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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by dessalines@lemmy.ml to c/announcements@lemmy.ml

This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they'd like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky@lemmy.world 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 @phiresky@lemmy.world 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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[-] GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml 82 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Is there a public roadmap of some sort?

Maybe a blog post like "a year in review and what's up for this year"

I'm not talking about bugs or minor tweaks. Just a general where are we, where are we coming from and where are we going to? What are important milestones?

[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 35 points 10 months ago

I've just updated the post body with some updates about this, but if we get approved for another year of funding from NLNet, the the two new devs will be working on these milestones in 2024 (still a draft at this point).

Being an open source project, we can afford to be less strict about a roadmap, as anyone (including ourselves) can take on any of the open issues on the issue tracker. Part of the fun of these is getting to pick which things you'd like to work on, and that you personally think are important.

Outside of maintenance-related tasks and merging PRs (which does take a significant chunk of our time) of course @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I both have things we'd like to prioritize this year. My main priorities are:

  • Getting Jerboa as fully functional as lemmy-ui.
  • Notifications (Unified push).
  • Working on lemmy-ui-leptos, our proposed replacement web UI for lemmy-ui written in Rust.
  • Performance improvements (DB, federation code)
  • Stabilizing the API
  • Becoming fully funded by donations, and growing our dev co-op.
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[-] aeharding@lemmy.world 30 points 10 months ago

I think a lemmy roadmap for the next year is hard, because scope and even individual features depend on funding (for example, nlnet funds specific features).

Maybe something like Mastodon's roadmap would be possible though (with no specific timeline)? https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap

[-] Steve@communick.news 22 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I wouldn't put a timeline to it. Just a list of features, broad and specific. As time goes on, they can be marked as "in progress" or "included". New things can be added over time, or made more specific. All without timetables. For now call it a wishlist.

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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 64 points 10 months ago

Has Lemmy.ml been contacted by law enforcement yet to hand over user data? If yes, when was it, and what did you hand over?

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 24 points 10 months ago
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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 54 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

So many apps die before getting any users. For Lemmy however, when was the first time you really thought "Damn, this thing really might actually take off"?

[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 43 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

For me it was long before the reddit migration (which was ~7 months or so ago). I noticed lemmy slowly but surely gaining traction. It felt more dead than it does now, but the trend was slow and steady growth, which is always a great sign. People were using lemmy, liking it, and sticking around.

At the same time, it was clear that we weren't making the mistake of all the other reddit alternatives, by promising to be a free speech haven for bigoted communities. Those people actively did our work for us by warning their communities to stay away from Lemmy and its tankie devs, thereby making Lemmy a much more enjoyable place from the very beginning. That was a crucial test: we were not willing to sacrifice our values for growth's sake.

It's great to see that positivity confirmed by a researcher who did a qualitative and quantitative analysis about Lemmy migration, and finding that >90% of people saw themselves using Lemmy in the long term. We can all be very proud of that, and it means we have a bright future.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 22 points 10 months ago

Lemmy was meant to be a Reddit replacement from the beginning, so it was always supposed to take off. Even in the early days the tech was working quite smoothly and users were happy so there was no real doubt about it. The only thing missing were more users. However I had no idea how a real migration would actually look like, so it was really overwhelming when last year people started to flood in and everything got overloaded and broke down.

[-] ademir@lemmy.eco.br 48 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

What could be done to improve interoperability between federated platforms?
mainly talking about Mastodon since it is the biggest one.

I have seen the Peertube dev is quite nice and approachable. And willing to improve the experience cross-platform.

Have you tried to approach @Gargron@mastodon.social? Is he willing to contribute? How could we get Mastodon to improve the user experience with federated content, eg. communities and article posts?

What about @dansup@lemmy.ml / @dansup@mastodon.social and Pixelfed?

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 27 points 10 months ago

There have been lots of compatibility improvements with Mastodon from our side. However Mastodon seems to have almost no interest to make improvements from their side. I dont think there is much we can do about that, in the end project maintainers always care about their own users most.

With dansup there was some communication years ago, but it seems he lost interest in Lemmy.

[-] Blaze@discuss.online 21 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Mastodon's main dev isn't really open. Have a look at the "Ego" part of this article: https://cassolotl.medium.com/i-left-mastodon-yesterday-4c5796b0f548

Misskey forks, whatever their names are today, seem more interesting

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[-] sunaurus@lemm.ee 48 points 10 months ago

Do you think Lemmy is decentralized enough right now, or are you worried about some of the bigger instances growing too much?

