- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
Highlighting the recent report of users and admins being unable to delete images, and how Trust & Safety tooling is currently lacking.
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I don’t agree with the tone of the Lemmy devs, but they are right: it’s opensource being worked on mostly in the free time of people. Do not treat the devs like they are paid to do your bidding, because they aren’t. If you donated and have expectations, you don’t understand the meaning of a donation.
Imagine if the author had a woodworking workshop on their compound where they made things out of wood; figurines, furniture, tools, sculptures, and so on. Say they opened it up to the public so that guests could have a look, play around, spend some free time there, and maybe even use the equipment there. But then guest started demanding the author buy newer equipment, make sculptures more to the guest’s liking, made the workshop more accessible to invalids, put up the national flag, play the radio, and a host of other things. All the while not footing the bill for anything, not helping clean up, not volunteering to help in any fashion.
Then the author refused and invited the guests to help. But instead, the guests went off and made a blog saying the author was selfish, cold, self-centered, egoistic, rude, and what not.This is what the author of this article and people in that github discussion come over as. If those people came into my workshop and told me how to do things without helping out in any way, I’d rightfully tell them to fuck right off.
Articles like these that are practically demanding change will not and do not improve the dialogue. They are actually bad for opensource as a whole because they give people who don’t understand opensource the feeling that they have the right to complain, the right to demand, the right to expect, the right to be entitled to an opinion and an outcome.
That’s a thumbs down from me dawg.
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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.
It doesn’t seem worth my time to learn Rust just to submit a PR to devs who behave like that
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.
we’re talking about a consumer facing social app
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.
There are zero obligations towards the people actively using the software.
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.
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.
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.
I’m a software developer, I understand exactly how frustrating user demands are
As am I.
that was still a completely and utterly unacceptable way to respond to a very politely worded request
I agree.
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, 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:
obligation /ŏb″lĭ-gā′shən/
noun A social, legal, or moral requirement, such as a duty, contract, or promise, that compels one to follow or avoid a particular course of action. “Are you able to meet your obligations?” “I have an obligation to attend their wedding.”
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.
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
The fact that Lemmy’s core team is taking a fairly laissez faire position on moderation, user safety, and tooling is problematic, and could be a serious blocker for communities currently hosted on Lemmy.
At this point, most of the solutions the ecosystem has relied on have been third-party tools, such as db0’s fantastic Fediseer and Fedi-Safety initiatives. While I’m sure many people are glad these tools exist, the fact that instances have to rely on third-party solutions is downright baffling.
Honestly, what? Why would be baffling to have third party tools in this ecosystem? It would be baffling if that was the case for Facebook. Also the devs did work on some moderation features, but they probably have tons of other stuff to work on, all for an amount of money which is a low salary for one developer.
That’s not the argument being made. What’s baffling is to pretty much only rely on the efforts of third party devs to fill in the missing gaps. It’s a profoundly bad strategy.
It’s like with Bethesda releases a shitty half-finished game, and leans on the modding community to actually put in half the things that would actually make it in any way fun to play. Except Bethesda actually makes money, and the community works for peanuts. Here, Lemmy makes some money, but a huge chunk of the user community shoulders the cost out of pocket. A big chunk of the Fediverse is actually unpaid labor that brings in negative dollars month over month.
The devs have a vested interest in ensuring their project continues to grow, they continue to get funded for their work, and features on their own roadmap get planned and developed. They can’t do that if the tooling is too brittle, shitty, or threadbare to actually handle the deeply fucking intense problem of managing and maintaining a server and community on the open Internet, where literally anything and everything goes. Factor in a myriad of local jurisdictions and laws about data and content, and a lot of these things end up becoming severe liabilities.
Look at it this way: with federation, a handful of volunteers themselves are doing labor for free, for the devs, by propping up their platform, client ecosystem, and reputation in the space. If this gets bad enough, people will literally say “fuck it” and walk away.
That’s not the argument being made. What’s baffling is to pretty much only rely on the efforts of third party devs to fill in the missing gaps. It’s a profoundly bad strategy.
I literally quoted the article:
At this point, most of the solutions the ecosystem
I mean, there are some moderation features in Lemmy, for sure with gaps, but there are many gaps on other aspects as well, and if people can’t run the instances due to other technical issues, there is also nothing to moderate, so obviously prioritization is complex when resources available (dev) are so limited.
