this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Announcements

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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

founded 5 years ago
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This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (3 children)

First, just want to say thanks for building and maintaining Lemmy. It's an incredible project, and it provides an incredibly valuable public forum that's completely open. This is the way internet was always meant to work before it got hijacked by corporations.

The questions I'd like to ask would be whether the platform is developing in the way you originally envisioned, what surprised you in terms of how the platform ended up being used in the wild, and what were the biggest technical and non technical problems that came from the rapid growth after the Reddit migration. And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be honest I never had any long-term vision, and still dont have. I just thought that decentralized software in general and Activitypub in particular is very exciting and lets us take power away from corporations like Reddit, Google, Facebook etc.

Biggest technical problem was implementing Activitypub, when I started there was no implementation in Rust yet, and it was very hard to find detailed information how everything is supposed to work. Over the years I had to rewrite the federation code at least 4-5 times, each time making it a bit cleaner.

Biggest nontechnical challenge is dealing with all the people who are suddenly joining and want to contribute, so that it doesnt turn into total chaos. Luckily there are many helpful community members who helped to organize things. Another challenge is with funding, now we dont have as much time to work on the paid NLnet milestones. And its not clear if NLnet will grant us another funding round once this is over. Hopefully the user donations will grow over time so that they can cover our full salaries.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Since you're very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?

Thanks for your work, it's projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm gonna ask some tough questions, but I am hopeful to get a response. Thank you for all that you do.

  1. Do you envision NSFW content having a place in the federation safely? And if so, would lemmy.ml ever refederate with NSFW instances? What would it take for that to happen?
  2. How do you feel about lemmy.world being the proto "default" lemmy instance right now, especially on Sync app. Some have expressed concern about it causing centralization on the platform, others are hoping that people will spread out.
  3. Do you anticipate making a distinction between NSFW and pornographic content at all? And taking that a step further potentially, is implementing activitypubs content warnings on the road map?
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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Comrade Dessalines, you rock. Your audiobooks and essays are great. No questions.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Thanks for both of your work on Lemmy, join-lemmy, lemmy-ui and Jerboa.

  1. Can you tell us about any upcoming major features/issue resolutions in development currently, if there are any?
  2. Will Lemmy have any form of cross-instance community/post grouping, similar to multi-reddits, hashtags, "alliances" or categories? Although some Lemmy apps have implemented something along those lines, it could be more fully-implemented in the official backend/frontend. I've been thinking Lemmy has desparately needed it to help solve some of the fragmentation problems across instances. It would also help avoid one instance necessarily having all the content, ballooning in both running costs and control.
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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Do you think 'normies' (people with very very little technical knowledge/experience) will be able to come to a decentralized platform like lemmy? Can a platform be successful long term (especially in niche areas) without that super huge low effort part of the user base?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago

I think an already established player like Sync or Boost should provide an experience that hand holds newcomers, by leaving little to guess work.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
  1. Are you proud/happy/satisfied how Lemmy progresses and its current status?
  2. Does it make sense to spend your time to develop client apps when there are so many other already (including open source)
  3. What are your ambitions/goals/hopes for Lemmy in one year from now?
  4. What do you see as the biggest issue for Lemmy (as a platform) which must be addressed?

Ps: thank you for your work!

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago
  1. For sure! I'm just glad we can provide an alternative that some people enjoy and get some use out of, and to not feel like they're just adding to a company's market cap. Development has certainly picked up with this massive migration, and people have helped us find and fix so many security and performance issues that just two people would never have found before.
  2. The current official UIs (lemmy-ui and somewhat jerboa), have had a ton of developer contributions, and more people added as direct contributors besides me, and they've made those apps better than I ever could. So while I never want to be completely hands-off from those, its wonderful to have the help.
  3. A few I can think of: I hope that performance issues stabilize, that we can create a better onboarding site / improve join-lemmy.org , do lots of code maintenance, become financially stable and grow our little developer co-op into more than just us two, learn how to scale handling issues better, that we can add notifications / unified push, better sorting, and move the web-ui over to a more stable app in rust / leptos : lemmy-ui-leptos
  4. Currently, performance and security, so that we can focus on the above.

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is there a reason we don't have users ability to block entire instances, or is it difficult to code? (I don't mean to sound ungrateful)

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The only thing I think is missing is that we can't group subscriptions to communities. Do you have plans for that in the future? Really happy here regardless.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

First off, thank you for this awesome platform and for being my first real experience with contributing to FOSS, I learned quite a bit and I had a lot of of fun! I really hope Rust ends up becoming the new standard in web backends instead of Java with Spring/Springboot.

The only question I have that hasn't already been asked is about the legal side of things:

What are you responsible for as the developers of Lemmy, and what are you responsible for as the owners of a Lemmy instance?

Do you have to take certain measures to keep the platform clean from illegal activities and CP/gore? If so, what has been done?

The same question applies to GDPR rules for Europe.

Thanks for doing this :D

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe I'm completely misremembering things, but at some point wasn't there a hotfix to Lemmy that hard-limited how many comments a thread could have? Does anyone know if there's a maximum and if so how many?

Just wondering, cause uh, I could see this one having a lot of comments.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (8 children)
  1. What is the best Linux distribution?
  2. Favorite instance outside of lemmy.ml?
  3. Best and worst Lemmy client?
[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago
  1. Manjaro for me.
  2. Impossible to choose, there are too many.
  3. I didnt have the time or motivation to try different clients yet. The web ui works just fine for me.
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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Opinions on hexbear finally federating?

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Which are your 3 favorites lemmy instances besides Lemmy.ml?

also thanks for the work you do meow-fiesta

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)
  1. Can we get the show context bug fixed? Pretty please? :3 Possibly the most frustrating bug we've ever had.

  2. Also, on crossposted threads can we get the first thread marked as "original post" so it's clear what the originating community is for people that might want to subscribe to it for similar content. The indication of the originating community is a considerable source of subscriptions over on reddit and one of the primary methods that crossposting functions as a growth tool for new communities.

  3. When you started this project did you think it would get where it is now? Was it a sort of daydream thing or a serious belief that it would get this far?

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  1. Its fixed in a back-end PR, we'll try to get a bugfix release sometime soon.
  2. Hrm... haven't thought about that. Could you open up an issue in lemmy-ui . I think the cross_posts field is sorted by published, but I'm not totally positive. In that case it'd just be marking it in the UI in some way.
  3. I def didn't anticipate it would get this far this fast... we've become the 2nd most popular fediverse software recently. I'm super-excited about the impact we can have on global media, and getting ppl to break their dependency/addiction to US-tech dominated spaces.
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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Any plans to make it easier to interact with links to other instances?

The QoL value to automatically open links to other instances inside my current instance would be enormous.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What was your first reaction to the massive exodus from Reddit during the blackout? Was it something you were expecting?

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (8 children)

How do you plan on improving the onboarding/sign-up process for newcomers, especially when they have little to no understanding about the Fediverse?

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