cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/26272438

Hello!

I am sunaurus, the head admin of lemm.ee. Ever since I created my instance, I have been following a lot of public and private discussion channels between different parties involved with Lemmy. As I’m sure many others have also noticed, the discussions in such channels sometimes get heated, and in fact recently, I feel like there has been a constant trend in these discussions towards a lot of demands, hostility, negativity, and a general lack of empathy between different participants in the Lemmy network.

I am writing this post for a few reasons:

1. I would like add a bit of positivity by expressing my gratitude towards every single person who has helped improve Lemmy.
2. I want to speak up in defense of different people who have been receiving negativity lately.
3. There are a few false rumors spreading on Lemmy, which I would like to try and counteract with very simple evidence.
4. I want to remind everybody that at the end of the day, all of us care about building and improving Lemmy. We all have the same goal, and it’s too easy to lose sight of that.

I will split up what I want to say in this post by different user groups - users, mods, admins and developers. I understand that many people belong to several (or even all) of these groups, but I just want to highlight the value of, and express my gratitude to each group separately.

Users

At the end of the day, Lemmy would not be worth anything without the users. Users bring Lemmy to life by posting great content, getting involved in discussions in comments, helping surface interesting content for others through voting and even keeping the platform clean through reports. I am extremely thankful for all the users who have given me so much enjoyment on this platform.

I believe that users often get treated unfairly on Lemmy based on what instance they are participating from. I’m sure so many of you have noticed comments around Lemmy along the lines of “Oh, another user from , I’m going to completely ignore your stupid takes”. I’ve also many cases of people treating users as second-class citizen if they are not on the same instance - for example, I’ve seen users who are active and valuable participants in communities on another instance receive comments like “why are you participating in our discussions, go back to your own instance”. In my opinion this is completely counterproductive to the whole idea of federation. On a human level, I can understand it - you’re far more likely to notice or remember what instance somebody is posting from if you have a negative experience. As a result, as time goes by, people tend to develop negative views of each instance, despite potentially having had many positive interactions with other users of those same instances. The message I want to put out here is that instances, especially bigger ones, are not monoliths - do not judge users based on what instance they are browsing Lemmy from, judge them by their actual words and actions.

Mods

There are some excellent communities already on Lemmy, and these communities are all continuously being built up and maintained by mods. Mods put in huge amounts of their free time and energy in order to provide spaces for all Lemmy users. They form the first line of defense against bad actors, they keep communities alive and often receive no praise, only criticism. I am very grateful to everybody who has dedicated time to building communities on Lemmy.

Users rarely notice the lengths mods go to in order to keep communities running smoothly - mods more often than not only get noticed when users disagree with some mod actions. I believe mods deserve a lot better than this. Constructive criticism can of course be useful to improve communities, but it must be balanced with empathy and kindness towards people who have been putting in effort to provide something for users. Remember that there is another human being reading your words when you start writing about the mods of any particular community. Users who are not happy with mods of a certain community always have the opportunity to start their own community and run it as they like.

Admins

Admins provide two main key functions for the network:

1. Taking care of the actual infrastructure of Lemmy
2. Working as a higher level defense against bad actors, in cases where mods are not enough

I can tell from my own experience that being an admin of a bigger instance requires constant energy and attention. I don’t believe that there is a single medium-to-big instance where the admins have not put in hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of their free time, as well as in many cases, probably their own money. This is a service which admins provide for free, and it is necessary in order to keep the Lemmy network healthy. I have endless respect for anybody who is willing to put themselves in the position of a Lemmy admin.

I have seen awful messages towards admins from all the other groups listed here, including other admins. These messages range from condescending and rude, to downright hateful. I have seen admins treated as useless and their work taken for granted. I have seen people getting frustrated with admins for not spending every waking minute on Lemmy. I have seen some users consistently spreading provably false rumors about particular admins in an effort to tarnish their reputation on Lemmy.

Before you take out frustration on admins, please remember that they are also humans who have been working tirelessly to improve Lemmy in their own way.

