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.
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: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.
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 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.
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.
I want a statement on the apparent lemmygrad connections and supporting human rights violations. The recent blog post was a PR non-answer, free speech is important, but human rights violations are just not acceptable.
Edit: it’s obvious at this point there will never be a proper statement. I just want to say that regardless of the country of origin, US, China, EU, South Africa, India, it doesn’t matter to me, all human rights violations are violations and unacceptable. This isn’t a communism vs capitalism debate, this is a situation of whether to support the guy creating this software if that individual supports genocidal tendencies.
Please add a statement on the apparent connection between lemmy.world and their support to the US led NATO: The United States is the worst human rights violator in post-war history. The United States is responsible for over 300 million deaths directly and as the sole world superpower that has imposed its economic system on nearly the entire world, its system based upon deprivation for many (in exchange for luxury for a few) has led to the intentional starvation of 9 million people annually and imposition of poverty that has led to 5 million deaths annually from lack of medical care. On top of the 300 million the United States has killed directly, the 14 million lives taken annually by its world-wide imposed economic system has killed 448 million people through social murder since 1991 when its economic system was finally imposed nearly worldwide.
The United States, through its international secret police organization (CIA), also runs secret black sites throughout much of the world where people are detained without charge or trial and often tortured. The United States has openly admitted to running a torture program in breach of international conventions it has signed.
The United States also illegally invaded, and currently occupies 30% of Syria, controlling 90% of its petroleum. This illegal occupation violates Syrian sovereignty and occurred long before the conflict in Ukraine.
As the user wrote above, free speech is important, but human rights violations are just not acceptable.
Edit: I forgot to add, the United States has a system of racial apartheid and mass incarceration targeting ethnic minorities within its own borders. As a country representing about 4% of the worlds population, it contains more the 20% of the worlds prisoners. These prisoners are forced into labor for private corporations and often subject to solitary confinement (which the UN has called a method of torture) This system of mass incarceration and forced labor is unlike any other in the world, and is largely a holdover of the United States system of race-based chattel slavery, that was subsequently replaced by a codified racial caste system that denied Black Americans all human rights until a few decades ago.
All of those situations are unacceptable, but come on, none of the articles you posted other than the CIA Wikipedia page and the Syria article (to which I absolutely don’t condone) lists the US as the sole country responsible for those statistics. Regardless of those sources, it’s important to call these things out, which I commend you for trying. Which is why I want a proper statement, not some PR nonsense answer that avoids the subject.
I don’t understand. Do you have some sort of analysis that says that the United States does not impose its economic system on the world? I think the people of Vietnam, Korea, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, Haiti, Afghanistan, Laos, Grenada (to name only a few) would disagree. The system of capitalism is one in which the economic system revolves around profit. This system of profitability robs people of the value of their labor and imposes inequality through rent-seeking behavior in housing and food markets. lemmy.world identified their support for the US-led IMF and World Bank which impose political reform to their liking on overexploited nations in exchange for much-needed liquidity. (That is when the US does not install puppet governments that take out huge loans immediately, like Bolivia in 2019) The need for cash infusions is a direct result of the US world economic policy and its imposition, but then these loans cause a tremendous debt-burden and the cost of debt-service often outpaces any social programs in the affected countries. … Is there some other global super-power imposing this on the world? The UN has said that the cost of ending world hunger is merely $40 billion dollars annually. Yet the United States spends nearly $1 trillion on military spending annually. So they United States imposes its system on other countries, causing deprivation and social murder, yet the capacity to resolve the problem is entirely within their ability to do so? That sounds like it is intentional and something they are responsible for. Even if you claim that this is not “intentional” because you blame these systemic problems on individual choice or a lack of responsibility on the part of the wealthy, that doesn’t make it any less true. Capitalism was imposed on the world by the US and the result is social murder on a mass scale. The isn’t even considering the other human rights violations by the US, which I didn’t even bother citing them all.
Also, the US’s treatment of Black Americans, including extrajudicial killings by the state and torture, is most definitely the responsibility of the United States. I would like a real statement on the relationship to lemmy.world and abusers of human rights, not some PR nonsense that avoids the subject.
