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Some Lemmy clients offer the option to auto-hide posts and comments which contain certain keywords of the choice of the user. Are there any plans to implement this feature into the stock Lemmy experience?
I know it is possible to do some hacky stuff with UblockOrigin to do the same, but that is not something most know about and are willing to do.
Communities should be more unified across servers, especially for niche ones. I want to see an active Metroid community, I don't give a crap what instance is hosting it (or if it's a mostly-opaque medley of instances) so long as I'm federated with it. This is probably the biggest UX misunderstanding new users have.
What have been the biggest challenges with the project over the years, both in terms of technical and non technical aspects. I'd be interesting to hear a bit of retrospective on how has the stack's been working out, and what surprises you might've run into in terms of scaling and federation. What recommendations you'd make based on that and what you would've done differently knowing what you know now.
How do we avoid defederation through leemy.world and lemmy.ml? What I mean is, there are instances for Canada, or FOSS, or any other inalienable trait. Most can communicate with eachother with exception of porn specific instances. When new people sign up, they look for popular instances and there are no restrictions on what you can join. So, larger instances like .world and .ml will have more foot traffic and more new signups. I think that's just an immediate path to recreate reddit and I think that needs to be recognised and seriously avoided, at all costs. The whole point is that this is not-for-profit, free of advertisements and already voyager as downloaded for android contains ads. Also, unless specifying only foss software during the building process of app on linux, ads are present there too. I would love to see some community driven livestreams or events, where we could fund the developers ourselves through donations. We're all refugess from reddit, but that doesn't mean we have to be "libre reddit." I think we could easily fund ourselves if we fostered more of a connected sense of community through events and conversations, turn this group of websites into something more than just friendly social media.
Any possibility for hash tags to be added? Cross instance topics would be so much easier to browse especially when similar topics are discussed across different community names across difference instances.
I'd like to be able to browse the federation for tv show discussion with #tvshows or #fringe or something
So, larger instances like .world and .ml will have more foot traffic and more new signups
Lemmy.ml is only 5th by monthly active users: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
voyager as downloaded for android contains ads.
That's Boost or Sync? Never seen an add on Voyager @[email protected]
Granted, but that doesn't answer the question at hand.
No, it is on voyager too. I built and installed it last night.
Are there any plans to deal with the most common annoyances regarding Lemmy? In my opinion these are all based on federation:
Multispam is one of the things that is genuinely a threat to Lemmy's usability. If you follow certain topics, you start seeing 2-5 copies of every post. It's a genuine spam problem and "just block" or "just scroll" is as much of a non solution as it is with other spam.
it’s still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the “proper” path.
https://phtn.app/signup gives a prepopulated list
show up in people’s “all” feeds multiple times.
Which interface do you use? Crossposts only show up once on the default UI
A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.
You can already export and import your subscriptions between instances (account settings - import/export)
Posts and comments can't be migrated, but Mastodon doesn't allow it either.
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.
gives a prepopulated list
The official one also does that. I'm talking about choosing a username, password, and email maybe, and then clicking register, and being done. No thinking involved.
Crossposts only show up once on the default UI
False, you get links to the other posts, of which you posted a screenshot, but each post is handled as being completely separate. If you are in the subscribed, local or all feeds, you would see all of these posts separately. Have you really never noticed scrolling by "the same" post multiple times? You have to go to each post manually to get all the comments to the "same" thing.
but Mastodon doesn’t allow it either [...] due to technical limitations
Yes, I know that. But I'm also a programmer and I know that "technical limitations" is mostly a term for "that's how we started it and it would be too costly to solve now, so we'll just dismiss it" and not for actual limitations (i.e. not technically possible). It'd maybe require breaking changes of some kind or some kind of annoying backwards compatibility workaround, but that is why I'm asking. I'm not completely familiar with activity pub, but there's likely some key used to verify posts/messages are made by a certain user, and there's currently no way to transfer or change that key to a new account. But it seems very technically possible to me, and also possible without massive security issues. So that was my question, is there any plans to do this or no?
The official one also does that. I’m talking about choosing a username, password, and email maybe, and then clicking register, and being done. No thinking involved.
This should probably be handled more by people when they talk about Lemmy. Instead of explaining what Federation is, just point people to https://vger.app/settings/install so that they can install an app.
Voyager by default suggests Lemm.ee as the instance to register, so no thinking indeed: https://vger.app/profile
That's the recommended approach nowadays on [email protected]
False, you get links to the other posts, of which you posted a screenshot, but each post is handled as being completely separate. If you are in the subscribed, local or all feeds, you would see all of these posts separately.
I only see them once in my subscribed feed. You may indeed see them multiple times if you are not subscribed to all the communities.
You have to go to each post manually to get all the comments to the “same” thing.
This one I agree, and it's why I generally suggest to consolidate similar communities to solve that issue. [email protected] has quite a few examples of successful consolidations.