Also, a reminder: the absolute best feature of Lemmy is that users are free to pick their instance - and as a result, users are also free to pick their admins. Even more than that, users can always become their own admins by spinning up their own instance. Yes, this requires dedication, effort, and research, but that’s exactly my point. It’s not easy running an instance, and mistreating people who do this as a free service is completely unacceptable.

Developers

Lemmy development has been lead by a few key maintainers, with a massive amount of smaller contributors. The software is constantly being improved at a very good pace, and everybody is able to benefit from this effort at no cost whatsoever. I am extremely grateful to everybody who has participated in the development of the Lemmy software, and other related software, as without you folks, none of us would even be here now.

There seems to be a huge amount of people with very little appreciation of the work that has gone into the software. I’m sure many of you have seen countless messages where people express that the devs should be doing more in one way or another. “They should work faster”, “they should prioritize this obviously most important feature”, “they should be available 24/7 to offer support”, etc. I just want to take a moment here and acknowledge what core maintainers have already done for Lemmy:

• Years worth of work on the code itself
• Offering support to the community and other admins
• Reviewing literally thousands of pull requests on GitHub
• Acting fast in stressful situations where the Lemmy network has been overloaded
• Not abandoning the project in the face of constant hateful users
• Sacrificing literally hundreds of thousands of euros in missed salaries which they could have been getting if they were working for a tech company instead of working on Lemmy

I also want to take this moment to discredit some rumors which I have seen repeated too many times:

1. Rumor: Lemmy devs do not accept outside code contributions

This is completely false - the maintainers are completely open to (and even constantly asking for) contributions. When somebody starts contributing, they will receive support and code reviews very quickly. I can tell you that I have experienced this myself several times, but that’s anecdotal, so let me also provide evidence:

a. Contributors list for the Lemmy backend: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors

b. Contributors list for Lemmy UI: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/graphs/contributors

Both of these lists include 100 different names, and that’s only because GitHub literally caps these pages to 100 users. Actually, the amount of different contributors is even bigger. If Lemmy devs did not accept and encourage outside contributions, then there would be no way for these lists to be so big.

2. Rumor: Lemmy devs work too slowly

This is an extremely entitled and frankly stupid claim. I try to keep on top of the changes made in the Lemmy repo, and let me tell you, the pace of improvement is very good.

I very firmly believe that if the network started downgrading to Lemmy versions from ~8 months ago, the whole network would just collapse, as none of the instances could keep up with the current volume. That is to say, we have come an extremely long way since last summer alone.

Let me provide some more evidence. Take a look at the Pulse page for the Lemmy backend on GitHub: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pulse. As of writing this, Lemmy devs have merged 18 pull requests in the week leading up to this post - that’s an average of 2.5 merged PRs per day. This is extremely good for a project with a small underfunded team.

3. Rumor: Lemmy devs do not prioritize the important issues

There are two sides to this. First of all, there are endless users who turn to the Lemmy devs with what they believe is the most important issue and should immediately be prioritized - the problem is that almost none of these endless users have the same view of what the most important issue actually is! In that sense, it’s literally impossible to please everybody, because everybody wants different things.

On the other hand, even when Lemmy devs do prioritize things which some users have been desperately asking for, I have on several occasions seen a dismissive response along the lines of “too little too late”. Basically, the demands made are often unrealistic and impossible to meet.

If you are somebody who feels like Lemmy devs are not doing enough, I would ask you to please take a step back, look at the actual contributions which they have made, and consider how you yourself would feel if after making such a massive contribution, you would still need to listen to countless strangers on the internet tell you how you’re not good enough in their opinion.

Conclusion

Lastly, I am very thankful to anybody who took the time to read to the end of this post. Again, my goal is to try and defuse some of the hostility, as well as to put out a message of gratitude and positivity. I am very interested in the success of Lemmy as a whole, and that is much easier to achieve and maintain if we all work together. Thank you, I hope you're doing well, and have a nice weekend!

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/4818729

TLDR

• From right now and until April 1st, discuss with your country's community on Lemmy about which song to send and share to the fediverse.
• On April 1st, voting will begin, where you will rank your favourite songs. Any song not submitted by this date will not be featured.
• On April 8th, results of everyone's favourite songs will be published.
• You can use !lemmyvision@jlai.lu for any question, this will be the community for updates and results, make sure to subscribe if you'd like to stay in the loop.