That said, I really don’t see the problem of third parties. We rely on third parties for one of the most fundamental features, which is community discovery (lemmyverse.net), for example. What’s the problem with that? I think that’s literally one of the benefits of making an open platform, where other people can build other tools in the ecosystem. We are not purchasing a service, we are not talking about an organization who has a substantial revenue and tons of people and can’t deal with basic functionalities. We are talking about a project with a team that is smaller than the team that in Facebook deals with which colors to make buttons, and it’s “paid” 1/20th of that. So I still don’t understand, what is “baffling”? Because from where I stand, all things considered, it’s totally normal that a project with these resources and that gained popularity less than a year ago has still tons of gaps and a long roadmap, and that tools in the ecosystem address some of these gaps.
It’s like with Bethesda releases a shitty half-finished game
No it’s not. Bethesda is company that sells you a proprietary product while having a revenue in the order of hundreds of millions. The relationship between Bethesda customers and Lemmy users has absolutely nothing in common.
Here, Lemmy makes some money
Lemmy makes no money. Considered the opportunity cost, Lemmy loses money. A single dev with a full time job can easily double the amount that Lemmy devS earn. Not to talk about the fact that the money they make are donations, without a contract bounding them to anything and also not granting them anything (tomorrow everyone could cancel donations and the income would disappear).
They can’t do that if the tooling is too brittle, shitty, or threadbare to actually handle the deeply fucking intense problem of managing and maintaining a server and community on the open Internet, where literally anything and everything goes. Factor in a myriad of local jurisdictions and laws about data and content, and a lot of these things end up becoming severe liabilities.
Sure, but again, if those were the only problems and the devs would be sipping cocktails in Hawaii splurging on those 4k/month, I would agree with you. If they think priorities are elsewhere, or are also elsewhere, they might have their reasons. In fact, in the article there is a complaint about them answering in a “hostile” manner, but I also understand that the issue in question is probably the 100th issue in a week/month in which other people tell them what they should do. This is a regular problem in OSS (See https://mastodon.uno/@bagder@mastodon.social - the maintainer of curl - for plenty of examples). After they understood better what’s the problem, their stance changed as well, which is also reasonable.
Look at it this way: with federation, a handful of volunteers themselves are doing labor for free, for the devs, by propping up their platform, client ecosystem, and reputation in the space. If this gets bad enough, people will literally say “fuck it” and walk away.
I don’t look at it in this way at all. I think the devs made it extremely clear (even given the political stance of both) that despite the happiness of seeing their project flourish, they have no interest in growth as an end. In fact, I would say that nobody is doing work for the devs. But I see that we have a fundamentally different perception on the dynamics in Lemmy, so I see no reconciliation between our opinions.
Yeah it’s open source, 3rd party tools existing is kinda the point really. If these people care so much then they should be working on making tools to address the issue, or funding someone to do so.
Instead of playing the blame game, let me see if I can help with a solution: I am fairly certain that I can take the “admin” functionality that I built for fediverser and use it as the basis for a “moderation dashboard”. It’s a Python/Django application that can communicate with the Lemmy server both through the API and the database. The advantages of it being a “sidecar system” instead of being built “into” the Lemmy code itself is that I am not blocked by any of the Lemmy developers and the existing instance owners do not need to wait for some fork to show up.
I can propose a deal: at the time of writing, there are ~200 people who upvoted this article. If I get 20 people (10% of the upvoters) to either sponsor me on Github or subscribe to my Europe-based, GDPR-subject suite of fediverse services, then I will dedicate 10 hours per week to solve all GDPR-related issues.
How does that sound? To me it sounds like a win-win-win situation: Instance admins get proper tooling, Lemmy devs get this out of their list of concerns and users get a more robust application for the fediverse.
I wish you the best of luck on this and I truly hope you do this, but this is what the lead dev of Sublinks tried to do. That’s the missing piece here. He tried making an external mod tooling system. Maybe you’ll have better luck than he did. I really hope you do.
That sounds great! Be sure to get in contact if you run into any problems or limitations with the API.
In a similar vein, I’ve seen a lot of auto moderator implementations created. If instead of creating yet another project, people started contributing to existing ones we’d have a good core set of functionality that could be shared across instances. Competing implementations are fine, but at some point the efforts get spread so thin that progress is limited.
This sounds great!
Glad you agree, and hope to see your name on the sponsors list and/or the communick signups. ;)
If someone will point me there I’m on it.
