this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023

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[Opinion] Voyager developers should first spend time on Lemmy development to fix fundamental issues (feddit.nl)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Lemmy is a decentralized platform that uses ActivityPub to offer an alternative to Reddit, but I’ve come to the conclusion it’s lacking serious development.

As I’m not a software developer myself, I cannot contribute to it’s development and therefore my critique is obviously unfair to sone extent: who am I to point out what’s wrong with Lemmy?

That said, I’ve decided to return to Reddit for now. The reason are at least three issues that I think should be fixed ASAP, but aren’t.

(1) No way to migrate communities or user accounts.

This is crucial IMO, as an instance administrator can suddenly decide to quit an instance, remove communities or stop updating the server. Most if not all administrators are volunteers working with donations, so there’s really nothing one can demand of course. But without a possibiliy to backup and migrate accounts and communities, there’s nothing you can do if a server has frequent issues.

Again, I don’t blame administrators. And yes, I know it’s possible to setup your own instance, but the fact is that most people don’t setup their own instance.

Mastodon does offer migration from one instance to another and I think Lemmy should offer it ASAP.

GitHub issue #3057

(2) No way to block or delete direct messages (DMs)

Every Lemmy user can start sending you DMs and there’s nothing you can do about it. As long as you don’t mind DMs, that’s fine of course. But I don’t want to receive them. Moreover, apparently people are receiving offensive DMs or spam, but it’s impossible to delete it without an administrator getting involved.

Allowing an account to DM you is one thing, but people sending you DMs without asking for them is really annoying. Not being able to delete them is taking it up even one more step.

Github issue #3640 and #3629

(3) Deleting user accounts

You can’t. Yup, that’s right. It’s apparently impossible to delete a user account.

Now this is plain stupid. I’ve decided to quit Lemmy for now, but had to resort to deleting every post and comment by hand first only to discover today it’s impossible to delete your user account. To be clear: I haven’t tried it yet, so this might be instance related. That said, one would say this isn’t rocket science, but it’s awaiting a fix for over a month now. But again, I’m not a developer so this might be a very difficult bug to fix.

Overall, IMO Lemmy isn’t a very well thought through platform. Development is slow and issues like migration tools still aren’t available.

My suggestion to the Voyager developers would be to invest time in the development of Lemmy first before putting in more time developing Voyager. It’s a really nice PWA and I hope the native app works out, but bottom line Lemmy currently isn’t up to it’s task yet IMO. There are too many issues laying around for too long.

Again, that’s easy for me to say as I don’t have the skills to contribute to the development in a sensible way. But for now, I’m returning to Reddit in full awaiting further Lemmy development.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Lol the skills to make Voyager do not necessarily equal the skills to work on Lemmy fundamentals, and it’s also not their responsibility to fix Lemmy to begin with.

Lemmy ought to also be improving on its own given that ActivityPub is FOSS and interested people like OP should actually do something about contributing to.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

As a developer myself, I love people who combine

it’s lacking serious development.

with

As I’m not a software developer myself

there’s nothing you can do if a server has frequent issues.

True. And migrating might be useful. But going back to Reddit where you can't do anything at all seems kind of contradictory.

(3) Deleting user accounts

You can’t. Yup, that’s right. It’s apparently impossible to delete a user account.

Wrong.

//Edit formatting

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What I wrote was:

and therefore my critique is obviously unfair to sone extent: who am I to point out what’s wrong with Lemmy?

But you didn’t cite that. Is there a reason to leave that out of your citation?

You’re completely missing the point. Going back to Reddit isn’t contradictory, because the number of users far exceed the downsides.

Good to know it’s possible to delete an account. Did you actually try it or are you only looking at the user interface? Because I know there’s a button. That’s not the issue.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But you didn’t cite that. Is there a reason to leave that out of your citation?

Obviously there is a reason, but not the one you are implying. I did not cite it because it does not matter. I can also not go with "I am not an architect, but I think you misplanned, there should have definitely been a structural change to support this and that".

Did you actually try it

Obviously I did actually try it. It works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If the deleting the account works for you but not for the other guy, then there’s an important question to be asked. Why does it work for you but not for him?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

OP says they have not tried it 🤷

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have re read their comments and I don’t see where they said they haven’t tried. I see the spot where they said the button exists but that’s not the point (which implies they see the button and have tried it but it doesn’t work for them).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

They say this in their initial post, but do not state why they believe this is the case 🙃

To be clear: I haven’t tried it yet, so this might be instance related.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It’s a known issue:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1637

The point I’m trying to make clearly isn’t understood.

What I read are lots of Lemmy fans that don’t think through the lack of migration tools or blocking DMs are serious shortcomings and it obviously makes no sense to continue developing a front end if these aren’t fixed first.

But apparently many people think that’s very logical.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's good feedback, but I'd like the voyager developers to stay focused on their software.

You can donate to Lemmy development directly: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did you review the Patreon page? I’m not interested in having my name displayed. I’m interested in having the developers take a certain direction.

Donating for hardware (like donating to Lemmy instance administrators) is also completely different.

But donating to some group of developers without being able to influence the direction of development really feels like a money pit to me. I’d rather spend my money on charities. Access to dev chatroom is the closest you can get.

My point with regard to Voyager is: there’s no point in building a beautiful house (because Voyager is very good), if you know the foundation of the house is missing.

And specifically the lack of migration tools is a very fundamental issue IMO. Yes, it might be developed in the future. But it might also take years, who knows.