[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 27 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Its definitely a concern. IMO the lemmyverse is far too centralized at the moment. The big questions are:

  1. Is there a trend toward centralization, or away from it?
  2. How are people being introduced / onboarded onto lemmy?
  3. What can we do to combat centralization?

(1) I'm honestly unsure, and I'd def appreciate if anyone has done a study of it. We've seen a big growth in single person / smaller topic-focused instances, which is a great thing, but if their communities aren't growing, we need to figure out how to reverse that trend. I'd have no problem with the current large instances, including this one, as long as the long-term-trend is away from them.

(2) Is mostly word-of-mouth, join-lemmy.org, and apps / web-ui's which show an instance by default.

We've made the sort for the join-lemmy.org instances page be by random active users, and tried to emphasize on that page that it doesn't matter which instance you join, since most federate, and can subscribe / connect to any community. I hope that helps, and we need to replicate that wherever we can.

Apps and webUI's mostly just show lemmy.world rn, where they should show random instances. I'm guilty of this in Jerboa as well (showing lemmy.ml by default), and I've just opened up an issue that it should be showing a random server for anonymous users.

But I think we need to do more, and I'd def appreciate yours and anyone else's ideas on how we can combat centralization. We need to get ahead of this problem before it gets worse.

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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 47 points 10 months ago

Not a question, just wanted to let you know I how much we appreciate and love you all for making Lemmy happen 🥰🥰

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[-] 9point6@lemmy.world 41 points 10 months ago

Firstly, thank you so much for providing the means for me to cut Reddit out of my life, I feel like I'm engaging with content in a much more deliberate way since, and honestly it's been a massive improvement to my mental health in a way that I was completely oblivious to there even being a problem before.

Anyway, the question—regarding things happening entirely out of your control, what would be the best and worst things that could happen to lemmy from your perspectives? And as an extension, what are your goals for it?

[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 27 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Thx! Its pretty wild to me how much these algorithms, and formats, affect our mental well-being. Those giant US tech companies employing Psychology PhDs to figure out how to keep people angry, engaged, and watching ads, is doing so much harm to so many people, not just in the US, but the whole world, and unfortunately very few countries are doing enough to protect their people from these companies (who also act as surveillance arms of the US state) by blocking facebook and the rest.

I've seen two professors I respected turn into angry children on twitter, in a way that would never happen in real life. Reddit, twitter, and Youtube platform reactionary rage-bait to get people trapped in a downward spiral of negativity. These companies do not care how much damage they do; all that matters to them is their profits.

We don't have those same incentive structures, so we can and should be doing everything we can to make this a positive and enjoyable experience, not about arguing constantly, but about learning, laughing, and understanding.

what would be the best and worst things that could happen to lemmy from your perspectives? And as an extension, what are your goals for it?

The best thing would be that we continue our slow and steady growth. Every user that migrates away from big tech to the fediverse is victory, so while we shouldn't emphasize growth at any cost, its still a good thing when we can get people away from all that negativity.

The biggest concern for me about Lemmy, would be a centralization onto one big server, that tries to replicate all the worst things and behaviors about reddit: its combativeness, xenophobia, bigotry, pro-US-foreign policy agendas, and advertising. There is a noticeable chunk of Lemmy's users who don't really see any problem with those things, they just want a reddit that lets them use 3rd party apps again.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 26 points 10 months ago

The best thing would be if Reddit goes the way of Digg. Seems that will happen sooner or later. The worst thing, maybe if funding stops and we are unable to keep working on Lemmy. But even then admins could still host Lemmy instances.

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[-] calavera@lemm.ee 37 points 10 months ago

Were you ever approached by any kind of organization making some weird proposal regarding lemmy?

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 25 points 10 months ago

Some company (dont know which) wanted to make a one-time donation of 500 Euros to get listed as donor on join-lemmy.org. Rejected because thats only for recurring donors. Does this count as weird?

[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

A few, mostly harmless tho, just about working on pet features they'd like to see in Lemmy. None panned out.

I imagine the more parasitic companies avoid us as soon as they see the AGPLv3 license.

[-] pocketman_stuck@lemmy.eco.br 35 points 10 months ago

People, avoid to ask repeated questions and keeping it one question per comment is generally better.

[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 29 points 10 months ago

Yes thank you. Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming when there are 10+ questions in a single comment, and each of them requires a little essay.

