The AMA is upcoming on Friday, it’s not this thread

Edit: Leaving this here cause why not

If you’ve been following our code commits / PRs, we’ve been adding a lot of mod tools improvements not just lately, but over lemmy’s entire life. I would even go so far as to say we have the strongest mod tools of any project in the fediverse, all the more necessary for us because of the community-focus.

The upcoming roadmap for 2024 includes some mod additions, such as mod warnings, attaching report counts to items, viewing mod actions for items, etc.

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)?

Instance admins are responsible for what content their users see, so if a troll is visible to their users and ruining their day, then it should be taken care of everywhere necessary.

I have seen this first hand. I think when someone hits report it needs to go to the moderator of the community. From there the mod should be able to forward it to where it needs to go.

Instance admins should be able to intersect this process.

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.

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.

No, I guess they only care about Mastodon. I will just wait and see how that goes.

We also blocked threats here already, and encourage other servers to do the same. FB is a rabid wolf that would love to be let inside the fediverse.

I think Lemmy is a tiny blip size wise.

So far it doesn’t seem like any company actually wants to compete in this space (longer-form somewhat text-focused communities). Even reddit is trying to become more twitter and less reddit.

One that I can think of rn, is @[email protected] 's lemmy-bot, as well as ridoukousage’s TLDR bot.

With the web being so ad-infested and completely owned by google, people have noted how the TLDR bot means they often don’t have to leave their lemmy app at all, and can stay behind its privacy shield.

While of course I do think we can code a lot of functionality directly in to lemmy in a way that we couldn’t with reddit, there’s undeniably a lot of potential with bots that can do different things for us.

Any breaking changes which get implemented in the meantime. There are no specific plans.

For migration we recently added a feature to export your user data. But “real” migrating accounts is something I put on our “todo” list, though it probably also first needs a proposal to define how it should work exactly (should it still work when the original instance is down?) As soon as we start giving users more control over their private key issues start appearing like not having any infrastructure for key rotation / revocation. Without that it will only work when the original instance still exists.

I’m not sure if by tagging users you mean linking / mentioning them? Or adding tags to them like you can tag posts / users on other platform. For tagging in general there’s a pending proposal https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4 . So far it focuses on post tagging though to reduce the scope. I think the goal is going to be to start with one kind of tagging and add more kinds of tagging later.

For improving cross-instance linking (both communities, posts, and users) we also have a open milestone. There’s a few spitballing issues about it, but no real concrete proposal on how to build it yet.

As @[email protected] mentioned we have improvements coming down the pipe for linking content across instances.

Community linking and user linking do work currently (for example I just linked phiresky above), and a community example would be [email protected] , but we could improve this by extending it to posts and comments, as well as creating a url link standard that would work across apps.

Migrating accounts between instances

Isn’t that implemented in the 19.2 and later versions? I just migrated using that feature a few days back, worked quite well

Can you add one to your list? Linking posts across instances? Like you can do !community@instance and the community will open viewed through your instance. But for linking posts there is no such equivalent. Like if I make an HTTP link it will be through my instance or possibly the one the community is hosted on which would be annoying for users of other instances.

Also, linking communities across instances is possible already, but you can leave it up since it’s confusing. I still see a lot of folks try to do the reddit approach if c/community

Thank you! Its great that you have been around all these years.

Thx a ton!

I very much dislike it obviously, and I’m happy that one shut down. There have been others, but for the most part they’ve stayed away from Lemmy as “that software made by tankies.”

Outside of making sure that we don’t platform them anywhere, there isn’t much we can do. Lemmy is open-source software after all, and a tool can be used for good or ill. As @[email protected] mentioned, coordinating on adding them to our blocklists and isolating them is the best option.

I hope they’re not too against it. I know they’re extremely left wing, which scared a lot of the centrists on Reddit. If they allow even right wing instances, then it emphasizes the project’s lakc of political bent, and encourages more mainstream people to join. The politics can be up to each individual instance to decide whether to defederate with those other instances or not.

But that’s just my opinion, I’m also curious how the devs will answer.

I think you should be careful with political hate. Its a slippery slope and should not be handled by a developer.

Maybe we could simply focus on having clear rules for each community.

They were posting spicy memes but thats how the internet works. If you dont like it then dont visit there, just like you wouldnt visit 4chan. Lemmy is open source so anyone can use it for any purpose.

Wolfballs? Was it straight up hate or just run of the mill GOP talking points?

I’d hope that they are at least 18

1. Im 31
2. Not yet, hopefully that will change in the future
3. North of Spain
4. Im not really anonymous, it would just feel weird to post here with my full name
5. No
6. Maybe less than 50%
7. Im terrible with names so no

From NLnet we had three funding rounds with 50.000 Euros each.

I think most of that can be taken from here: join-lemmy.org/donate. If you click through each donation method they each list goals/monthly intake.

EDIT - Minus crypto of course!

Sure

No problem, thats why its called AMA. Of course its possible that your questions wont get answered.

Lemmy supports horizontal scaling, so in theory it is only limited by the amount of servers you can afford. Of course there are always unpredictable bottlenecks which need to be fixed, but no inherent limitation.

The ActivityPub protocol lemmy uses is (in my opinion) really bad wrt scalability. For example, if you press one upvote, your instance has to make 3000 HTTP requests (one to every instance that cares).

But on the other hand, I recently rewrote the federation queue. Looking at reddit, it has around 100 actions per second. The new queue should be able to handle that amount of requests, and PostgreSQL can handle it (the incoming side) as well.

The problem right now is more that people running instances don’t have infinite money, so even if you could in theory host hundreds of millions of users most instances are limited by having a budget of 10-100$ per month.

Not necessarily