This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they'd like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky@lemmy.world about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
NLNet Funding
First of all some good news: We are currently applying for new funding from NLnet and have reached the second round. If it gets approved then @phiresky@lemmy.world and SleeplessOne will work on the paid milestones, while @dessalines and @nutomic will keep being funded by direct user donations. This will increase the number of paid Lemmy developers to four and allow for faster development.
You can see a preliminary draft for the milestones. This can give you a general idea what the development priorities will be over the next year or so. However the exact details will almost certainly change until the application process is finalized.
Development Update
@ismailkarsli added a community statistic for number of local subscribers.
@jmcharter added a view for denied Registration Applications.
@dullbananas made various improvements to database code, like batching insertions for better performance, SQL comments and support for backwards pagination.
@SleeplessOne1917 made a change that besides admins also allows community moderators to see who voted on posts. Additionally he made improvements to the 2FA modal and made it more obvious when a community is locked.
@nutomic completed the implementation of local only communities, which don't federate and can only be seen by authenticated users. Additionally he finished the image proxy feature, which user IPs being exposed to external servers via embedded images. Admin purges of content are now federated. He also made a change which reduces the problem of instances being marked as dead.
@dessalines has been adding moderation abilities to Jerboa, including bans, locks, removes, featured posts, and vote viewing.
In other news there will soon be a security audit of the Lemmy federation code, thanks to Radically Open Security and NLnet.
Support development
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
- Liberapay (preferred option)
- Open Collective
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Then who would moderate this? And what if lemmygrad.ml/c/books wants to have different discussions from lemmy.world/c/books?
As I understand your suggestion this would mean one super community might get moderated from 5 different instances and 5 rule sets. It is definitely the right direction but not that easy to design..
I think this is interesting but should not be an automatic feature.
There are other factors at hand, such as the moderation and the instance politics
There are plenty of politically neutral instance. Most of them are, actually, the only ones that come to mind as politically oriented are hexbear, lemmygrad and to an extend, lemmy.ml.
That leaves lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, all the feddit.country, discuss.tchncs.de, sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com, lemmy.zip as neutral alternatives
Another option here is FEP-d36d which is a standard for group-to-group following. This looks to me like a slightly more organic and opt-in approach.
I think one thing you're missing here is that under such a system the defaults would likely become your locally hosted /c/books rather than the largest one. Even still you'd probably see posts from the largest books communities because /c/books@your_instance follows multiple /c/books@big_instance. Community blocking would likely still work as it currently does so any books communities that you were not fond of could still be blocked.
There is still the issue of where do you post and I think the answer looks something like:
Which is more or less how most people would decide where to post book stuff anyway.
Who's Lemmy's spez?
The main difference of Lemmy compared to Reddit is the ability that communities have to walk away, as I explained in another comment: https://discuss.online/comment/5393546
I just had an issue that might be interesting in your case. You can read it up on !newcommunities@lemmy.world, but long story short, the mod of a community wasn't happy with the way I wanted to bring some meta discussion into the community.
The main difference in this kind of situation between Lemmy and Reddit is that
See here.
see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
I'd like that. I think some other platforms/projects have features like this. And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw.
Are they not allowed to?
Beehaw exists for people who wanted a heavily-moderated space, and they seem to be doing well activity-wise. Do you want to force them with the rest of the instances?
Sure, that's not the point at all. But wouldn't it be great if the knitting community (for example) on beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and feddit.de would be merged for me into one entity for a better browsing experience? And people wouldn't post the same breaking news 3 times and the cross-posts always showed up 3 times in my timeline? (And sometimes it's the same 30 people anyways that are subscribed to all of them so the cross-posting doesn't add anything?)
I currently don't have a good idea for a UI design for that. But I think a feature like that would add to federated platforms (if done right.) But nobody said you're not allowed or it's bad to open a dozen communities with the same name and topic on different servers. That's perfectly alright. In the real world we also sometimes discuss the same topic with different people at different locations.
Why wouldn't they merge on one instance? Seems easier, and can be done today compared to having to ask the developers to implement a complex feature.
Is there a client that does that? Sorry I lost track of the different clients. But I'd like to try. I know Eternity (which I use on my Android phone) and the default webui can't do that. But I haven't tried all the options.
I don't quite get your wording. If you mean similar communities should be merged in all cases, I think I'd disagree. People might want to subscribe to a specific community. And it'd be complex to figure out moderation etc, since the root of the platform is a federated architecture and this somewhat goes against that. I think it'd be more a UI / client feature, tied into a cross-posting mechanism.