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Lemmy's Image Problem (Updated 02-06-2024)
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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This link has been posted and discussed on Reddit too.
Of course, we shouldn't care about what people on Reddit think (and I noticed this post by chance since I log on there very rarely now), but some users in the thread genuinely ask about joining Lemmy and so I guess it's useful to know about possible obstacles to trying it that they may perceive.
That OP has been crying everywhere about the Lemmy devs being mean to him. Saw a few threads of his here on Lemmy.
Ya, reading the GitHub issue sounds entirely like burnt out devs being abused by users. It's a massive issue in open source.
The Late Night Linux and Linux Dev Time podcasts talked about exactly this in a recent episode. It can be extremely demoralizing to do all this work for free for a project only to be inundated by ungrateful people demanding you fix something or implement a feature they want. Many open source projects have died because of that.
We're not talking about a user demanding you release a flatpak build targeting their personal linux distribution running in a VM'd WSL, we're talking about a consumer facing social app that doesn't include the functionality for a user to delete something they added.
You know what the acronym used for describing the most basic functional web app api is?
CRUD - Create, Read, Update, Delete
You seem to know what you are talking about. Have you made a pull request yet?
Have you learned how to program to fix the problem?
It doesn't seem worth my time to learn Rust just to submit a PR to devs who behave like that, they'll just reject it and be pithy, like they are when a user asks them to comply with EU privacy law.
Ya, this is exactly the attitude that burns out devs and kills projects. Congrats for being super entitled towards a free project.
It is not entitled to expect a published project to comply with basic privacy legislation and not be illegal to use.
If your bar for this project is that much below basic consumer expectations, then this project was always going to fail.
No it's not. But what is entitlement is bombarding voluntary devs with garbage requests. Is this particular issue entitlement? No. But having seen the various requests made over the last year or so there's a breaking point where a person gets overly sensitive.
Think of being pestered ALL day at work over garbage and having an all around bad day. Then on the way home you jump into a store to pick something up and someone says something annoying but ultimately innocuous to you. Some people can handle it in stride, some people's nerves get frayed.
I'm not excusing the devs here. I don't actually know what their thoughts are. But from personal experience in the dev world and from what I've seen, it looks to me like they're getting frustrated by users.
And they might be in a region where the privacy concerns don't apply to them. And I agree that it's a problem, but ultimately it's their right and prerogative to not implement.
Remember, absolutely no one here has paid a single CENT to the devs for their work (not talking about donations).
So complaining about the quality of their work while you are benefiting from it for free is literally entitlement.
I understand having frayed nerves, I even understand snapping at someone because you're having a bad day, and I do feel sympathy for the devs, and wouldn't hold this against them (especially since they're at least providing a nuke everything option that will address it).
But the line between entitlement and reasonable expectation is not one of monetary compensation.
Engineering ethics does not let you off the hook just because no one paid you to build what you built. If an engineer goes to the park and unilaterally builds a playground that doesn't meet basic legislated safety standards and kills a kid, they're not off the hook. They will be investigated by their professional body and have their license revoked.
Hell if they just build a playground off in the woods on their own private land but don't take reasonable steps to prevent kids from accessing or using it then they will have their license revoked.
Sure, but if you want to extend the analogy that far, then the devs are just posting free plans online on how to build a playground. It's the instance owners who physically build the "playground" and are liable.
Again, that does not matter. If an engineer published those plans online and you built it and your kid died they would have their license revoked and face likely criminal liability.
There's no equivalent to a licensed civil engineer in programming.The proper analogy is just anyone putting up those plans.
Why do you keep adding new parameters to these analogies? It's such a simple concept but you are determined to prove your opinion, that the devs should acquiesce to your point of view, no matter what.
It's literally called a software engineer in most jurisdictions that aren't America where anyone is allowed to call themselves that. And software engineers also have to take engineering ethics, both courses in university as well as in their final professional exams if they want to call themselves engineers.
You're the one who added the "posted online" parameter. I responded and pointed out that it doesn't matter to the analogy.
If you put something dangerous into the world, mark it "ready to use", and encourage people to use it, and that results in them getting hurt or hurting others, then that is a bad thing and you have an obligation to fix it or warn people.
You're right about it being a simple concept, I don' understand where you think I'm demanding anyone do anything. The devs have already acquiesced after the community overwhelmingly dumped on their response. My only point has been that it's not entitled to expect a developer to put a warning on software once they've been alerted that it's dangerous.
