This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.
Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.
How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?
Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named
!news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:This also isn’t unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.
Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.
There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.
Overall tho, I’m against the concept of “combining / merging communities” that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.
Are there any plans for a “multi-community” (pka multi-reddit) to allow users to combine multiple communities into one? This could give users a neat way to browse/participate in similar communities across instances without having to navigate to each one manually.
What do you mean by combining in this context? If they mutually agree to combine because they have aligned interests I don’t see anything wrong with that. An external entity combining them I agree would lead to a bunch of problems.
I asked in the other thread about GDPR.
Nobody thinks it’s very interesting but if instances don’t follow gdpr, the entire network is at risk of legal consequences.
So please bring this up, even though it’s not very fun.
Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don’t know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn’t do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.
We have a
Legalsection under admin settings, that’s an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We’d need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn’t EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:
- Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
- If the former, delete all data of their data on the server, send it to them, and then (this was the important part) forward the data deletion request to every single partner we were working with.
For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between “we’re thinking about it” and “we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we’ll get to it sometime within the next month”), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.
As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that “no, it’s anonymous” - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.
So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you’re not doing that, you’re not fully compliant.
Kind of shitty, but that’s how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)
Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don’t recall what the time was for a “see my data” request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.
There a different levels of personal data but a unique identifier for a user is one of them because it allows linking information together about a single person, and from there you can try to identify the real person. So an option would be to overwrite all the occurrences of this identifier with random data so you can’t link data together anymore, as long as it’s not also personal data.
Sure, but you’d still have to delete all their written posts - which is really what all this is about.
You don’t have to bother with GDPR until you’re a certain size company
That’s what I thought too until I looked it up. It applies to individuals as well.
If an individual runs a web server and processes personal data of individuals within the European Union, then they are subject to the requirements of GDPR. GDPR applies to anyone, including individuals, who processes personal data of EU residents, regardless of whether they are operating as a business or on a personal basis. It’s important for the individual running the web server to comply with GDPR’s data protection principles and obligations to safeguard the personal data they process.
What does “processing” data mean though?
Asking chat gpt, so take it with a bit of salt, but it’s usually correct about these things.
In the context of data protection and GDPR, “processing” refers to any operation or set of operations performed on personal data. This includes collecting, recording, organizing, storing, adapting, altering, retrieving, using, disclosing, transmitting, and deleting personal data.
Processing can be done both manually and automatically. It covers a wide range of activities related to personal data, such as capturing information through web forms, analyzing data for marketing purposes, storing customer records in a database, or even just viewing or accessing personal data.
Under GDPR, any entity or individual involved in processing personal data is required to comply with the regulation’s principles and obligations to protect the rights and privacy of the individuals whose data is being processed.
Hope multiples are ok …
- As platform developers, do you have any thoughts about ActivityPub? Positive/negative critiques, needed developments (in your opinions), usage gripes or tips for other platform devs, future predictions?
- As devs of (now) the second largest platform next to mastodon (by some metrics), which are probably as distinct platforms can be in terms of format, do you have any views on interoperability between platfroms over ActivityPub, where a common critique (AFAIK), from *diaspora devs for example, is that sharing posts/information of different formats just doesn’t work well over AtivityPub and so is one of its major flaws?
- Arguably the fediverse has so far sought to replicate the corporate big-social platforms … should new design evolution occur now and if so how?
- Much has been made by some of how the lack of user-friendliness of the fediverse really isn’t anything to celebrate and should be taken more seriously by users and devs alike (see, eg, Erin Kissane who focuses on mastodon). However much this applies to lemmy (where issues of user mobility probably do apply), do you think the fediverse needs a better story around catering to user needs?
- Do you have any thoughts on the server-based architecture of the fediverse (where all user accounts are bound to a particular user) and whether alternative architectures have a future or could be better (p2p, more single-user based for instance)?
- Should lemmy and the fediverse seek to grow with any and all users or seek to stay relatively small and limited to ensure a healthy cutlure?
- Journalism and journalists … should they be on the fediverse (like the BBC recently with their own mastodon instance) … and if so, how?
- What are the biggest or proudest moments you’ve had with Lemmy so far, and the worst or most embarrassing?
- How does it feel to have so many users using and developing against your software?!
Haha youre a very curious one :D
- See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2348893
- It sure isnt perfect, partly because Mastodon makes no efforts to be compatible and expects everyone else to cater to their way of doing things. Regardless, the fact that you can interact between different platforms is a huge improvement over current social media platforms. And Im certain that interoperability will only get better over time.
- Its already happening, look at Kbin combining the concepts of Reddit and Twitter into one. Or mitra which adds cryptocurrency integrations. There are probably others which Im unaware of.
- Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements.
- Its really genius because it combines the best aspect of centralized (simple login with username/password and an admin who manages technical stuff) with those of p2p (no central point of failure). Real p2p is great in theory, but it requires way too much technical knowledge for the average user, so its unlikely to ever gain mass appeal.
