this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024

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The playground schematic analogy for designing a fediverse service. (dbzer0.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Mate trust me I understand all about Foss stress and burnout. I've been doing Foss for way longer than 4 years and the ai horde has been very demanding as well (and I also have a day job and small children) . But through all this, you have to learn to keep your cool. It's sometimes better to just come out and say "people, I'm close to burnout and I can't comment now" or "I am going to work on this as fast as I can but if someone can get to it first feel free" etc. It's way better to explain that you're overworked than to attack people. It's also OK to say nothing at all than to go on the offensive. People can understand the former but the latter will never work the way you expect.

I keep saying that this is a pure communication issue. I (and many others like sunaurus) can clearly see you're working hard and we understand how much there is to do, and this is why I'm dismayed when I see you escalate.

If you want we can get in a voice chat and I can share how I deal with these situations and what has worked for me. Just pm me. I really think this is made unnecessary harder than it needs to be.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Thank you for the offer but its not necessary. Ive also maintained open source projects long before Lemmy so Im familiar with the occasional entitled user on Github. In my experience its not a good idea to make any promises to these users because they will view their entitlement as justified, and make more demands.

However its a completely different quality when its not just Github comments, but multiple blog posts within a few days attacking Lemmy and me personally. Sure my responses were not ideal, but it was the best I was capable of at that time. If I had said nothing, people would assume that all the accusations are true and I have nothing to defend myself (like the claim that Im a "tankie" which has been going around on Mastodon for years).

In any case I think its better to say something and get my view out rather than being quiet. Sure there are miscommunications but those can be cleared up, and I can learn how to communicate better in the future. On the other hand if I said nothing, I may be left with the impression that my work sucks, and lose all motivation to keep working on Lemmy. Then I would be stuck doing nothing at all. Luckily that hasnt happened, Im still working on the project like before.

[+] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The only ones I want to chase away are those who somehow feel entitled to demand some specific work from me. But that is only a very small part of the userbase. I know Lemmy isn't perfect and I'm working every day to improve it. If anyone thinks that some area is not getting enough attention, they are welcome to make a pull request and I will happily review it to get the changes merged.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

no software out that is as mature as lemmy,

Doesn't mbin have feature parity?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I honestly haven't heard back much from mbin so I dunno

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I use it from time to time, it's quite decent. I prefer the Lemmy UI, so I use it more, but I really could use Mbin much more if it was the opposite

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

It’s normal that there will be forks and alternatives

This is not the sentiment you have previously expressed in direct response to these forks and alternatives. Thinking specifically about your activity in the sublinks announcement posts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I only wanted to point out that Sublinks will take a long time to be ready for production and to replace Lemmy. Some people seemed to think that its only a few weeks away. However this doesnt mean I want Sublinks to fail.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Youre welcome :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

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.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[+] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I agree. A lot of the friction here is due to miscommunication. That said, if what I said kept being misunderstood, then I would make a priority to improve my communication style.

This shit is hard. If one has ASD like I do, it's even harder. Personally try to be very exact on what I say, even when speaking casually, and pepper smilies and caveats to try to ensure people don't take what I say the wrong way. And even then I've stepped in it a number of times.

My perspective is that lemmy found perhaps a very unexpected success, and caught the devs flatfooted and this is how the stress of that success is manifesting. In short, they walk the walk, but can't talk the talk.

There's a saying where I'm from, that the Queen doesn't just need to be pure, she needs to appear pure. And those two things are completely different skillsets.

[+] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I am very sad about the situation with Beehaw specifically.

I think it's a very unfortunate case where all parties have the best intentions of building something great with Lemmy, but through different circumstances, relations have soured and involved people no longer think they have a shared vision (which in my opinion is actually not true - I believe that Beehaws vision fits in very well with the direction Lemmy is going, especially with private communities being planned soon).

I am still hopeful that things can be improved, but we will see.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure why Beehaw is coming up specifically in recent day (did something happen that I missed? E: Yes, a new write up from the Beehaw team, see Blaze's reply), but their moderation issues and needs came up as early as June and July of last year, but was definitely being talked about by September between Beehaw admins and users. Here's the thread I remember on it.

Another thread on one of the major CSAM content attack events against Lemmy (the one that took out vlemmy.net as you probably will recall) highlighted their desire for a better platform.

I'm OOTL if anything specific happened between the Lemmy devs and Beehaw admins this week that caused more beef, but the mindset that the development of much needed moderation features was progressing too slowly was with the Beehaw admins for many months now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

https://docs.beehaw.org/docs/important-questions-decisions-and-reflections/beehaw-lemmy-and-a-vision-of-the-fediverse/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Thank you for the link! I can see yeah it appears like drama on the face of it, but from what I see it's nutomic continuing to be defensive (as far as I'm concerned it's their right to be) and the write up is a mere extension of genuine uneasiness expressed last fall, it all just adds up to mean that Beehaw and Lemmy's goals still haven't fully aligned in the last 6 months.

I've donated to the Beehaw project because I support their vision, if they separate entirely from Lemmy on a new service I'll be happy for them for it, but I will stay on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Thank you for the link!

You are welcome!

it all just adds up to mean that Beehaw and Lemmy’s goals still haven’t fully aligned in the last 6 months.

Yes indeed

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

(which in my opinion is actually not true - I believe that Beehaws vision fits in very well with the direction Lemmy is going, especially with private communities being planned soon).

Strong agree.

Hopefully there can be some renewed collaboration in the future.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 7 months ago

Have you ever considered tying a feature request to a dollar amount? If people want x, prioritizing it would cost x?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

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!