The links are on the first comment:
- Github sponsors, $4/month: https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs/
- Signup to Communick and get access to Mastodon/Lemmy/Funkwhale and Matrix for $29/year: https://communick.com/packages/access
Ok! Amazing.
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Was going to say “another one of these?” but, wow, the article really further highlights the childish nature of the Lemmy devs… Can’t wait for Sublinks to reach feature parity and become main stream, so we can leave this dark phase behind.
You don’t understand how open source works. You are not entitled to any features. Let the devs go on their own pace. A lot of open source projects shut down because of similar reasons.
Likewise, an open source project can totally die if they refuse to engage with the needs of the users. The lack of moderation and content management tools have been a longstanding criticism of Lemmy, and instances will migrate to alternatives that address these concerns. It is a genuine legal liability for instance operators if they are unable to sufficiently delete CSAM/illegal content or comply with EU regulations.
But opensource projects are more likely to get dropped by devs than losing their userbase from what I’ve seen. I could be wrong. Both our points are true. That’s the best part of fediverse. If one doesn’t like lemmy, they are free to choose an alternative. I just don’t agree with demanding features from open source developers. There is a distinct line between demanding and requesting. I’m not saying lemmy is perfect. Maybe Sublinks would be better. Let’s wait. But even Sublinks won’t be sustainable if users do not respect developers time and patience.
I think there is also a distinct line between demanding, for example, a new animated avatar feature and demanding a way to delete child porn.
Reasonable.
While I think you’re correct about it ultimately being their project, and that users are in no place to demand or expect anything, this thing takes on whole other dimensions once a project is all about building a social platform. Particularly one where volunteers host part of the network themselves.
It’s one thing to look at some random demand to write everything in a P2P architecture because DNS is too centralized. When I worked on Diaspora, I literally saw people demand stuff like that, and laughed it off. I’m trying to build a platform that exists today, not some pixie dream bullshit compromised of academic circle-jerking.
But when it comes to basic table stakes for participating in a network that already exists, things change a bit. This is especially true when you’re connecting to a global network that has:
- Hate Speech
- Targeted Harassment Campaigns
- Child Pornography
- Extreme Gore and Violence
Suddenly, it makes a lot of sense to say “you know what, admins are going to want to filter this shit out, maybe it’s reasonable for them to have some tools and fixtures that are part of core.”
Unfortunately, these devs are the kind of people who scream angrily when someone says “Hey, this thing doesn’t actually respect local image deletes / GDPR stuff / content deletion on account deletion”. To me, that’s fucking insane.
You don’t know how social networks work. They only survive based on network effects, if they don’t have the most basic functionality that users expect (like complying with privacy legislation), then they will fail to reach critical mass and be outcompeted and die.
If the devs don’t want to provide the most basic functions that any user of a social network would expect, they’re welcome to be downvoted to hell and have their project go back to being one of the millions of forgotten and unviewed personal github projects.
Open source projects die because it takes both technical talent and attention to your users to make a project successful, and for-profit companies often pay different people to do those.
The entire point of the “fediverse” is to combat the network effect. Don’t like Lemmy? Move to another app and still communicate with people on Lemmy. Plus it’s all open, can’t find an app you like? Build one or wait for someone to build one you like.
The entire point of the “fediverse” is to combat the network effect.
No, it’s not.
The purpose of the fediverse is to decentralize control of the network, it does not eliminate network effects in any way shape or form. At the end of the day a social network is only as valuable as the users using it and contributing content to it. If they don’t find lemmy pleasant to use, they’re not going to say “let me jump to mastodon” they’re going to go to Reddit.
Build one or wait for someone to build one you like.
You really don’t understand network effects if you think you can just sit around and wait for basic functionality and expect your network not to die.
It’s honestly mind-blowing. At every turn, for no reason at all, they act like a bunch of dicks. It’s like they decided to run a community project based on engineering prowess alone, and nothing else.
Except the engineering isn’t all that good, either.
Not only that, but the developer Dessalines apparently denies the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praises the Uyghur Genocide. Absolutely disgusting
Edit: Wow. Tankies are mad. Lmao
Well yeah? The only countries accusing China of mishandling the ETIM in Xinjiang (an issue created by the US through Afganistan btw) are the ones committing an actual genocide in Palestine, i.e imperial core countries. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Global South and Muslim countries in general are against the western propaganda about it.
20 . Welcomes the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat’s delegation upon invitation from the People’s Republic of China; commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People’s Republic of China.