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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 33 points 10 months ago

Back when the first Reddit exodus happened, there was a group heavily DDOSing many of the popular Lemmy instances. While it was a great opportunity to optimize Lemmy, did you ever find out who that attacker was?

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[-] sab@kbin.social 32 points 10 months ago

What happened with the domain Lemmy.ml when Mali took back controls over its domains and some sites went offline? Are you confident that the .ml domain will be reliable in the future?

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[-] mrmanager@lemmy.today 32 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

What are the plans around admin tools?

Instance owners currently gets notified when someone has reported a user for spamming or trolling, but frequently it's a user that is not on his instance, so he can't do anything about it. Wouldn't it be better if instance owners got notified only when they can take actual action (like the user being registered on their instance)?

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[-] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 32 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

A lot of people say there are a bunch of tankies on Lemmy which really begs the question: Where do you all keep your tanks and can I drive one?

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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 32 points 10 months ago

First, I want to say thank you for the incredible job you already have done in this area. However, do you have any thoughts on further improving some fundamental Lemmy UX painpoints? Examples such as:

  • Migrating accounts between instances
  • Tagging users across instances
  • Linking communities across instances
  • Finding communities across instances
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[-] treadful@lemmy.zip 29 points 10 months ago

Is there an official roadmap for Lemmy?

What are the current needs of the project, if any? For instance, are you currently looking for skilled or financial contributions?

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[-] Vinegar@kbin.social 27 points 10 months ago

Thank you! Lemmy is a tremendous contribution to the wider Fediverse, and no amount of "thank yous" is ever enough for people like you writing free software and giving freely to the public domain.

I have been on Lemmy, and around the Fediverse on various accounts since ~2021, and a suggestion I have seen promoted countless times is for communities which federate across instances. e.g. posts to Linux@lemmy.ml will show on Linux@lemmy.world as long as lemmy.ml and lemmy.world federate with one another. If I remember correctly, each of you have previously opposed this idea for multiple reasons. If you do still oppose such a feature, will you please reiterate why you think this is the wrong direction for Lemmy? Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit's multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?

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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 26 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

What are some cool "Lemmy Adjacent" projects you know of and want to share? (Things like LemmySchedule or Toast.ooo's Canvas)

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[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

There was a big time gap between 0.18.5 and 0.19. Have you considered adopting a release train model, similar to what Rust does? The Bevy game engine has also adopted the idea.

More frequent but smaller releases would probably cause less friction and make upgrading less of a "big thing" and "big things" are always where things go wrong.

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[-] glibg10b@lemmy.ml 21 points 10 months ago

Please stop using time zone abbreviations. Everyone can read an offset (UTC +02:00 in this case). But almost everyone has to look up the abbreviation

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[-] Pacrat173@lemmy.ml 21 points 10 months ago

Will Lemmy ever have another source of income like official merch or will it rely on donations for the foreseeable future?

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 18 points 10 months ago

Would people really pay for Lemmy merch?

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[-] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Do you have any estimate of how much storage (in GB) all the posts ever posted across Lemmy have taken up, to date? (Excluding media)

[-] 1984@lemmy.today 19 points 10 months ago

Something tells me lemmynsfw has the largest disks. :)

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[-] deadlyremote@lemmy.ml 19 points 10 months ago

How did you feel when everyone was coming from Reddit to Lemmy?

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 26 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Very excited, and then very overwhelmed because everything started breaking left and right.

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[-] hendrik@lemmy.ml 18 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

How's development going? Do you have enough funds to pay your salaries? Did the EU fund run out? What's your workload? Is the amount of full-time developers enough to work on new features? Or is it barely enough to keep up?

How do you like Lemmy and the people on it? (As of now)

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 32 points 10 months ago

We are getting about 4000 Euros per month which is not much to pay for two developers, so more donations would definitely be nice. From NLnet Dessalines and I still have a few milestones leftover from 2022 but those should be finished very soon. We could definitely use more developers, its impossible to keep up with all the issues so we have to try and prioritize the most important ones.

The people on Lemmy are generally very nice, so I cant complain.

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[-] CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml 23 points 10 months ago

I'm personally working a full time job in addition to this. However, I spend a lot of my free time contributing because if the only software I worked on was the corpo shit at my dayjob that ends up being cancelled before it reaches production half the time, I'd go insane.

I've found the people pretty good. I find it's easier to get a sense of community on here than it is on big tech platforms.

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this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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Official announcements from the Lemmy project. Subscribe to this community or add it to your RSS reader in order to be notified about new releases and important updates.

You can also find major news on join-lemmy.org

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