Announcements

Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don't know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn't do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.

We have a Legal section under admin settings, that's an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We'd need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.

Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:

• https://startrek.website/c/news
• https://starwars.website/c/news

This also isn't unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.

Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.

There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.

Overall tho, I'm against the concept of "combining / merging communities" that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.

Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there's anything else needs to be added, we're open to PRs.

Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn't be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I'd rather focus on improving lemmy's search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.

I second this. I know SEO is a controversial term with Lemmy's core audience, but being able to find posts through a search engine is pretty darn helpful. It'll also help more people find their way to Lemmy, which will diversify the range of communities.

If you're not sure where to start, Google's free Search Console can give you insight into how your site ranks, how people are finding you and which factors are preventing instances from appearing in search.

Wow lots of questions here.

• Im doing well, its exciting to know that so many people like the software Ive worked on for the last years. The first month after the migration was really stressful, but by now its calmed down a lot. Plus there are many contributors now which are helping a lot.
• Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
• I think the "breaking bugs" were really minor considering how we had to constantly rush out performance and security fixes. This should get better as we dont need to make emergency fixes, and have more time to let the community test release candidates before making the full release.
• Supporting downgrades means that someone has to test them and report/fix problems. We dont have time for that, but feel free to do it.
• Like I said, our recent releases had urgent performance/security fixes so we didnt have enough time for testing. We also didnt find out about these problems until later. Part of the problem is that keeping up with issues is almost a full-time job on its own, so I rarely read them anymore. If you see something important reported, do let me know.
• No concrete plans, but I definitely think that admins are the main actors who should have a voice in development. Its impossible for us to listen to all the individual users, because there are too many and they often dont have the necessary technical knowledge. If you have some ideas how to facilitate communication between devs and admins, let me know.

Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.

I'm personally a hard copyleft developer, so I'd prefer that people making apps and tools for the lemmy eco-system, open source them, to benefit the community as a whole. Nearly all lemmy projects have adopted that standard, and are using the GPL and other hard copy-left licenses, and sharing their code freely with the community.

One example: various devs of lemmy apps have asked me how we build comment trees. Because lemmy's source code is open, I was able to share the exact code from lemmy-ui (typescript) and jerboa (kotlin). This is not something closed source developers are able / willing to share.

So I continue to recommend that developers heed calls to open source their applications. I developed my ThumbKey android keyboard, specifically because my requests to the MessageEase developers to open-source their codebase, after development had stopped, went unheeded for years.

Side note, but I've seen a lot of the discourse around Sync confuse FOSS, with making money. Of course developers deserve to get paid for their labor time! The thing is, FOSS makes no demands on how you monetize your software: "free as in freedom, not free as in beer", is the saying. So its entirely possible to open source your app, and still charge for it if you like. And If someone wants your app for free (say via an unlocked APK), they'll get it, whether its closed source, or not.

And yes, if an instance decided to insert ads, or becomes full of blog/cryptospam, I'd def recommend other instances defederate from them. I'd rather not lemmy become the ad-machine that other social media has become.

I definitely didnt expect it, nor did I expect that there would suddenly be more than a dozen different apps. But its not a problem, the more choices users have the better. Those who like such clients can use them, thout it affecting anyone else. Plus monetization of apps could potentially help to fund development of Lemmy itself.

For instances with ads its pretty much the same, more choice for users. But I really doubt that model can have any success considering how many free instances are around which are run by volunteers. Defederation should be unnecessary assuming that ads are only shown to local users.

Haha youre a very curious one :D

1. See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2348893
2. It sure isnt perfect, partly because Mastodon makes no efforts to be compatible and expects everyone else to cater to their way of doing things. Regardless, the fact that you can interact between different platforms is a huge improvement over current social media platforms. And Im certain that interoperability will only get better over time.
3. Its already happening, look at Kbin combining the concepts of Reddit and Twitter into one. Or mitra which adds cryptocurrency integrations. There are probably others which Im unaware of.
4. Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements.
5. Its really genius because it combines the best aspect of centralized (simple login with username/password and an admin who manages technical stuff) with those of p2p (no central point of failure). Real p2p is great in theory, but it requires way too much technical knowledge for the average user, so its unlikely to ever gain mass appeal.
6. Personally I think the Fediverse is really the future of social media, so it will grow whether we want it or not. And its much healthier than the corporate platforms with their tracking, advertising and manipulating algorithms, so the more people leave them behind, the better. I dont see a way to influence this growth, we just need to adapt and deal with it.
7. Basically my previous reply, I dont know enough about journalism to give a more specific answer.
8. The biggest and proudest was definitely when tens of thousands of Reddit users suddenly came here, and most of them actually liked it. Cant say there was anything bad or embarrassing, the experience for me is really positive.
9. It feels great, I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.

