This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they'd like to myself, @[email protected] , SleeplessOne , or @[email protected] about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
NLNet Funding
First of all some good news: We are currently applying for new funding from NLnet and have reached the second round. If it gets approved then @[email protected] and SleeplessOne will work on the paid milestones, while @dessalines and @nutomic will keep being funded by direct user donations. This will increase the number of paid Lemmy developers to four and allow for faster development.
You can see a preliminary draft for the milestones. This can give you a general idea what the development priorities will be over the next year or so. However the exact details will almost certainly change until the application process is finalized.
Development Update
@ismailkarsli added a community statistic for number of local subscribers.
@jmcharter added a view for denied Registration Applications.
@dullbananas made various improvements to database code, like batching insertions for better performance, SQL comments and support for backwards pagination.
@SleeplessOne1917 made a change that besides admins also allows community moderators to see who voted on posts. Additionally he made improvements to the 2FA modal and made it more obvious when a community is locked.
@nutomic completed the implementation of local only communities, which don't federate and can only be seen by authenticated users. Additionally he finished the image proxy feature, which user IPs being exposed to external servers via embedded images. Admin purges of content are now federated. He also made a change which reduces the problem of instances being marked as dead.
@dessalines has been adding moderation abilities to Jerboa, including bans, locks, removes, featured posts, and vote viewing.
In other news there will soon be a security audit of the Lemmy federation code, thanks to Radically Open Security and NLnet.
Support development
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
- Liberapay (preferred option)
- Open Collective
- Patreon
- Cryptocurrency
Echoing the concern of @[email protected], I want to ask about the issue of a lot of communities becoming big on different instances, to the point they consolidate the moderation and engagement power and ability for users. Posting to them is the only way to get ample engagement, even if same communities exist on other instances. This needs to be rectified.
Same communities across servers should be possible to engage with in a metacommunity format. This will be a game changer for Lemmy.
There are several examples of communities moving from instance to another, or refusing a mod powertrip.
[email protected] was an attempt from the mods subreddit to get the community back, but most of the people rejected that and stayed on [email protected].
Small scale example, but I like the show "the Office". [email protected] is the historical community, but as some people are not fans of lemmy.ml, we moved to [email protected], which is now the most active community on this topic.
I guess that shows that community takeover is possible, and does not need additional tools, just some time and dedication.
Also, keep in mind that except if there is a real reason (admin/mods powertripping, problematic instance direction), there is no incentive for users to move to another community. But the important thing is that the possibility is very much there, and helps keeping everyone in check.
This was only possible because the scale of users on a community is very low (<5000). Bigger communities have inertia effect in play. Almost all Lemmy mods are well vetted and benevolent unlike ones on Reddit, so that helps too.
Migration is different from being able to view all posts of same topic community in a meta form.
40k of us literally left Reddit to come here due to malevolent actions from Reddit.
Do all people interested in gaming see the discussions happening at hexbear and beehaw on those topics? The meta form seems to deny that there is a reasons why different communities exist on the same topic.
See here.
Yes, I did say in another comment that this requires the benevolence of admins/mods across instances. Each community may also have its own unique sub culture, just like Reddit, which complicates the problem even more.
IMO the only possible solution that is also user customisable is meta tagging for communities that users can utilise to create custom communities, which would be a subset of the multicommunities/multireddit style feature.