Yeah, because the West is also committing a genocide, that means your genocide is ok. Both are doing genocides. Torturing and raping hundreds if thousands of Uyghurs, forcing them to abandon their culture, forced birth control, forced labour, forced sterilisation and prosecution without any legal process isn’t just combating ETIM terrorists. That’s same level of BS argument Israel is using while flattening entire Gaza and saying they’re only combating Hamas terrorists.
“The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Muslim countries in general are against the western propaganda about it”
Because they’re corrupt shitheads? They don’t give shit about human rights either, they see more profit from supporting China same way the west sees more profit supporting Israel.
Sources:
- https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/06/china-draconian-repression-of-muslims-in-xinjiang-amounts-to-crimes-against-humanity-2/
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China
And you can’t say Amnesty International is Western propaganda because they’re very critical of Israel and it’s genocide as well.
TIL two wrongs equals a right!
You’re being dense, the reason is devs get burned out and you’re asking them to do work for free.
The reason that an open source developer might experience burnout are myriad, but can include:
- Lack of compensation
- Insufficient tooling or project infrastructure
- A high ratio of operators to maintainers
- Lack of a concrete roadmap, quality documentation, tests, essential resources
- Lack of an onboarding process for new contributors
- Inability to reconcile differences with contributors, leading to hard forks or exodus of contributors
- Intractable architectural issues that require substantial engineering effort, possibly more than the maintainer can actually contribute
As someone who has done Community Management for an open source, decentralized communication platform (Diaspora), I am familiar with all of these things. This shit is hard, and I am not denying that Lemmy devs have done a lot of good work.
The problem is actually much simpler than you’re making it out to be. For a social platform, which depends on interconnected self-hosted communities to succeed, you absolutely have to build in the tools and utilities necessary to deal with all the crazy shit that comes with the territory. Ignoring this causes a cascade of problems that gradually get worse the longer they remain unaddressed.
The devs are surviving on crowdfunding and grants, and doing the best they can with that. That’s commendable! They probably need more of both to have their needs fully covered. But don’t get it twisted: receiving proceeds for your work is not the same thing as working for free.
receiving proceeds for your work is not the same thing as working for free.
Accepting donations is not the same as entering into a contract agreement where the person giving a few bucks per month entitles them to dictate how the work should be done. If people want to enter in a relationship where they get exactly what they want for the money they are giving, then they will be better off by going to a commercial provider, so that the nature of the transaction is explicit and mutually agreed.
About the grants: AFAIK they got the grant to make federation work, which was completed to everyone’s satisfaction. If they had received a big grant from NLNet, got the money but didn’t deliver on what they promised on the application, then you could argue that they did not hold their end of the bargain. But do you it’s fair that because they got money from one part of the work that they should be responsible for all subsequent deliveries?
I’m really trying to understand where you are coming from with this. You mentioned your work on Diaspora, and I don’t know how much you were involved on it, but I do feel that one of the things that doomed Diaspora was that the founders mistook the attention and money they got in 2010 as an indication that they were all alone responsible in “saving us from Facebook”. If Ilya had learned to say “it’s not my responsibility to build everything to win a fight against a multi-billion corporation”, perhaps he would still be around.
Accepting donations is not the same as entering into a contract agreement where the person giving a few bucks per month entitles them to dictate how the work should be done. If people want to enter in a relationship where they get exactly what they want for the money they are giving, then they will be better off by going to a commercial provider, so that the nature of the transaction is explicit and mutually agreed.
With respect, this is a framing issue and depends on your point of view. Does a donation mean someone contracted you to do something specifically? Not really. But, will mismanagement of expectations and hostility convince someone to stop donating to a project? You’d better believe it. If you’re working full-time on a project, donations are your lifeblood. They literally put food on your table. You literally can’t afford to disregard the needs of users and admins. But of course, you are at discretion to decide what those needs actually are, and how critical they are. Nevertheless, the relationship is more transactional than it appears to be.
About the grants: AFAIK they got the grant to make federation work, which was completed to everyone’s satisfaction. If they had received a big grant from NLNet, got the money but didn’t deliver on what they promised on the application, then you could argue that they did not hold their end of the bargain. But do you it’s fair that because they got money from one part of the work that they should be responsible for all subsequent deliveries?
Overall, I think their grant from NLNet was a good thing, and I think they did good work on that. As long as their work was in scope of the grant, I don’t see a problem with that.