Mastodon still doesn’t allow quote posts (some clients do though) because quote-tweets (or should I say quote-Xs?) can be used in a toxic way. Development promised to implement them in the back-end months ago, but it still isn’t possible. Searching is also absent on purpose. Those are fundamental issue that block further growth of Mastodon IMO. But that’s obviously just my opinion.

That’s why I think Voyager devs should spend time on Lemmy development IMO. Without a fundamental tool to migrate accounts and communities, there’s really no point in spending time on Voyager features.

I think most Lemmy users haven’t experienced an instance administrator suddenly quitting. Think through what would happen to your community if that happens. It’s gone. That’s what happens. Unless you decide to host your own instance of course, but try and get users attracted to it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you don't want your name associated with the project you can donate anonymously with crypto. You don't have to give up your identity to do that. If you want to affect specific change in a project you can set an open source bounty.

I.e. https://app.bountysource.com/teams/lemmy/issues?tracker_ids=126011972

I personally donated to the Lemmy general fund because they got us here and I'm sure they're keenly aware of the points of friction and they're working on them. So I'm willing to have faith in them. That's why we're here because the communities on the whole good trying to improve itself.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That’s not the point.

The donation page ‘rewards’ those with a mention, but doesn’t allow development in a certain direction.

You give money, but those who receive it get to decide what they do with it. Look at the GitHub page and check for yourself what is being done with that money.

Again, it’s their choice, but I think they should focus on much more fundamental issues. If the foundation of your house is missing, what’s the point of adding fancy woodwork to the outside? Or donating to a project where people decide they want to spend it on fancy woodwork while leaving the foundation problematic.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's the core of open source. People find an itch to scratch. And they tend to scratch their own itches. The open source bounties are a way to encourage people to go outside of their toy problems. Though in many respects the way to get something implemented well is to implement it poorly and then through annoyance and sheer willpower someone will fix it properly. In a few years. Maybe

This is really good news is because Lemmy has had explosive growth recently that's a lot of people with a lot of itches. Which is going to drive a lot of attention and hopefully a lot of development. And we're seeing that with the surge in Voyager development.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I agree with you that there should be a way to donate or pay someone to develop or implement a certain feature. Or even have a link on the donation page that says “this money is being donated for X feature “ . That way if a developer wants that cash they have to go after that issue/problem.

Also all three problems that you listed in your original post are serious flaws in my opinion. But for me personally I still won’t go back to Reddit, but I can see why you might feel the need to head out and wait for the issues to get resolved.

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

I don‘t think that these issues are for Voyager‘s developer to solve, but you‘re totally right. Lemmy still feels broken to me, important features like migrating aren‘t added yet.

It‘s not user friendly (okay, with Voyager it is). I‘m still confused by this defederating thing - an angry admin from another instance can lock users out of dozens of communities there. The sorting algorythms are weird.

The only reason I‘m still here is this app. And people are much nicer here.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

And people are much nicer here.

That's the biggest thing for me. I'm happy to be with a few hundreds nice people compared to millions of angry strangers. I actually noticed than here, when "bad" behaviour is called out (e.g. someone phrasing a request in a very demanding way, while everyone here is a volunteer), people usually react very well, apologize, and go on with their day. That's science fiction for current Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you are not a benevolent dictator or core contributor of the project, I think you cannot directly dictate what should be done. But you can always vote which should be prioritized first.

Things you can do are

hire developers to work on the issue you mentioned
bounty the issue or donate (some FOSS asks for donation for specific feature e.g. Wayland support for Barrier)
create a campaign to raise money to solve the issues

For me, none of the issues are deal breaker for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you cannot directly dictate what should be done

Of course, but that’s not the point of this post.

none of these issues are deal breaker

Imagine setting up a community, having thousands of subscribers and the administrator of the instance your community is hosted on pulls the plug.

And yes, I know people can host their own instance (see OP). But that won’t happen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I understand your frustrations on lack of features you need.

The first one you quoted is not to point out your inability to dictate the direction. It is for the suggested actions I want to make.

I work in software industry. To my understanding your analogy to foundation and house is spot on but there is some major flaw. After building the house the foundation cannot be redone. In software, in this case API and clients, they can be changed anytime.

Technically, Lemmy server is backend + frontend and done in Rust programming language. Voyage is frontend and done in Typescript and ionic. To come back to your analogy, your suggestion is like asking interior designer to do structural engineering. (aeharding could be proficient in both frontend and backend but I don't know)

If you have the extra resources to donate to charity, you could do one of my suggestions instead. It will make more work done for both Lemmy and voyager app. This is just my opinion.

As far as I know Lemmy has been created some years ago and most of us knew it now because of reddit API changes. Lemmy is not feature complete as existing commercial one. The voyager app also is not feature complete. A lot of people are working happily and free for both Lemmy server and clients. So your opinion and suggestions to emphasize on Lemmy server dev is not very popular (at least I could say that seeing your downvotes).

P.S. you drop a lot when you quote me.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That said, I’ve decided to return to Reddit for now.

Tha'ts okay, to each their own. I’m happy to be with a few hundreds nice people compared to millions of angry strangers. I hope you can come here again once the platform is a bit more polished.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

I hope you can come here again once the platform is a bit more polished.

Thanks and I hope so too. I’ve given it a try for four weeks.

That said: people respond with ad hominems on Lemmy as well. In fact, one of the comments to my OP is only ad hominem.

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