This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @[email protected] , SleeplessOne , or @[email protected] 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 @[email protected] 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
- Cryptocurrency
Please stop using time zone abbreviations. Everyone can read an offset (UTC +02:00 in this case). But almost everyone has to look up the abbreviation
No, I can not read an offset. Because we have summer time and winter time here, and I dont instantly know what the offset is for which one.
Has Lemmy.ml been contacted by law enforcement yet to hand over user data? If yes, when was it, and what did you hand over?
Nope, never.
Is there a public roadmap of some sort?
Maybe a blog post like “a year in review and what’s up for this year”
I’m not talking about bugs or minor tweaks. Just a general where are we, where are we coming from and where are we going to? What are important milestones?
I think a lemmy roadmap for the next year is hard, because scope and even individual features depend on funding (for example, nlnet funds specific features).
Maybe something like Mastodon’s roadmap would be possible though (with no specific timeline)? https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
Do you have any estimate of how much storage (in GB) all the posts ever posted across Lemmy have taken up, to date? (Excluding media)
Something tells me lemmynsfw has the largest disks. :)
I think they have the smallest dopamine receptors
A lot of people say there are a bunch of tankies on Lemmy which really begs the question: Where do you all keep your tanks and can I drive one?
Maybe the real tankies are the comrades we made along the way
They stay in the bunker except for emergencies like facebooks threats.net . You get to drive one when you can recite the first section of the communist manifesto from memory.
So many apps die before getting any users. For Lemmy however, when was the first time you really thought “Damn, this thing really might actually take off”?
For me it was long before the reddit migration (which was ~7 months or so ago). I noticed lemmy slowly but surely gaining traction. It felt more dead than it does now, but the trend was slow and steady growth, which is always a great sign. People were using lemmy, liking it, and sticking around.
At the same time, it was clear that we weren’t making the mistake of all the other reddit alternatives, by promising to be a free speech haven for bigoted communities. Those people actively did our work for us by warning their communities to stay away from Lemmy and its tankie devs, thereby making Lemmy a much more enjoyable place from the very beginning. That was a crucial test: we were not willing to sacrifice our values for growth’s sake.
It’s great to see that positivity confirmed by a researcher who did a qualitative and quantitative analysis about Lemmy migration, and finding that >90% of people saw themselves using Lemmy in the long term. We can all be very proud of that, and it means we have a bright future.
How did you feel when everyone was coming from Reddit to Lemmy?
Excited, but also extremely stressed out and exhausted. For about 2 months I was getting an average of 4 hours of consistent sleep a night after that happened. We were very happy when things calmed down.
Very excited, and then very overwhelmed because everything started breaking left and right.
Are you incentivized by the burning smell of Reddit like I am?