I’m really trying to understand where you are coming from with this. You mentioned your work on Diaspora, and I don’t know how much you were involved on it,
Community Manager, circa 2011 to 2013. I was basically an air traffic controller for GitHub issues, acted as a developer liaison, served as a face of the project to the community, and engaged on the network every single day to get a pulse on what was going on. A lot of it involved smoothing things over with people who were upset about things, resolving conflicts, drumming up volunteer coders, and indicating to core team what varying needs were across the user and developer communities. I lived and breathed it every day.
I do feel that one of the things that doomed Diaspora was that the founders mistook the attention and money they got in 2010 as an indication that they were all alone responsible in “saving us from Facebook
This is somewhat inaccurate, and here’s why: Diaspora never advertised itself as an Anti-Facebook. They were building a federated network that focused on user freedom, and it was a combination of timing and insanely good luck that their Kickstarter campaign picked up as much as it did. The whole “we’re going to save you from Facebook” thing was an invention of the media to get people to click headlines. What really doomed Diaspora was that the core team wanted to be a startup, the community wanted it to be a project, and getting the company into yCombinator had the team focus on things further and further away from their original goals.
If Ilya had learned to say “it’s not my responsibility to build everything to win a fight against a multi-billion corporation”, perhaps he would still be around. This is a little disingenuous. Ilya had a big heart and was an amazing person, but he struggled with depression, anxiety, and mental illness. There was an enormous amount of pressure, sky-high expectations, and media vultures that picked apart every little hiccup the team went through, but I don’t think it’s fair to say it was those things alone that made his passing happen. They didn’t make life any easier for him, though.
If you’re working full-time on a project, donations are your lifeblood.
This is where we fundamentally disagree. This is only true if the developers puts the project above themselves, which is the wrong attitude on multiple levels. Developer owe nothing to those donating, they owe nothing to the project and they should never be compelled to accept anything because other people are putting a metaphorical gun to their heads.
And like I said before, even successful projects are barely getting by with donations they are getting. Instead of putting themselves on some imaginary treadmill (one more feature, and we will get people to like us!) it is healthier for everyone if we dropped the pretense that “community is enough” and established beforehand what all parties want to get in order to get something done.
So, here’s the thing: these guys are working full-time on the project. Their only source of income, grants aside, are donations via fundraising. Effectively, they are putting the project above themselves.
The common model for this nowadays is the Patreon / OpenCollective / LiberaPay, where donations are usually given continuously over an indefinite period. It’s closer in form to crowdfunding than it is traditional institutional donations.
This is going to sound shitty: just as the expectation is set that no one should make demands of work done for free, so too is the expectation that development work technically isn’t owed a single penny. Any donor can stop giving, for any reason, at any time.
If I as a donor feel my needs aren’t being met, I can stop donating. As a collective action, a bunch of dissatisfied supporters can do the same all at once.
I’m not saying either side should threaten each other. But let’s not pretend that this is some hoity-toity Utopian model where donors selflessly hand over money with no expectations, and the developer just works on whatever. If your livelihood depends on it, if you can’t put bread on your table without it, then you’ve got to keep your backers happy.
you absolutely have to build in the tools and utilities
Why? If your argument were “users of the system need to have these type of tools ancillary utilities to be able to use the core product”, I certainly agree. What I am failing to understand why do you think that this must be the responsibility of the developers of the core product.
What is so bad about the developers delegating this away?
What is so bad about the developers delegating this away?
Developmental drift and code rot. Both parties can try their best to keep up with changes and adjustments, but an external resource is always going to lag behind of core. This isn’t necessarily bad, but having it in core at least kind of ensures that future development and updates have to take into account how those things are affected.
Couple of reasons:
-
It’s core. Super crucial parts of the platform should, ostensibly, be done by the core development team, who can ensure they have someone to work on it as needed. If you delegate the development of a core feature to someone who isn’t part of the core team, there is always a possibility that said person will fall off the development wagon, and the feature either languishes, or core team is stuck having to babysit a part neither of them directly worked on.
-
The people building the platform need to have a significant understanding / frame of reference for these parts and how they work. When doing future feature development, they need to be keenly aware of which features touch which fixtures.
