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Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT

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.

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  • Thank you! Lemmy is a tremendous contribution to the wider Fediverse, and no amount of "thank yous" is ever enough for people like you writing free software and giving freely to the public domain.

    I have been on Lemmy, and around the Fediverse on various accounts since ~2021, and a suggestion I have seen promoted countless times is for communities which federate across instances. e.g. posts to Linux@lemmy.ml will show on Linux@lemmy.world as long as lemmy.ml and lemmy.world federate with one another. If I remember correctly, each of you have previously opposed this idea for multiple reasons. If you do still oppose such a feature, will you please reiterate why you think this is the wrong direction for Lemmy? Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit's multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?

    • Thx!

      I see why people think that's a problem, but in reality, its more of a feature. For example, take communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics, or locations, based on their instance:

      or

      These are all news communities, yet should stand on their own: each with their own creators, moderators, users, rules, posts, comments, culture, and topics. It makes no sense to combine or "merge" them given all these differences, in the same way that it makes no sense to "merge" two completely different users because they have the same name.

      Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit’s multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?

      Sure! Multi-Communities are an open issue, that I'm sure someone will take on eventually.

    • There's also FEP-d36d which is a standard for group-to-group following. In Lemmy terms, a community could subscribe to another community.

      • I think FEP-2100 is a much more promising approach because it makes communities more resilient in case an instance goes down.

      • In Lemmy terms, a community could subscribe to another community.

        In this case, why not merge?

        • I think the major advantage with this model is that it gives those local communities a little more flavor while allowing the same functionality as the large communities (probably a good place to apply scaled sort). It also allows for a sort of curated multi-reddit functionality. Most importantly, it seems flexible and generalizable enough to allow for building advanced group features on all platforms, while still advancing the goal of inter-operability. A more straightforward multi-community functionality or the OP solution would have a lot of unanswered questions regarding federation. I'd be curious to see how kbin does it and whether that federates well. All that said, I think a lot of communities probably should be looking at negotiating a merge.

          • I always like there are basically two types of topics (because after all, communities are focused on a topic)

            • either you have enough of a userbase to have your own flavour on the topic, for instance all the gaming communities that exist on different instances, which all co-exist next to each other, and it wouldn't really make sense to merge them all
            • or you don't have enough people, and in this case you should just agree on one instance where to host the community and be done with it

            I know there is the political aspect to take into account, but for me that comes back to the first point: if enough people of the same political side want to talk about something between them, that's good. If not, they might have to put that aside and go for the second option.

            All that said, I think a lot of communities probably should be looking at negotiating a merge.

            Strong agree

      • ooooh I like it!

    • I'm not aware of philosophical disagreements with that feature, I can just think of logical and technical issues. Like how moderation would federate, etc. If all the mods come to an agreement then the mods on one instance could lock their community and link to the other one. If the mods disagree, then moderation is going to be chaos in any case, no?

      I think multi-community views would be a great idea.

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