this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024

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Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT (lemmy.ml)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] silas 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

As developers, what can we do (or not do) to best support Lemmy’s vision and goals right now?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

In your opinion, what are the top strengths and weaknesses of Lemmy at this point in time?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

Looking forward to it. Hopefully people will stay respectful.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I post a fair amount of video edits. I've had quite a few people say that video playback is far from ideal for not just Lemmy, but the Fediverse as a whole. Is this mostly a 3rd party app thing, or a backend issue? I haven't had much issue myself, but enough people have mentioned it that there is likely an issue somewhere down the line.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

Will private messages ever be displayed in a threaded or grouped manner?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the current web interface is just a reverse chronological list of all sent and received messages. This can be confusing to follow if one is messaging multiple users over an extended period of time. I think the ability to group messages by user would be useful.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

First of thanks a lot for the effort that you put into creating lemmy. You have created a really friendly and welcoming place!

I have a question regarding licenses. When you started developing lemmy, what were the reasons for your choice of the AGPL? As you are marxist-leninists, did you also look into other licenses like the the Anti-Capitalist Software License?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

To me, AGPL is the most pragmatic choice. As a hard copy-left license, it enforces derivative works to adopt the same license, unlike the more open and "soft" copy-left licenses that let corporations capture and digitally enclose your labor as they see fit.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (11 children)

Will the source code ever move off of proprietary Microsoft GitHub where users need to have an account to contribute & search code—or certain users are blocked due to US sanctions? If the idea is wanting to stand up against centralized US-corpo-controlled social media for forums, why use that US-megacorpate-controlled code forge / social media platform?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I agree that it's not ideal to be hosted on a platform controlled by Microsoft, but it's just a fact that you lose 90+% of contributors if you are anywhere else (there's an article where someone compared, can't find it right now). It's not great that that's how it is, but you need to choose your battles.

I'm not really very concerned, since git itself is decentralized, and if Github starts causing visible problems moving somewhere else is not a huge problem. Also VPNs exist.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (10 children)

How do you feel about extreme right-wing instances like the late Wolfballs using Lemmy to promote and spread hate?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I very much dislike it obviously, and I'm happy that one shut down. There have been others, but for the most part they've stayed away from Lemmy as "that software made by tankies."

Outside of making sure that we don't platform them anywhere, there isn't much we can do. Lemmy is open-source software after all, and a tool can be used for good or ill. As @[email protected] mentioned, coordinating on adding them to our blocklists and isolating them is the best option.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

They were posting spicy memes but thats how the internet works. If you dont like it then dont visit there, just like you wouldnt visit 4chan. Lemmy is open source so anyone can use it for any purpose.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (3 children)

A long time ago, @[email protected] made Jerboa as an Android Native client for Lemmy as an alternative to Boost for Reddit. How happy are you that the OG Boost developer came and made a Lemmy client?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Seeing my PR here made me feel good. 3 months and ~60 commits for only one lil field was too much 😅

It's very nice and reassuring that all the commits are audited subtly though.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

Any words for Zuck and Threads?

Edit: on a more serious note, has Meta reached out to the Lemmy developers at all?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (10 children)

What is currently in the works to help admins locate spammers and problematic users on their instance?

Right now I believe it relies heavily on users reporting and admins looking through a users history however I think that is really inefficient.

Are there any better visualization tools that could be made to aid admins?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Have you put measures into place to assure the quality of future updates? In the past several updates have caused issues. And recently 0.19.x broke federation for the most of us. And it took weeks to fix it and make Lemmy usable again.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (3 children)

We publish multiple release candidates and run them on lemmy.ml before the final release. That allows the community to test changes. We dont have a quality assurance team, and developers are notoriously bad at testing their own code, so I dont see what we can improve in this regard.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Is there any new p2p/decentral technology that is trying to advance beyond federation?

It would be cool to have a generic framework to make web resources that are inherently decentralized without the need for sponsor and hosting.

Like IPFS but as a social site. Everyone helps partially host content in exchange for access to all the content.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There is a ton of decentralized projects that no one has really ever heard of, new ones pop up all the time (I was watching multiple of them in the past). Sadly in most cases it seems like most authors stop working on their projects after a while.

The same ideas have existed for a long time but both decade old projects (ever heard of Freenet? Probably no) and new ones . Many of them are very ambitious and try to replace huge swaths of things (not just file storage but also social aspects, web of trust, etc) but then collapse under the complexity. IPFS is the most well known new project and (good imo) has limited its scope, but sadly (still) suffers from huge scalability issues, some of which are deep in the design.

I think it's really hard to align incentives there - the nicer it is the harder it is to make money with it. So either these projects tend towards control by one entity or they tend towards death.

Really the only one that seems to have a long lasting life so far is torrents. Which are amazing. And Email if you want to count that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Torrents are truly one of the best inventions of the internet.

They've fully solved the static data distribution problem, in a way that's resilient and practical. I do a few torrent-related side projects, and I'm also super-interested in how we could integrate them into lemmy UIs and apps in order to take on YouTube.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hi again,

1 - Now that there are multiple apps for lemmy, wouldn't be better to handover jerboa to someone else and focus more on core lemmy?

2 - How was the inception moment for lemmy? When and how did you decided to leave reddit and create something new and how was the first couple months?

Thanks and come to Brazil ;)

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Since I read a few comments here... What is your oppinion on more democratic platforms? I mean something like electing moderators. (Or dropping them in a democratic process.) Or voting for other things in a community.

(This is more a hypothetical question. I guess with the architecture as is, it can easily be exploited. And there is no way to implement this properly without severe changes and consequences.)