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Trying to delegate this kind of thing to volunteers is just such a mixed bag in terms of Quality Assurance that I cannot recommend it. You might get something great! But regardless, you’re delegating to someone who is a relative stranger, who may have done things in a hacky way that will break something else later on, or may have not even bothered with code or documentation. Worse yet: trying to reconcile a volunteer’s PR with upstream is not always a cakewalk, and this can drag on and on and on. I’ve literally seen projects with PRs open that sat in that state gradually getting adjusted, tweaked, and rebased by various volunteers who came and went, that are still open to this day.
I assume you missed all the microservices hype cycle of 2015? The whole idea was to isolate the dev teams into their core functionalities and to only let them talk through specific APIs.
Speaking as someone with 20 years of software development experience and from the work on Fediverser: all I need from the Lemmy devs is in the API that already exists. None of the functionality related to content moderation and instance administration needs to be implemented in Rust and frankly trying to tie it with the core code would make development slower.
Can you trust me on this one? This is not about the Lemmy devs being dicks or not wanting to do this work, this is me saying that they are right when they say that someone else could take care of this instead.
I’d love it if the API that exists was more reliable… It’s getting better, but the amount of basic features that didn’t work (usually without specific combinations of params or unknown ranges, but sometimes not at all) is pretty crippling. (If there’s a central place of discussion, I’d love to hear about it…I don’t speak rust or flutter, but I’ve had to muddle through source several times)
I’ve never done anything as a mod so I have no idea what kind of tools they need, but I noticed enough basic parts to build all sorts of things.
There’s definitely no reason to build it into the core though… Why put it on the machine busy serving everyone? You could do stuff so much cooler if you offload it… Like you could track mod actions against users/communities/servers, give a sample of random posts across their vote distribution, show the top few communities they get down voted… All things psychotic to even consider in the core right now, but a reasonable project for a separate system
And since you seem like you’d get it, I want to share a win I made today. I’ve got a lemmy app I want to mix feeds (including between accounts and servers) to make a unified feed algorithm on your device. I also want it to support kbin, and maybe more… I took a couple cracks at it and charted out several designs, but I was getting too deep into abstraction.
Today, I finished working on a ridiculously generic abstraction layer - it handles not only tracking pagination, buffering, and preprocessing, it also enumerates all of the options in the Lemmy sdk so I can auto magically build most of the controls when I update. It also disambiguates resources (and actors) across instances and could describe valid actions you can take on it (I think that might be too far, so I’m resisting the urge… This time)
Everything is done through the account level, everything knows where it came from and can call the API by passing itself to its account to be worked on. It’s also neatly serializable, you just have to write one function to pull the next page, and the rest is just an absurd amount of generics
Now, if I can figure out how to translate all that into a usable UI, I’ll be getting somewhere…
I just had to share that with someone who can appreciate crazy data flow, it’s been in the back of my head for months and today (after pulling my hair out for an hour and realizing I was forgetting to actually pass the posts to the UI) it worked beautifully
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I like to think of it like this - many hands makes for a very stable project. Stable as in reliable, but also stable as in resistant to change.
Everyone is going to pull in a different direction, and it kind of averages out and slows things down.
Right now, lemmy is extremely immature. It’s amazing how well it’s held up really. There’s a lot to go to get to a solid baseline - just enough to keep
If everyone dogpiled it, someone could easily solve the image problem. Granted, that might block someone else working on the database, and changes to improve or extend federation would likely be set back as they step on each other’s toes.
We could still probably quickly get popular features quickly… For example, one person could get more useful mastodon and kbin federation going in a reasonable period of time. But then, when the core team goes in to overhaul the database or the API, now they need to make sure they don’t break it - and the person who did those changes won’t have the same vision as the core team, and now you have to either refactor the whole thing or work around it until it’s causing too many problems
Certain things can be spun off more easily than others - I think other people have totally taken over deployment of instances.
Some are good candidates but require more maturity - like if they handed off jerboa and the default web client, there’s one place that would need to be reinforced - the API.
Way down the road, they could build plug-in/mod interfaces so instances could choose feed algorithms, or individuals could come up with their own karma systems, or all sorts of other things.
To get to that point, you have to have a clear vision and stable growth though - that takes time, and is better done by an individual or small team keeping things heading in one direction
You know that you are riffing on the theme of “The Cathedral and The Bazaar”, right?
Anyway… For this to work well things needs to be enforced at the API level, but APIs are exactly that: a contract between two separate applications that need to interface with each other programmatically.