Its been bothering me too, that the large communities have been swamping out smaller ones.

As one solution, the closed PR linked in this issue has some more context, but we plan to add a Best sort, that retains the qualities of hot, but gives a boost for small communities over larger ones. This shouldn't be too difficult to add, as its very similar to hot.

Another benefit of lemmy being FOSS, is that we have the option to add many more sorts as time goes on.

Any concerns about duplicate communities across multiple instances?

See here.

If lemmy is working as intended (many small, connected servers), hosting costs should be small: like < $10 USD / month. (images are another issue, but I'll answer that in other comments).

Of course we don't plan on adding any monetization directly into lemmy or its UI, including ads, or required payments. Right now at least the best way is to put donation links in your site sidebar.

Account migration is not in the works, and I consider it very low priority. Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy isnt focused on individual users, so it doesnt matter much if you start posting from another instance one day. If its important for you, you can always put a link in your profile to your other accounts. I would rather implement a way to export/import account data. Thats much simpler and can also be used as a backup in case your instance goes down.

Limitations no, if anything the protocol is too extensive and lets you do too many things (or do the same thing in different ways). But thats somewhat expected for a protocol which can handle all types of social media platforms. I think the protocol is fine as is, but it needs minor changes here and there to keep up with how it is being used in the real world. The FEP process is doing a good job of that.

From what I know the AT protocol used by Bluesky is entirely centralized, so it doesnt look like a competitor yet. They claim that it will be decentralized in the future, but I will believe it when I see it. For now the decentralization seems more like a marketing gimmick.

I mostly imagined the slow but steady growth we'd been having, and def didn't anticipate that reddit would mess up so badly that a massive chunk of users would migrate from a multi-million dollar enterprise software, to a hobby project developed by a couple of marxist-leninists 🤣 . But so it goes, with all these late-capitalist social media companies alienating their users, monetizing them in any way possible in search of declining surplus.

The biggest non-tech problem, is just the overwhelming amount of notifications. Companies have multiple layers between devs and users, to separate, order, and create a more controlled explosion. That doesn't exist here, so we get hundreds of notifications every day, with everyone treating us as their personal issue tracker.... and I basically would get nothing done if all I did was respond to them. Luckily things are calming down a bit now.

The biggest tech-problem was the performance and security issues of so many users joining the network all at once, and luckily we had so many wonderful community contributions to help stabilize that.

And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.

We should be ambitious, and wantthe fediverse as a whole, on the long term, to replace big-tech. Every user we draw away from them, is one less person exploited for their data and treated as a commodity.

Technically, I'd just like us to continue making the software better, maintaining the code, and adding features.

o7 comrade. I'm glad I can help out in any way.

I dont follow /c/worldnews so I dont see much of that. Also hexbear is federating now, so it might easily swing back the other way again.

Thanks!

1. There isn't a good way to do it: your All tab will be full of potentially illegal content if you federate with NSFW instances. We want to focus on dev, and not on legal issues, so for that reason we won't federate with NSFW ones.
2. I'm guilty of this also w/ jerboa, showing lemmy.ml content before you log in. We obvi don't want single points of failure, and want lemmy to be as distributed / spread out as possible. If some of the bigger instances go down, I'm sure people will write premature articles about "the death of lemmy". We're still in the early stages, and I think we'll have to see how things evolve, and what promotes decentralization the best. We've tried to rotate the signup sites at the top of join-lemmy.org , but there are likely other things we could do.
3. Creating multiple types of NSFW would be possible, its just not something we've implemented yet, and there are also issues with how that would be handled with activitypub, which only has one type of sensitive field.