The playground schematic analogy for designing a fediverse service.
The playground schematic analogy for designing a fediverse service.
In recent days, the discussion around Lemmy has become a bit...spicy. There's a few points of impact here. To list some examples: Beehaw being frustrated enough to ponder leaving the software Sublinks being started out of uncertainty with the lemmy roadmap Drama about inability to delete images and ...
Its important to keep in mind that Lemmy is provided for free and as-is. It also hasnt reached version 1.0 yet so obviously there are still many features missing. Yet there are tens of thousands of users and hundreds of admins who are happy with Lemmy in its current state.
To continue with the analogy, if the Lemmy playground is not safe enough for your particular neighborhood, you have a few different choices:
- Wait for someone else to solve the problem (but this may take very long or forever)
- Solve the problem yourself, or pay someone to do it
- Use a different type of playground instead
Beehaw in particular has $5,470 in donation balance. This would cover my income for around 2.5 months. They could easily take this money to hire a developer and implement the features they require. Yet they believe that they are somehow entitled to dictating what I or Dessalines should work on.
Edit: This doesn't mean that I don't care about implementing better mod tools, in fact if you look at the pull requests there have been numerous improvements in this area. But resources are limited and mod tools cannot be the only priority as some people seem to expect.
Edit 2: To be very clear, this comment is only aimed at Beehaw admins and a few other individuals who are extremely entitled and think they can dictate me to work on features they specifically want. The vast majority of users and admins on Lemmy are not like that, so of course my comment is not aimed at them and Im working hard every day to make Lemmy better for the majority. But that means I cant get distracted and waste time on features that only a tiny minority wants.
Use a different type of playground instead
It's obvious that people are indeed doing or thinking of doing just that. Don't get complacent just because things have not changed yet. There is a threshold to cross and once it crossed, things change very very fast. Currently there's no software out that is as mature as lemmy, but if the trust thermocline is breached, people will prefer to switch to something substandard than support a project they don't believe anymore.
Your biggest benefit as FOSS developers is your community goodwill. I can't stress enough how much you need to be careful on what you say and how you communicate to maintain it.
Look at it this way: I've spent almost every single working day for the past four years developing Lemmy. I implemented the entire federation logic and much more. Most days and nights I think about ways to improve Lemmy and it's not easy to shut off. Especially during the Reddit blackout it was extremely stressful as we were completely bombarded with requests, I didn't even have time to keep up with all the issues.
Yet last week some individuals came along who never made any contributions to Lemmy and never showed the slightest gratitude for my work. They essentially what I'm doing is wrong and that they should be in charge of decisionmaking for Lemmy. One Beehaw admin even said that all my work on Lemmy is meaningless.
I know you and many others have good intentions with your criticism. But after all the negativity of last week I simply don't have the mindset to accept any of it.
Yeah i made a comment defending the devs just today now i am rethinking my stand and will have to edit it . But i can see both sides here and i find it much more pleasent when dessalines is involved in the conversation nutomic loves to defend himself from really small criticisms in rude ways i am not throwing shades here but maybe just take a breath nutomic ? Like we all do love lemmy and will stand with you even tho some won't but you are litterally chasing away the loyal ones .
Yet there are tens of thousands of users and hundreds of admins who are happy with Lemmy in its current state.
And I'm one of those. Thank you for your service Nutomic!
Youre welcome :)
You sound like you actually want to end up with another niche alternative that never does get big.
Is your perfect-world idea for Lemmy just a modestly-sized userbase? Is it already bigger than you'd prefer?
Not true, at this point it seems inevitable that Lemmy will get even bigger. And that's a good thing in my opinion. But that doesn't mean it can encompass all different use cases. It's normal that there will be forks and alternatives, just look at all the different microblogging projects on the Fediverse.
Yet they believe that they are somehow entitled to dictating what I or Dessalines should work on.
I think this is the most frustrating thing: some people do not value free work. Some people cannot empathize, cannot understand what it is to build something for free and get shit on because it doesn't fit somebody else's desires. Block em and move on.
Just keep the negativity out of your life and keep up the good work for lemmy. I've reached by quota for opensource donations, but I'm one of those thousands of people who appreciate the work you put in. We are probably the silent majority.
Really sad to see you go this way my man i had high hopes but oh well it is your work and you have the right to destroy it.
I think something is being lost in communication here. Nothing is being destroyed.
I keep seeing this disconnect, I think it needs to be emphasized: Lemmy maintainers have been focusing (and continue to focus on) safety and moderation improvements. Anybody can verify this by looking through PRs/commits/RFCs on GitHub.
I think I understand where the disconnect is coming from - there have been a few responses in some of these threads by Lemmy devs where they tell people to be less rude and demanding, and to contribute if they desperately want some feature. Perhaps as an observer, this sounds like "we do not care about mod tools" or whatever, but reality is just different.
Perhaps it would be useful to do a more in-depth post about all the stuff Lemmy devs have worked on and are currently working on? I mean things like:
- When purging a federated user, federate local community removals. (#4505)
- Mods and admins can comment in locked posts (fixes #4116) (#4488)
- When site banning a federated user, also remove their content from our local communities. (#4464)
- Store password reset token after email successfully sent (fixes #3757) (#4489)
- Require verified email to reset password (#4482)
- Correctly synchronize collection of community featured posts (fixes #3867) (#4475)
- Ignore expired bans in CommentReportView::read, just like in CommentReportQuery::list (#4457)
- Auto resolve reports on removing a comment or post. Fixes #4390 (#4402)
- ... the list goes on and on and on, these are just a very small and incomplete list of examples of already merged PRs which took me 30 seconds to quickly find on GitHub
I feel like there is this meme developing in Lemmy that maintainers are putting out a message of not caring about mod tools, which anybody with context will know is completely false, but I think most Lemmy users (and even many admins!) just don't have this context.
Have you ever considered tying a feature request to a dollar amount? If people want x, prioritizing it would cost x?
Lemmy's maintainers seem overworked. As is the case with so much of software dev, (open source or otherwise!) non-programmers are unaware of or underestimate maintenance burden. From the outside, it looks like it's just about "adding a feature". But in reality, it's less about "adding" and more about "growing". Feature requests generally need to be evaluated with this in mind; whether future development is sustainable with some new feature(s).
I see opportunities here for some software dealing with either ActivityPub directly or with Lemmy's HTTP API.
Anyone used lemmy-modder? Thoughts?
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I had my phone read me the article since I was busy doing some manual task. I wholeheartedly agree. The development of a plugin (or modding for the gaming crowd) system would be massively beneficial for speeding up the development process.
The current issue I have for example: I‘d like lemmy to have some features and I actually can fork it and do a PR if necessary but I dont know how to dockerize the whole thing again and this makes it insanely complicated. A plugin system would mean I can develop something without working on the original thing.
It is what makes kodi gread, what makes long time favorite games great (minecraft, fallout for example) and those are proprietary, for profit games. Imagine the impact of this in the FOSS community. A LOT more people here know how to code and tinker which makes mods and plugins so much more likely to happen.
Anyway, thank you again for providing the instance and your inconsiderable knowledge and ability to write concisely like this. If you ever write a book, I will definitely buy it. Have a good one!