I for one wished that “the API” was not something ad-hoc and developed exclusively for Lemmy, but as long as “Lemmy’s API” can be used as a de-facto standard for discussion-group applications on the Fediverse, then I don’t mind working with it.
Huh, I’ve never actually come across that, I’ve only gotten it indirectly. I bet my first mentor put it on in my head, the guy built out our entire system, then a v2, with one intern while the rest of us extended the framework he built.
As long as the Lemmy API can be used as a de-facto standard
And that’s the sad part… The Lemmy api is not only not that, federation is an API+ that gives an amazing starting point. As far as I can tell, the lemmy API was made with the official clients in mind, and everything else was an afterthought made in a hurry during the last Reddit Exodus
I started reading through the kbin API, which starts with “here’s a link to activity pub standards, they’re surprisingly readable”. They were… It’s unwieldy in a lot of ways and maybe too all-encompassing, but they left so much on the table.
For one, uri ids. Lemmy has them for everything (which is nice), but they aren’t directly usable. You can get the local ID for the home instance, but if I’ve got a url for lemmy.world I want to see on my instance, my only option is a search. Which should kick off federation, but what if it’s there already? I want an endpoint to resolve it (or even to tell me it’s not here right now so I can fall back).
And the way they handled metadata is pretty awkward… They next objects inside of collections of activity data and object properties, which is annoying because it’s so inconsistent. Like, if you get a comment response, it gives you the comment reply, which is basically a comment without the usual metadata like vote count or the full actor object.
It gives you too much, then suddenly too little - I don’t need the bio, tagline, and banner of a server every time I see a post, and I also don’t need it for the community and user
But I do need the comment votes when I get a reply - I’ll wait on the comment chain and root post, but I don’t want to have to build a post-body only component to show while I wait to replace it with the whole thing
I do really like that they autodoc everything… Even if a lot of it is indecipherable with no context offered. Like the honeypot parameter on getPosts… It’s actually intended to be a honeypot. Like if you set it to true, it’s supposed to not give you posts, or log you or something? I tracked down a one line confirmation on GitHub which left me baffled. I had to try it… It didn’t seem to do anything
/Rant
It is getting better though, the amount of completely breaking changes that pop up is very frustrating, but this time around it is significantly improved
Yeah same. I’ve been looking forward to sublinks for quite a while now. I’m jumping to it as soon as it’s ready
What is sublinks?
Update: there was a link in the article, thanks though!
“Sublinks, crafted using Java Spring Boot, stands as a state-of-the-art link aggregation and microblogging platform, reminiscent yet advanced compared to Lemmy & Kbin.”
I can’t wait to migrate from Lemmy to it. Looks good and all Apps should be working with it
Followed Sublinks on Mastodon for updates 😼
Yeah, I’m pretty excited about it. Apparently the Pangora (Lemmy fork) dev joined forces, and the new UI is starting to look great.
Java is horrible. And Lemmy is open source. We could just fork it and have the best of both worlds.
The core issue here is that there are too many things to do, and too few developers to do them. By the way, for a huge number of these things that need to be done, there is most likely at least one person who thinks it’s the absolute highest priority for Lemmy. Forking would not help fix this issue, it would only make it worse.
In other words: if you’re a Rust dev, you can just fix it in Lemmy anyway, so there is no benefit from forking. If you’re not a Rust dev, then after forking, you will have a new repo to create issues on, except you’ll have 0 devs to actually fix them.
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GDPR applies to any entity that processes personal data. That includes instance owners. In fact of you look up GDPR enforcements you can that it’s also enforced against private persons.
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Maybe you should reread what you wrote? You said there’s no way GDPR would ever apply. I said it does. You said there are no enforceable actions, there are. the part you thought makes you right is the “criminal charges” part but that makes zero sense to begin with because GDPR, as an EU wide regulation, imposes only fines and no criminal charges.
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Hey everyone, I just wanted to thank you for the lively conversation and thought-provoking insights. We don’t have to agree on every point (or at all), but I’ve decided to synthesize a lot of thoughts and ideas from these conversations into a blog post: https://deadsuperhero.com/2024/03/economic-musings-on-federated-networks/
I know you said it is a brain dump, but your follow up still seems mostly an emotional reaction to how the devs responded rather than a reasoning synthesis process.
E.g, your “Where Fediverse Software Differs”, it seems like you want to pay off the set up you’ve placed in the previous paragraph (about the difficulty of being an open source developer), but this payoff never comes and instead you end up the argument with “The feature requests valid, and the devs responded like dicks”.
