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.
Right now, instances with transphobic and racist content like exploding-heads are still listed on join-lemmy.org. Are you planning to implement a Server Convenant like on joinmastodon.org? To be listed on joinmastodon.org, an instance needs “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.
The instance list is fine as is. Think about it like this: do you want racists to join a single instance so they are all in one place? Or do you want them to spread across all different instances, causing moderation problems everywhere?
It’s possible that anti-racist, queer or any other serious organisations might not want to link to join-lemmy.org because of it.
Thats fine, they can provide their own list of instances where users can choose from.
They are on your list (which is seen as the official one by many and has most visits) to guide transphobes and fascists to their fitting community?? Exploding-heads is not labeled as transphobe and fascist on join-lemmy. So that does’t make sense.
i would rather want the racists to not be able to go anywhere at all
It doesnt really matter what you want. The software is open source so anyone can use the software freely. No way to prevent it.
yea sure there will always be racist instances but they shouldn’t be promoted on sites like join-lemmy.org
Yes, I think it would be best if they would all gather on one instance that can get defederated. Right now they attract users on join-lemmy with “Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable”, no other info.
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I think you got downvoted because people were not looking for a way to make it ok for the racist instances to stay on join-lemmy.
I am not really familiar with shadowbannig, but users could just check their posts from another instance and find out about the ban.
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And if the racist is here to cause problems rather than commiserate with fellow racists, they now know exactly which community to avoid, thus restoring moderation problems everywhere. I don’t think anyone is asking you to moderate every instance to ensure they are sticking to your TOS or your viewpoints, but it’s a very minor ask to not showcase off the racists and transphobes and bigots on the ‘join this platform’ page.
There are plenty of other instance lists across the internet. So its not even a real solution for your theoretical problem.
I don’t think the people raising this as a concern are trying to solve the problem of bigots on the internet; they are just asking for you to change the advertising you provide to remove the bigots from a place of visibility.
And then we should block lemmygrad, lemmy.world, hexbear and hundreds of other instances? Thats not gonna happen. If you want to block instances, do that on the beehaw side.
I’m not here to proselytize about what we decide to block or not. I’m explaining what the person above is requesting - not a block, but a conscious decision about what shows up on the join-lemmy list.
I’m new to the fediverse, and even I can tell you’re missing the point.
Well said. It’s rare to see such a good mindset!
Wasnt free speech all about being able to express your opinion without getting banned?
No. It’s about being able to voice your opinion without going to jail for it. No one is going to jail for making transphobic memes or comments. But that doesn’t protect them from me blocking them or banning them from my instance.
Ok fair enough. But (outside of the context) defederating/banning certain communities because they don’t have the same beliefs as you can lead to a fully opinionated/based fediverse and should be prevented imo. Everybody should be able to express their opinions no matter what. I don’t want lemmy to change into some kind off mass media like everything else rn. If a post isn’t showing a good/kind, people respecting vibe, it will be downvoted and thus not shown to anybody. And later if lemmy creates an algorithm of some kind, these posts can be ghosted for certain individuals. But i don’t think they should be completely removed and banned from the connected fediverse as this platform is one of the only ways to express ourselves online at this point. I hope i could get my point across
Defederation doesn’t prevent them from being able to access the fediverse nobody has a right to harassing people thats like saying you are being discriminated against because you aren’t allowed in the public park because you throw garbage everywhere and spray paint the children’s play equipment but it’s a public park my rights
What type(s) of transphobia?
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.
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 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.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !news@startrek.website
Is this link supposed to work?
No, it’s a fictional instance used to make a point.
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.
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.
Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don’t know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn’t do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.
We have a
Legalsection under admin settings, that’s an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We’d need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn’t EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:
- Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
- If the former, delete all data of their data on the server, send it to them, and then (this was the important part) forward the data deletion request to every single partner we were working with.
For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between “we’re thinking about it” and “we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we’ll get to it sometime within the next month”), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.
As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that “no, it’s anonymous” - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.
So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you’re not doing that, you’re not fully compliant.
Kind of shitty, but that’s how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)
Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don’t recall what the time was for a “see my data” request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.
There a different levels of personal data but a unique identifier for a user is one of them because it allows linking information together about a single person, and from there you can try to identify the real person. So an option would be to overwrite all the occurrences of this identifier with random data so you can’t link data together anymore, as long as it’s not also personal data.
