprietary software?
Growing up during the US war on the Iraqi people, the jingoistic coverage in media for all US wars, then the subsequent alienation I felt after I started working, is the main thing that turned me to Marxism. Essentially, when the extremely untrustworthy warmongers start calling everything they dislike, "communism / socialism", then it must be worth looking into. And I found that there was good reason they carefully steer populations away from Marxist literature, and deem it a heresy: because its a clear and straightforward description of how things actually work, and it threatens their fortunes. Nearly every communist grows up in liberal-dominated cultures, and goes through their own process of rejecting the world that enshrines property and profit over human lives, and how it affected them personally. Their stories are all worth listening to.
I've worked in many different industries in software, and found the same issues in all of them, and just lost patience, especially seeing that all the work I did creating proprietary software was essentially thrown in the trash, and societally useless. I'd much rather be paid very little, and contribute something positive to the world; time is our most valuable resource, and we should spend it doing things that improve the world, because there is so much that needs doing.
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.
This is very well put and mirrors the issue I keep coming up against in my career.
Thanks for the reply! As a baby Marxist I just wanted to add that I recently listened to your Audiobook of Zak Cope‘s Divided World Divided Class and I thought that it was really eye opening as it for the first time made it clear to me, that there actually is a material basis for people in the West to buy into the liberal ideology. Living in the west one personally benefits from the bribes that the western haute bourgeoisie is able to pay its workers in inflated wages made possible by the super exploitation of labor and resources in the third world. (At least that is my understanding of the book, I‘m open for different interpretations)
So thank you for making the book available as an audiobook!
Thanks! Yep that book really did open my eyes too, that the process of colonial extraction of the labor of millions of super-exploited global south workers, to feed the imperial core nations, is still going.
Glad I could help!
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.
Based
Are there any countries at the moment that are close to what you'd describe as Socialist? I find myself interested in certain aspects of it, but wanted to know if there's anywhere that practices some of it so I can see/research for myself to try and figure out where I sit politically.
Another question regarding this - are there any links/similarities between socialist ideologies, and services offered by welfare (such as free transport, education, healthcare, unemployment benefits, housing)?
Apologies if I'm mixing things up or anything, thought it would be quicker to just ask directly. Since I'm from a western country I'd assume the lens through which we view and understand socialism may differ
There are many countries on the socialist road, but these types of questions would be better to ask somewhere like https://lemmygrad.ml/c/communism101