Even if we take “the feature request was valid” for granted, it does not follow that the devs must act on it right away. If the Lemmy devs acknowledged the issue and said “You are absolutely right and we strongly advise anyone hosting an instance in the EU if they are worried about GDPR”, then what? Do you think that whoever wrote the “perfectly valid feature request” should still be pushing for making it a higher priority? On what grounds?
Also:
The operators, who to some degree help the project gain visibility, support, and money, are themselves doing unpaid labor: community building, moderation (…)
shouldn’t ever be used as an excuse to justify free labor from developers. This is not Self-Loathing and Display of Low Self-Steem Olympics. Anyone that comes to me with a “I’m not gaining anything from my work” argument will promptly receive “The fact that you can not establish boundaries and are martyring yourself is not my problem” as a response.
The fact that developers of FOSS software project are able to tell users “If you want something done, you need to give us the resources or do it yourself” should be lauded, not criticized or be seen as “dicks”.
If instance owners are dealing with bad users “and not getting paid for it”, they can do two things: close down the instance, or put proper boundaries and tell what they are willing and not willing to do for free. Alternatively, they can do what I do and make the relationship explicitly transactional: I’m more than willing to work a lot to solve my customer’s problems, but this is only after they actually paid me for it. The fact that I only accept paying customers makes my instance noticeably easier to manage. Even if I’m charging way less than what some people would donate to their favorite instance, the fact that all the users from the instances are paying make for an excellent filter.
The common denominator is relatively simple to understand: good optics of a project leads to more users, leads to more communities, leads to people building all kinds of apps and tools for those communities, leads to more people being willing to donate to a project.
This “donation-based” approach needs to change. Mastodon has no problems with “optics”, and its “Founder and CEO” is reportedly making 30000€ as yearly salary. This is ridiculously low. This is less than what an intern makes at Facebook. The three Lemmy devs are sharing less than 4k€/month. You can make more money by working part-time on Uber Eats. To think that this is enough to claim “they are making some money” is frankly absurd.
If society in general is so tired of exploitative Big Tech, society needs to give a strong signal that it’s willing to pay for the alternative. If we don’t want to have the most brilliant minds of our generation working on how to optimize the amount of ads that you get to see online, then we need to show that those building better solutions can be properly rewarded. It’s not up to the developers to try to build out everything perfectly and then go around begging for people for breadcrumbs and their seal of approval.
To sum up: I’m not saying that developers need to be worshipped because they can do what others can’t. I’m also not saying that the Lemmy devs were right in how they communicate with its users, but I am saying that they are absolutely right in establishing their priorities and not let their work be dictated by someone that is not putting any Skin on The Game.
The problem sort of is capitalism right? These public good projects should have public funding. Imagine if the public funding for open source software projects was like that of the Apollo program in the 60s (2.5% of gdp).
I am not sure I’d be using any mass communication platform that is primarily developed and/or funded by any government.
But anyway, I really don’t like to use hypotheticals as an excuse to not take action. Yes, it would be better if there was more public support for open source. But it doesn’t. Should we just shrug our shoulders and do nothing on our own? Why give away our agency?
I am not sure I’d be using any mass communication platform that is primarily developed and/or funded by any government.
One could argue you’re using one now.
No, not really. We’ve come a long way from ARPANET. Pretty much every large data network is privatized. The foundations working on funding FOSS might even get some of their money from Governments, but they are reasonably independent.
Anyway, my point is less about radical pro- or anti- government and more about asking “Cui bono?” if I suddenly heard about increased interest from any State Government to get more involved into specific FOSS projects.
Personally I believe that yes open source should be created by governments for the global good, that open source should be created by people studying PhDs and that community commons projects should be part of schooling with students learning how to use and contribute to them.
However the main brunt of open source should be created by people who simply want it to exist because we will always outnumber and outperform government workers and students.
Personally I would love to see a world where contributing to community projects is something everyone does as part of their life, not only because it’ll create more open source but because I think it’ll be a much healthier community if we stop seeing everyone else around us as competition and start seeing them as fellow workers in the project to improve life for all.
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@deadsuperhero Damn…breaking GDPR is a big problem
If an entity isn’t in Europe it shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Or the US. The US enforces GDPR on behalf of the EU. If the US catches you with misusing EU citizens’ data, they will let the EU take 10 million off your accounts and/or close your instance.