I’m not completely familiar with activity pub, but there’s likely some key used to verify posts/messages are made by a certain user, and there’s currently no way to transfer or change that key to a new account.
You're looking for https://activitypods.org/ . I haven't been following their recent progress, not sure how mature their solution is, and how many Fediverse platforms support them.
- A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.
This would be great.. also even if the "restore" part were not possible (yet?) I feel offering a way to extract your data might even be a requirement for a server to be fully GDPR compliant (though I could be wrong on that, IANAL), reddit does allow you to download your data after all.
What’s something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?
One of the biggest issue at this point is probably the registration experience. There are quite a few occurrences on [email protected] of users not sure whether their email has been validated or not, and at the moment they really need to look out for the toastify notification on their first try, later attempts won't show it.
Most recent example: https://lemmy.ml/post/27607055?scrollToComments=true
If there could be a way to inform a user saying "your email address has been validated, please wait for an administrator to activate your account, you can reach out to them at xxx", that would be great.
This generally goes against security best practices as it can be used for attempted user enumeration. A better version would be "we'll send you an email with your account status if this user exists" but obviously that results in a fair amount more complexity (and cost) to implement
How are you?
Hi, I think that Lemmy is great thank you for your hard work
I actually think that given the ads and other distorsions, and thanks to federation, Lemmy is overall actually better than reddit!
Some features I miss are:
Keep up the good work guys!
What are your thoughts on blocking AI scraper access? Any attempts to improve that on the side of Lemmy? Basic things like allowing to customize the robots.txt easily would already help.
I also recently tried this new AI block tool called Anubis with Lemmy, but for some reason it fails with Lemmy-ui. Might be interesting to investigate further.
I just set up Anubis today. Specifically I'm only testing it for Lemmy-ui, and it seems to work fine.
It looks like the distributed waves that keep bringing the service down hit exclusively our lemmy-ui subdomain, so maybe non-SSR photon is also a good defense, heh.
Hmm, that is odd. I guess I need to double check my Nginx config for lemmy-ui then. You have your setup documented somewhere?
I don't think it should be a problem, but I'm not that sure either. Lemmy.fedi.zutto.fi also runs it and that's just a normal lemmy-ui installation. I think Zutto simply forwarded all traffic to Anubis and then fixed federation. There was some discussion and config shared in sopuli's finnish matrix room.
I've previously worked in anti-scraping. There is a negative 0% chance the Lemmy devs have the resources to effectively do this without tanking the server for everyone else.
Anyone that wants to scrape Lemmy would have an easier time setting up their own server, federating with everyone, and reading straight from their DB. No web scraping required. Though, web scraping defenses would be useful against general web scrapers/crawlers.
That would require the authors of these AI scrapers to actually give a f*ck. The problem is that they don't, and just scrape what ever they can find repeatatly almost like a ddos attack on the open web.
Some companies use Reddit as their main forum or an established way to communicate with customers. Are there any companies that have explored Lemmy and have their community yet?
Not really a question, but something to think about is being more strict about backwards compatibility so that people don't get burnt out on having stuff break. Coming from this post by the Tesseract dev, who did not like the breaking changes to the v3 API in 1.0: https://dubvee.org/post/2904152
To formulate that into an actual question, do you think the changes are still worth it and you'd make the same decision to break backwards compatibility?
Do you guys have plans to add a spoiler tag? I post a lot of memes about tv shows that I watch, but the users complain that the post isn't blurred.
I know I can use the NSFW tag, but this gives the wrong idea and limits the post visibility (since people can hide nsfw posts).
Hi! As you might remember, i've been pushing for this platform for quite some time so i'll just dump ideas in a pretty annoying way, hope you'll spare me :3
alright i think it's enough lol; now one very big appreciation: thank you for the rss first approach, having rss for basically everything like it was on reddit (well still miss some query rss but i understand it's harder to do) it's really so fucking useful and cool and i really hope that lemmy will make niche communities shine again
Native push notifications would be awesome for Lemmy! I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Unified Push support would be great.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2631
It's coming in the next release
I think the greatest strength is that it is so compatible with other Threadyverse software like PieFed and Mbin. This brings a lot of freedom to the users.
Old user, haven't been active recently. Where'd all this growth come from?? Another reddit refugee situation?
[email protected] started to ban people based on upvotes
[email protected] movement has motivated people to look around for European alternatives to Reddit
On the server perspective, I have a question, what are your thoughts for horizontal scaling on the database? This seems to be the biggest limitation and requiring higher spec hardware to scale especially for the bigger instances.
My tiny instance for example I give over 20GB of RAM just to postgres to make it perform efficient enough.
Hello,
Thank you for organizing this AMA!
Starting with a quite expected question: when do you think you'll be able to release Lemmy 1.0?
We are seeing an influx of new users, but what's happening to older users? Are they still active? What's the average lifetime of Lemmy users nowadays? I'm kinda curious about the user retention in general
The best data we have on that is probably https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Not sure how to get the user retention from that, though