- Personally I think the Fediverse is really the future of social media, so it will grow whether we want it or not. And its much healthier than the corporate platforms with their tracking, advertising and manipulating algorithms, so the more people leave them behind, the better. I dont see a way to influence this growth, we just need to adapt and deal with it.
- Basically my previous reply, I dont know enough about journalism to give a more specific answer.
- The biggest and proudest was definitely when tens of thousands of Reddit users suddenly came here, and most of them actually liked it. Cant say there was anything bad or embarrassing, the experience for me is really positive.
- It feels great, I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.
Have you considered a feature like “sibling community”?
What I mean is, for example, car community on server 1 marks itself as a sibling community to a car community on server 2. Similarly server 2 marks itself as a sibling community to server 1, ie it is two-way.
When communities have been linked bi-directionally, any post and comment are shared between the two sibling communities.
This would allow bigger communities to form out of smaller communities, thereby preventing discussions from being fragmented and showing the true size of Lemmy, across servers.
Will you implement an sorting algorithm that would show more content from small, neglected, unknown communities/instances on the main /all/ timeline so that they are more discoverable and will be seen rather than only showing the most-liked posts from huge communities/instances?
Are there any plans to make an upvote history log available for users to view? I loved looking back over my upvoted content occasionally, but now I have to specifically save them to be able to keep track of them.
I asked this in the original thread but I’ll repeat it here:
-
Are there any limitations with the ActivityPub protocol you find limiting? Do you have recommendations for future versions of the protocol?
-
Do you have any thoughts on the AT Protocol (a potential competitor to AP)?
Limitations no, if anything the protocol is too extensive and lets you do too many things (or do the same thing in different ways). But thats somewhat expected for a protocol which can handle all types of social media platforms. I think the protocol is fine as is, but it needs minor changes here and there to keep up with how it is being used in the real world. The FEP process is doing a good job of that.
From what I know the AT protocol used by Bluesky is entirely centralized, so it doesnt look like a competitor yet. They claim that it will be decentralized in the future, but I will believe it when I see it. For now the decentralization seems more like a marketing gimmick.
I’ve been following BlueSky closely for a while and I’ll just add a few points here:
-
There is currently a federation sandbox for developers, it’s definitely on the way but it is a significantly different model than AP. Severs are really “dumb” and it has an emphasis on using a handful of services to crawl the network and generate a pipeline of all posts.
-
Moderation and custom algorithms are also a part of the decentralized model. Custom algorithms are out now, and custom moderation services are also under development.
Having played with both AP and ATP a fair amount they definitely both have strengths and weaknesses, very different approaches to decentralized social networking.
-
-
Hi! This isn’t really a question, but I was a former admin on Lemmy.ml and I just want to say that I really appreciated the opportunity to be on your team and it was a really valuable experience for me! I’m no longer an admin due to inactivity and personal life events causing me to no longer have the time to serve such a role, but I enjoyed the time I was and I really hope I was able to make a positive contribution to the instance!
Thank you for your continued work developing this project and running your instance comrades! This is still by far my favourite fediverse platform, actually, favourite social media in general. I intend to continue using both Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad and I hope I can continue to contribute by using Lemmy when I have the chance!
Thanks for the software!What is your and others Devs opinion on the pre-emptive de-federation of 20k hexbear users by 120k user instance lemmy.world?
Would you think Ranked Choice voting for admins i.e. with the Schulze method - which Debian
uses - integrated into the sites would mean that better community supported decisions can be made for both moderation as well as in comments/communities about stuff?Also: is there a remind me in 2 month of this post option?
For obvious reasons, we don’t want to be involved in inter-server conflicts. Admins are free to run their servers however they see fit.
Would you think Ranked Choice voting for admins i.e. with the Schulze method - which Debian power-genius uses - integrated into the sites would mean that better community supported decisions can be made for both moderation as well as in comments/communities about stuff?
I don’t know how the debian one works (I’m also personally a fan of olympic score / range voting over ranked choice). Because of the possibility of weaknesses of these community-moderation proposals(people creating fake users to vote, and gaming them in hundreds of other ways I can’t think about) I’d rather not stress-test them in lemmy.
We don’t have a remind-me, but someone could implement it, it’d def be useful. I don’t even think there’s an open issue for that one yet.
Do you know about majority judgement? If you know about it or check it out, what do you think about it? What do you wonder about it? Do you want to challenge something about it? What would you want to explore about it?
Looks like its a subset of range / score voting, but only scores of [1-4] are allowed (as opposed to range voting which doesn’t specify the number of scores, but its usually 1-10 or 1-100), and it uses the median, instead of the average for some reason.
I see how majority judgement could be seen as a subset of range or score voting.
A crucial difference between range/score voting and majority judgement is that one uses numbers and the others judgements. A majority judgement ballot could list all the possible candidates or options, and for each of them, there’d be a list of possible judgements. You can say that you consider a candidate “terrible”, “bad”, “meh”, “good”, “amazing”.
