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
- Patreon
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I kind of get where you're coming from, but to me it sounds like you're looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like "books"), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you're interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.
I don't think it's fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, "ownerless" topics, instead, it's built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.
IMO it's totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it's totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn't really seem like a useful feature, but that's kind of analogous to what you're suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.
What prevents from visiting /c/books@anotherserver?
Genuinely asking, because this is one of the core concepts of Lemmy and federation
Doesn't !books@lemmy.ml and !books@lemmy.world direct you to yourinstance.org/c/books@lemmy.ml and yourinstance.org/c/books@lemmy.world respectively?
Did you promote that community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and other promotion communities? Did you actively post on your new community, to attract users to your new one?
I'm going to take two examples I personally had
I guess that shows that community takeover is possible, and does not need additional tools, just some time and dedication.
No, that defeats the entire point.
The point of me having my own control over my instance. The bad moderator thing will always be a problem.
I must’ve read your comment wrong. Sounds like you just want a multi Reddit type feature? I agree that that should be implemented some apps have already did it. I don’t agree that the same word community should be lumped together universally and automatically.
Who are the moderators in this scenario you’re talking about?
Your argument through all of this is bad moderators controlling the largest communities so I’m wondering how what you’re saying fixes any of that.
That is true because admins pay for the servers and are legally responsible for the content they host. However anyone can quite easily become an admin, the hosting cost for a single user instance is very low.
yea Summit for Lemmy can do this already https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idunnololz.summit
maybe communities should be able to flag that they're the same community as one on another server, and if they mutually do so be combined into one metacommunity that people can search for
I really don't hate this idea from a lemmy centric UX perspective but how do you handle federation with other platforms?