Sure, but you’d still have to delete all their written posts - which is really what all this is about.
You actually would not. The content of the post can stay but the username/identifier has to be removed. Written text is not PII to my knowledge and every social platforms I’ve actively used only delete the identifier (Reddit, GitHub).
Written content can contain pii, but it’s rarer. Written content isn’t, by default, pii, but if someone tells anything reasonably pii the entire text can be consisted pii even when anonymized.
Yeah as someone who had to deal with GDPR in a professional capacity, it’s probably better to just assume that content written by users contains PII since you really have no way of telling whether it does or doesn’t.
Naturally you can just ignore that and leave the content as-is, but then you run the risk of some data protection authority ruining your day.
Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?
Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social’s privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy
As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.
That sounds like its something for instance admins to handle, nothing we as developers need to care about. Maybe we should add a privacy policy for lemmy.ml but thats it.
Yea it is ultimately on the admins, but Lemmy just needs to not make it hard to comply with GDPR. So it’s up to admins to raise issues when Lemmy is seen as an obstacle to compliance, and it’s up to devs to listen and implement compliance features.
You don’t have to bother with GDPR until you’re a certain size company
That’s what I thought too until I looked it up. It applies to individuals as well.
If an individual runs a web server and processes personal data of individuals within the European Union, then they are subject to the requirements of GDPR. GDPR applies to anyone, including individuals, who processes personal data of EU residents, regardless of whether they are operating as a business or on a personal basis. It’s important for the individual running the web server to comply with GDPR’s data protection principles and obligations to safeguard the personal data they process.
What does “processing” data mean though?
Asking chat gpt, so take it with a bit of salt, but it’s usually correct about these things.
In the context of data protection and GDPR, “processing” refers to any operation or set of operations performed on personal data. This includes collecting, recording, organizing, storing, adapting, altering, retrieving, using, disclosing, transmitting, and deleting personal data.
Processing can be done both manually and automatically. It covers a wide range of activities related to personal data, such as capturing information through web forms, analyzing data for marketing purposes, storing customer records in a database, or even just viewing or accessing personal data.
Under GDPR, any entity or individual involved in processing personal data is required to comply with the regulation’s principles and obligations to protect the rights and privacy of the individuals whose data is being processed.
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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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.
Would you please consider having only local post/community/users indexed by search engines? A lemmy.ml user complained that their username is first result on Google with lemmynsfw.com domain name. Also implementing this would decrease chance of duplicate content.
It can resolved with a simple noindex meta tag.
I’d be open to a PR for that, sure.
I hate Inferno (specifically class components) but I’ll check what I can do 🙏
I do too now (I created lemmy-ui when react was king), which is why the new UI will be written in leptos, using signal-based reactivity, and functional components.
Could you please create a middle ground between the nuclear option (banning sites) and the whack a mole option of banning users. It would be effective to be able to ban communities (at least temporarily) during bot spam attacks while you wait for admins to police up their site. Could there also be a way for admins to notify other admins that their site is spamming garbage so that admins know that their board is the cause of a problem and what that problem is?
As an admin you can remove a remote community, then it shouldnt federate anymore. Though admittedly this isnt very intuitive.
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.
For me its already a huge success that Lemmy got where it is today, with over 50k users. If you had told me that a few months ago, I hardly would have believed it. When I started working on Lemmy, there were a couple dozen active users at most, yet the project didnt die. Instead it kept growing and growing steadily. So I think it will keep growing, and there will be more improvements which make Lemmy more accessible for normal users.
Sync makes it as simple as any mainsfream social media
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.
Thanks for both of your work on Lemmy, join-lemmy, lemmy-ui and Jerboa.
- Can you tell us about any upcoming major features/issue resolutions in development currently, if there are any?
- Will Lemmy have any form of cross-instance community/post grouping, similar to multi-reddits, hashtags, “alliances” or categories? Although some Lemmy apps have implemented something along those lines, it could be more fully-implemented in the official backend/frontend. I’ve been thinking Lemmy has desparately needed it to help solve some of the fragmentation problems across instances. It would also help avoid one instance necessarily having all the content, ballooning in both running costs and control.
- The best way is to look at the open PRs on each repo, to see the things that are being worked on / fixed.
