This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml 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.
Big Fan
What are your opinions on third party apps for Lemmy using ads on their free version?
Thoughts on a GPL4?
Many examples indicate an even stronger license is needed, I will list a few
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The current RedHat debacle
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MuseScore’s closed source Musehub (after being acquired by Ultimatw Guitar)
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Google commiting copyright infringement by combining free (as in freedom) software with code under Apache license for Android
We clearly need a stronger, more all encompassing license.
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pls figure a way to monetize instances: a small fee charging api or something so admins could feel safe, or else instance owners will be piggy backed by third party app devs, and its happening.
If an individual wants to help develop this, how would they go about doing so?
Go to Github, look through open issues and find something you are interested to work on. Basically like any other open source project. Then make a pull request with your changes. You can ask for help from other devs in Matrix or directly on Github.
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.
The fix you are referring to only limits how many comments can be retrieved in a single API call (300). This limit is only used when specific parameters are passed, not in all cases.
Tree-paging is a pretty complicated issue, and we really do need some DB / SQL experts to help us with figuring out how to page them correctly. The limit is 300, but only for the top-level comment fetch, which could also have different slices whether you sort by top, or new, and doesn’t apply to the nested comments, which could have thousands.
The limit is a kludge, because ppl were creating thousands of comments, and without proper paging, it was affecting performance.
Will lemmy users be able to interact with Mastodon users in future and is there a roadmap for lemmy?
How do you combat bot accounts and illegal content? Is it moderation or algorithms or both?
I’m gonna be asking hard questions, I think, sorry about that. I hope you consider it tough love considering our past interactions.
As an instance admin, I have some questions:
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How are you doing? I know there was a lot of pressure when things blew up and it seems to be calming down a bit now.
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How is Lemmy doing financially?
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Considering past releases and their associated breaking bugs (including 0.18.3), what measures are you taking to help prevent that?
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Can we consider the possibility of downgrades being supported?
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Why are bugs affecting moderation not release blockers? Does anything block releases?
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Are there plans to give instance administrators a voice in shaping the future of Lemmy’s development?
As someone who is trying to help with Lemmy’s development, I have some other questions:
- What do you think are the biggest problems with Lemmy as a software project and what are your priorities for Lemmy?
- Considering fairly low amounts of developers contributing to Lemmy, how are you working to help new people get into the project?
- Do you worry about the message it sends to potential contributors when the main developers are working on a different project which competes with the former? (Example: Lemmy-ui vs Lemmy-ui-Leptos)
- Considering most work is done voluntarily, how are you trying to organize and prioritize work?
- Do you believe you are stretching yourself too thin between Lemmy, Lemmy-ui, Lemmy-ui-leptos, Jerboa and Lemmy.ml? If so, what are you doing to help you focus?
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As some instances grow, server costs are becoming significant. Right now, servers are only funded through donations. Do you see the development of anything else to help fund server costs?
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.
I’m on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month, which is above your costs.
Beehaw reports costs at over $500 USD/month.
I would imagine lemmy.world is in the thousands.
I know the idea is that there should be more instances, but we are already beginning to see server costs that are higher than what you think. User numbers seem to be settling down now, but who knows when the next spike will happen.
I run an instance on a spare computer that I had lying in my house. If I had to guess, I would say running my instance probably costs less than a dollar per month.
What kind of internet connection do you have?
I have a 1 Gbps up and down fiber connection.
It depends where and how you are hosting. Hetzner or OVH have small VPS which can host hundreds of active users for those 10 usd. Of course if you host on AWS or Digitalocean its much more expensive. lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server. Hosting costs will also go down as the code gets more optimized.
Yep. As ppl have mentioned, while our performance bottleneck is currently the unoptimized postgres operations, we haven’t even come close reaching postgres’s actual internal limits. So code and DB optimization will be the biggest factor reducing costs.
I’m on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month
If I really wanted to shoestring it, I could definitely get it lower. But I did want some headroom to grow, and to operate semi-professionally. With the recent upgrades we should be good for a while.
(Also if anyone wants to jump to a small instance, thelemmy.club has some room :)
Sorry for stupid questions and doubts 😭 but you said you don’t plan to add any plan, monetization or ads. SO never ever right? I’m willing to donate a hell lot to support the lemmy. So it’ll always remain like this innocent, inherently open source and always have the same “our”/ “people’s” internet, and never like a platform that is above us like it feels when using Twitter or reddit? (I said stupid question cus idk if having activitypub adopted and being decentralized makes lemmy and other platforms inherently “people’s” open-source and free internet?
We will never have ads or in-app monetization or crypto scams, no. We’ll always be 100% funded by donations and open source grants.
- How do you feel about ads on the internet?
- What are your thoughts on the sustainability of FOSS?
Why isn’t there a feature to allow individuals to block whole instances?
One of the major complaints on Reddit was the mod governance structure, with rank dependent on who showed up first. On the roadmap, do you see implementing other ways to govern mods, maybe something like how a lot of video game guilds govern themselves?
As a communist, I’m also receptive to a more democratic and less-hierarchical style of moderation. A LOT of reddit communities have been wrecked by an absent top moderator, who suddenly and suspiciously “becomes active” and removes the moderators who have been keeping the sub going for years.
We’ve had several people make proposals on github, but my issue has always been this: these are mostly untested, and potentially insecure. In the online space without any sort of real-person verification, If some kind of voting on mod actions were implemented, people could just create fake accounts to game the system, or find other ways.
AFAIK there hasn’t been any forum or community software that doesn’t implement the top-down chain of trust model. And of course this is less of concern with decentralized software like lemmy, where people always have the option to host their own instance, or create their own community, and moderate it exactly as they see fit. That’s not an option you have with reddit.
Part of what you would need to create is a qualified voter system.
For a meme sub, maybe the qualified voters are known participants in the community over a period of time.
For a more technical sub like what AskHistorians is on Reddit, voters are those qualified to answer questions.
It doesn’t have to be open to everyone, just the interested.
And you keep coming back to the federation model as a way to keep this in check, but it is still a dictatorial model and the only answer to dealing with a bad head mod is to destroy a community and lose the history of that community.
“qualified voter system” sounds all too much like karma that’s readily gamed with repost bots creating a worse experience for everyone.
Mods can alter who becomes qualified.
But lets face it, there are already a ton of reposters here already.
Could you expand on how video game guilds are governed for those of us unfamiliar?
You have different levels with guild defined titles and privileges. Some privileges are effectively mod abilities, but others are more enhanced user abilities.
The idea is that a sub could assign mod ranks in a more transparent manner while providing means to kick out non-performing mods easier.
You could also have a selected user base be able to vote on policy so that mods have a better understanding what the user base wants.
It isn’t a perfect system, but better than the first system we have.
Thoughts on the use of geographic domains for vanity purposes? I know that’s come up recently as a topic of concern (including with lemmy, specifically), and personally, it seems like it’s both extremely widespread and also maybe shouldn’t have become super widespread given the actual implications.
For me the whole point of fediverse is not depending on a single party for your socials/subs. But the current climate in each instance forces users to have accounts in multiple instances.
As a Lemmy user I believe account migration should be a default Lemmy feature which enables true federation for end users. Any plans for this feature in the near future?