The idea is that humans tend to think in terms of judgements more readily than with numbers. A good ballot would find what words evoke useful judgements for candidates, as each group of voters has its own social language.
For example, with my partner we have a list of movies that we vote on. We have judgements that include “I’ll leave the house if you play that sh*t”, or “Omg yes!”. It’s great to add a movie to the list and find that one of the judgements in our made up ballot matches our personal judgements so well!
This is something I think majority judgement can do better than range/score voting: it can reflect human judgements better than with scores. In that way, it is more intuitive than range/score voting.
One benefit of majority judgement is that leaders chosen through it would know the judgement that they came into power with. If someone is elected into a powerful role knowing that half of the voters think they’re “ideal” for the job, that’s quite different than knowing that they were elected with half the voters thinking they were “inadequate”. This means, ideally, that the legitimacy of incompetent leaders can be reduced.
Note that the amount of possible judgements in a ballot can vary. To make things quick and easy, I’ve had silly elections with three judgements, such as “nope”, “ok”, “omg yes”. I’ve also had elections with nine judgements.
If you want to reduce the probability of having multiple winners, more judgements are a good idea. In general, the amount of judgements should depend on what the stakes are (higher stakes should go beyond just a couple of judgements), how many options there are (few options require few judgements), and the amount of voters there are (few voters require many judgements).
I think the reason for using the median is so that a judgement can be chosen as representative of each candidate. In the “nope”, “ok”, “omg yes” example above, if the median of the winning candidate is 3, you can tell the candidate that the score that they were chosen with was “omg yes”. If the average of the winning candidate is 2.4, you can’t really translate that as succintly, given that 2.4 is between “ok” and “omg yes”.
I hope it’s clearer why I love this voting method!
One of the major complaints on Reddit was the mod governance structure, with rank dependent on who showed up first. On the roadmap, do you see implementing other ways to govern mods, maybe something like how a lot of video game guilds govern themselves?
As a communist, I’m also receptive to a more democratic and less-hierarchical style of moderation. A LOT of reddit communities have been wrecked by an absent top moderator, who suddenly and suspiciously “becomes active” and removes the moderators who have been keeping the sub going for years.
We’ve had several people make proposals on github, but my issue has always been this: these are mostly untested, and potentially insecure. In the online space without any sort of real-person verification, If some kind of voting on mod actions were implemented, people could just create fake accounts to game the system, or find other ways.
AFAIK there hasn’t been any forum or community software that doesn’t implement the top-down chain of trust model. And of course this is less of concern with decentralized software like lemmy, where people always have the option to host their own instance, or create their own community, and moderate it exactly as they see fit. That’s not an option you have with reddit.
Part of what you would need to create is a qualified voter system.
For a meme sub, maybe the qualified voters are known participants in the community over a period of time.
For a more technical sub like what AskHistorians is on Reddit, voters are those qualified to answer questions.
It doesn’t have to be open to everyone, just the interested.
And you keep coming back to the federation model as a way to keep this in check, but it is still a dictatorial model and the only answer to dealing with a bad head mod is to destroy a community and lose the history of that community.
“qualified voter system” sounds all too much like karma that’s readily gamed with repost bots creating a worse experience for everyone.
What inspired you to create Lemmy?
Any thoughts on adding emoji (or custom) reactions to posts? Might be a fun free alternative to Reddit’s award system. Might just add clutter.
Edit: nvm, found an open issue where you said you’d like to add it but there are lots of other things to do first: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2541
Here’s some lemmy gold for your contribution
✨🪙✨
Edit: I see its silver on Macs, so… lemmy coin?
Just as with reddit’s awards it would just be clutter
Maybe i would approve of just one special award award that you can grant once per day to a post or comment. But not tens of different icons atop of every post that would be awful.
I generally like awards, but on Reddit I’ve completely ignored them on posts. It was just too many of them.
I liked the awards for comments though, as they helped pick out comments from the bottomless pit. Not really a problem on Lemmy yet…
We did it at hexbear, the changes might make it upstream some day!
With instances already disappearing (eg. vlemmy), content is being lost. Are you considering a lemmy archive?
Every instance automatically archives content from other instances that it federates with (though this doesnt include images). An archive sounds like a good idea, but we certainly dont have the capacity to take on another project. It would have to be done by someone from the community.
Why Unicode usernames aren’t supported yet? After all, a big part of the world’s population don’t use the Latin alphabet in their native languages.
Simple, no one has implemented it. Dessalines and I are busy with lots of things, so we rely on community contributions.
Any regrets during your time working on Lemmy? Like implementing a feature and then later on thinking “Shit. This sucks, but I can’t remove it now or it will fuck up everything later.”
Probably infinite scrolling in jerboa, as its a very harmful psychogical anti-pattern. Now that I’ve added it, people have been extremely resistent to my insistence that it should be done away with.
I didn’t realize that you developes jerboa too! Thanks for not branding it something like “the official lemmy mobile client”
I use jeroba and I would at least love the option to turn off infinite scroll