- We have an open issue for community collections, but its not being worked on currently. We have
cross_postscome back through theGetPostendpoint, to see where else specific posts have been posted to.
The fragmentation issues I’ve addressed here.
Alright thanks for the answers! I’ve looked through them, and maybe I was looking for more of what you thought personally of what major features you had in mind. Rather, it sounds like (but don’t let me put words in your month) you’re more focused on just keeping the overall work together and stable. I can respect that.
As far as some longer-term goals, I posted this elsewhere, but some are:
- Performance improvements (DB, federation code)
- Creating a better onboarding site (joinlemmy)
- Stabilizing the API
- Becoming fully funded by donations, and growing our dev co-op.
- Lots of code maintenance
- Notifications (Unified push)
- Better sorting to push content from smaller communities (a best sort)
- A better web UI written in rust (lemmy-ui-leptos)
As some instances grow, server costs are becoming significant. Right now, servers are only funded through donations. Do you see the development of anything else to help fund server costs?
If lemmy is working as intended (many small, connected servers), hosting costs should be small: like < $10 USD / month. (images are another issue, but I’ll answer that in other comments).
Of course we don’t plan on adding any monetization directly into lemmy or its UI, including ads, or required payments. Right now at least the best way is to put donation links in your site sidebar.
Sorry for stupid questions and doubts 😭 but you said you don’t plan to add any plan, monetization or ads. SO never ever right? I’m willing to donate a hell lot to support the lemmy. So it’ll always remain like this innocent, inherently open source and always have the same “our”/ “people’s” internet, and never like a platform that is above us like it feels when using Twitter or reddit? (I said stupid question cus idk if having activitypub adopted and being decentralized makes lemmy and other platforms inherently “people’s” open-source and free internet?
We will never have ads or in-app monetization or crypto scams, no. We’ll always be 100% funded by donations and open source grants.
- Are you proud/happy/satisfied how Lemmy progresses and its current status?
- Does it make sense to spend your time to develop client apps when there are so many other already (including open source)
- What are your ambitions/goals/hopes for Lemmy in one year from now?
- What do you see as the biggest issue for Lemmy (as a platform) which must be addressed?
Ps: thank you for your work!
- For sure! I’m just glad we can provide an alternative that some people enjoy and get some use out of, and to not feel like they’re just adding to a company’s market cap. Development has certainly picked up with this massive migration, and people have helped us find and fix so many security and performance issues that just two people would never have found before.
- The current official UIs (lemmy-ui and somewhat jerboa), have had a ton of developer contributions, and more people added as direct contributors besides me, and they’ve made those apps better than I ever could. So while I never want to be completely hands-off from those, its wonderful to have the help.
- A few I can think of: I hope that performance issues stabilize, that we can create a better onboarding site / improve join-lemmy.org , do lots of code maintenance, become financially stable and grow our little developer co-op into more than just us two, learn how to scale handling issues better, that we can add notifications / unified push, better sorting, and move the web-ui over to a more stable app in rust / leptos : lemmy-ui-leptos
- Currently, performance and security, so that we can focus on the above.
Thanks!
With so many growing instances, were finding a lot of duplicate communities within each one, wich results in a lot of duplicate posts by cross posters.
Do you think it will be possible to aggregate similar communities together in some way?
See here
Firstly, I just have appreciation for you and nutomic for this amazing platform that you’ve created. This has become my favorite source of reading discussions and looking at memes. I know it’s small, but I love it and want it to succeed. My question is Do you see Lemmy or any other federated platforms reaching the level of audiences that other big Social Media Platforms currently have? Do you want it to grow big like them, or remain as it is, An amazing platform hidden in one corner of the Web?
I don’t know that we’ll ever replace big tech, but none of us can see the future. These giants will likely have a slow decline, whilst open-source and federated services will grow at their expense. But of course in the long term I do want the fediverse to replace the US tech giants, who treat us and our data as commodities to be bought and sold.
Any case where we can draw users away from that exploitation, is a victory.
Is there a reason we don’t have users ability to block entire instances, or is it difficult to code? (I don’t mean to sound ungrateful)
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What’s your favorite dinosaur?
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The way lemmy instances are organized reminds me of IRC. Was that any part of the inspiration?
- Brachiosaurus
- Not for me either.
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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.
- … I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.
Honestly heart warming to hear!