What we're talking about is a complete free and open source project that's built and maintained completely through volunteer labour.
There are zero obligations towards the people actively using the software.
While I agree that the functionality should exist, the devs can literally do whatever they want. Nobody is paying them.
Edit: you're also seeing only a single instance of a conversation. I can guarantee that the devs have been dealing with asinine and demanding users for a while now. There comes a point where your patience wears thin.
Yes, there are, and that obligation is to not publish something as production ready if it is illegal to use because of how it's built.
I'm a software developer, I understand exactly how frustrating user demands are, that was still a completely and utterly unacceptable way to respond to a very politely worded request for software that literally just doesn't break privacy laws to run.
As the commenter pointed out, if you don't want to fix it, fine, but then you absolutely have a moral, ethical, and professional obligation to document that clearly in your README.md.
No, there really isn't. Do I feel that project owners should follow good practices for maintaining clean code that also allows users to keep things legal? Absolutely I do.
But that is not the same thing as an obligation. If there was a single cent exchanged between the devs and anyone else (donations do not count) then this conversation would be entirely different.
I don't agree with the devs' stance. But it is 100% their prerogative to say no. It's their project, not ours.
As am I.
I agree.
No, you absolutely do not. Although I do somewhat agree on the professional part, but it's still not an obligation. It's completely unprofessional, but that's different than it being an obligation.
The word obligation is not as narrow as you're using it:
Does he have a contractual obligation? No, no contracts were signed. Does he have a legal obligation? No, the license file in the project absolves him of legal liability.
But he absolutely has a moral, social, and professional obligation to do so.
If you want to apply such a better definition, then you have an obligation to learn Rust and submit a PR to bring the project into compliance. You have a societal obligation since you are aware of the issue and use Lemmy.
You owe it to your fellow Lemmites. Lemurs? Lemmings? Whatever the term for a Lemmy user is.
All I have an obligation to do is give back to society, and I do so through taking care of my parents and grandparents, volunteering teaching classes every weekend at the community center, volunteering to upgrade and maintain an app for a non profit, donating to charity, open source projects and news organizations, helping my elderly neighbours with their snow and leaf clearing, etc.
And if you find one of my open source github projects will cause a user to violate a local law, kindly file an issue and I'll immediately update the README.md and take it down until the issue is fixed.
100% your prerogative.
Nope, it's my moral, ethical, and social obligation as a person, my professional obligation as a professional software developer, and if I had bothered to file the paper work for my engineering license, would also be my legal obligation as an engineer.
Again, 100% your prerogative. No one is forced to use any of your software. The only time you must fix it is if you have a contract that outlines those conditions or you are selling licenses to customers in the EU.
Again, you are narrowing the definition of "obligation" to just legal and contractual.
If you just want to think about yourself and how you interact with the world through legal and contractual terms, good luck, it will be hard and miserable and you will be disliked. Otherwise you do have moral, ethical, and social obligations for everything you put into society.
That's how a Minecraft server I ran died. Too many people telling me how to run it and trying to break things when I was asleep.
Ya, I know exactly what you experienced. It sucks and it's why we can never have nice things.
What I truly don’t understand is why the negative eggs that you WILL ALWAYS HAVE NO MATTER WHAT, read it again, ALWAYS HAVE NO MATTER WHAT, gets so much mental attention than the many more people who are actively applauding you and saying their thanks and giving you their praises.
I will never understand the focusing on the negative I guess. It’d be easy as fuck for me to ignore people’s assholeishness while still taking their badly typed criticism and improving (if I reasonably can).
Shit, it makes me feel like the fucking champ when some random persons says thanks for something I did, and I laugh and ignore the ones who don’t like what I do.
But hey, if focusing on the few negatives instead of the mountains of praise is what you want to do, it’s all yours.
Imagine you get approval to build a new park and playground for your neighbourhood. You spend hundreds of hours designing the plan and layout and you spend incredible amounts of your own money to get the resources.
You get to work and things are going well. As you near the end of months upon months of work, the park finally opens for families and kids to use.
As you're standing there proud of your work, some people come over to you. Do they say "thank you!" or "you did amazing work"? No, they come over to complain about things that are missing, tell you what you should have done better, that you didn't accommodate their each specific needs, etc.
You would very quickly get bitter and demoralized.
Like I mentioned before: this is a massive problem in the open source development world and has killed many great projects. This has nothing to do with "mental attention" and everything to do with users abusing the devs and their time.
No space for muh centrism
lol