I’m not trying to start a communism vs capitalism debate here, capitalism has its benefits, but that doesn’t mean I support every sick and twisted thing the US does.
This is simply a request for a statement on alleged ties the developer has to human rights violations. I don’t support the incarceration of African Americans one bit and think it’s absolutely disgusting what we’ve done. I don’t support those systems at all. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to prove here. I honestly commend your efforts. You’re clearly passionate about your united states hate boner, there’s nothing wrong with that and that’s the beauty of free speech. However, when you say things like “capitalism bad communism good!” but then turn around and support things like uyhger genocide and slave labor of North Koreans for lumber camps in syberia we have a problem. All of those situations, even the situations that the US has participated in is bad, that doesn’t mean I support them, that’s what I want to hear, do the devs support those human rights violations that they specifically have been tied too.
Wow, I mean, capitalism is bad and communism will be good. It isn’t a “hate boner” It is called having principles. If you think that the United States government, and the people who run it (the capitalist class) are committing serious crimes against humanity… why would you say “we” when you said “it’s absolutely disgusting what we’ve done.” You already identify with the crimes of your ruling class.
Those “examples” you gave of other human rights violations are spurious at best, US-ruling-class propaganda at worst. And you make several leaps in assuming that people are supportive of socialist states, or their struggle for self-determination against US empire, and support for specific instances of historic wrongs or mistakes. You clearly give “your own side” the benefit of the doubt or ignore it for the sake of attacking the US ruling-classes enemies. They aren’t your enemies, reallly. You assume that all labor in the DPRK is slave labor? That is laughable, and outright propaganda. All of the things you listed are nothing compared to what the US is doing right now, and what it has done in recent memory. It is August 7th, can you think of anything historically important that occurred the day before and the day after this date? You have a chance to admit you aren’t informed or passionate on the subject, and that you aren’t an expert. You can decide to change you mind and stop identifying so strongly with the worlds greatest oppressors. Please. Take this chance to come outside of your bubble and relearn.
The point is that your insistence that you are owed some sort of “real statement” on the lemmygrad community and dev’s support for “human rights violators” is farcical and partisan. It is a debate on communism vs capitalism because you are implying it by making a series of assumptions predicated on capitalists’ arguments. If you can’t see it, then you should spend some time reflecting on why you can’t see it. You also shouldn’t think that you are owed some sort of “real statement” if you can’t bother to investigate the question on your own.
Well then, hexbear troll account, makes complete sense now. I hope you have a good day.
How is it a troll? This is my account. I didn’t hide I was from hexbear. If you can’t argue your point, it only underlines that you aren’t standing on principle. I hope you reflect more on your own understanding of politics today, and that it brings disquiet and growth. But unfortunately, you might just continue to coddle yourself with the belief that you are right and good, and the heckin’ marvel good guy’s United States are only looking out for the human rights of Muslims and the global south, gee whiz.
We’re just asking for a statement about lemmy.world’s support for NATO’s human rights violations. Same deal.
Perfectly understandable, I honestly would love to hear their statement. Especially if it’s something specific they’ve been supporting.
Will you implement an sorting algorithm that would show more content from small, neglected, unknown communities/instances on the main /all/ timeline so that they are more discoverable and will be seen rather than only showing the most-liked posts from huge communities/instances?
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.
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.
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 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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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.
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!
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.
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:
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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.
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How is Lemmy doing financially?
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Considering past releases and their associated breaking bugs (including 0.18.3), what measures are you taking to help prevent that?
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Can we consider the possibility of downgrades being supported?
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Why are bugs affecting moderation not release blockers? Does anything block releases?
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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?
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
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.
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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.
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.
The free software movement is actually inherently political. Much of modern digital infrastructure is built using tools / software that embodies collectivist ideologies. I would be very surprised if the Lemmy developers even claimed that they created Lemmy in some sort of apolitical clean room (not that it is even possible).
What kind of political preferences are you referring to?
The devs are openly tankies. Pro-CPP/Russia, anti anything US or western in general.
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?
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.
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?
This comment states that they default to lemmy.world. I don’t think it should be handled that way.
Which is terrible, it centralizes Lemmy in lemmy.world, they’re already facing performance issues because of this.