Welcome to Lemmyvision !

Lemmyvision is inspired from Eureddision (itself a reenactment of the Eurovision song contest) which was held on r/europe some years ago, and based on the participation of national communities / instances and the delicate musical taste of their members (you!).

Every country is welcome to participate! The contest follows the rule of "national languages only" but regional languages are welcome too, if your community would like to feature a song in a regional language of your country, that's awesome. The aim is to promote different languages and cultures from around the world, to share more between our online communities across Lemmy, and discover songs from lesser known artists. I hope to make it a regular event, so hopefully this works well for the first edition!

Exceptions can be made for specific instances to participate if they can submit songs closely related to their center of interest, for example, someone from programming.dev asked me if they could participate and send video game soundtrack, which seems fair to me. So for example if a movie-related instance would like to submit a song from a movie soundtrack, it would be welcome.

How it works :

This post, and the !lemmyvision@jlai.lu community will be open on Monday, March 4th, and I will start promoting the event on various instances and communities. From the moment this announcement is posted until Monday, April 1st, Lemmy communities from each country will try to gather its members and vote on a single song to send for everyone to vote. On April 1st, the songs will be locked in, a playlist created to allow you to listen to all of them, and communities will be invited to vote on their favourite out of every songs submitted, the voting period is estimated to last for about a week. On April 8th the results will be published, with a ranking of everyone's favourite songs!

I don't expect countries with a "small" population to be accurately represented on Lemmy, so no worries if you don't have a community and are just a small group of people, or if your country is not even on Lemmy but another platform (Kbin and whatnot), I can make exceptions, just reach out!

Regional languages are welcome as well, for example, France and Spain can submit a song in Basque, you're welcome to promote a regional language instead of a national one!

Song submission

• Each Lemmy community is responsible for their own organization.
• Only one (1) song is to be sent to represent your country.
• If the song contains vocals then it must be in (one of) the official language(s) of your country, or a regional language in your country.
• Songs must have been released within the last year (after January 1st, 2023).
• Songs must not be international hits (I'll update on how this is evaluated).
• Verification will probably require a link to the discussion thread created within your community, to ensure it's a community (not a single person's) decision.

Voting

• I have one month to figure out a way to make voting fair and set up a way to prevent potential cheating (multiple votes per person and whatnot), I'll send updates in this community once I find a satisfying solution, but don't hesitate to make suggestions.
• It will probably require to mention your Lemmy account and which community you associate with to make sure votes are genuine and can be verified
• Results will probably take the shape of a percentage so that voices from "big" countries will not weight more than others.

On Federation

I don't discriminate based on instances, if your account is not on the same instance as your community, that's totally fine. Additionally, if you're on another Fediverse/Activitypub platform and would like to participate, and you're able to federate with your representing Lemmy community, you're welcome to join us, I'd just like to keep organization within Lemmy so it's easier to track participations.

Where to submit songs / votes

Probably right here in this community, I'm going to weight the pros and cons of submitting through a simple thread, or set up a form to use. Will update, but if your community is faster than my decision-making, it's okay if you submit your song by making a thread here!

Would you like to help?

Although I have the motivation to handle things, I'm probably underestimating the amount of effort needed to make this work. If you'd like to help with the organisation of this event, please feel free to reach out, I'd love to have as many people as possible involved!!

Salutations. After lurking around and reading posts for a few weeks, I have just created an account on this instance. Mostly, the experience has been good, but I am having one major issue: Shaka when the walls fell with two-factor authentication. When I press the button in my account settings, I receive the error couldnt_generate_totp. When looking in the Javascript console, I found the following occurred every time I pressed the button:

POST https://startrek.website/api/v3/user/totp/generate 400 (Bad Request)

I received a 404 when navigating to that URL. Is the API for generating TOTP keys not set up on this server? I am concerned about any count where I am unable to properly set up two-factor authentication, and I would be pleased if this difficulty could be rectified. Anyhow, glory to the houses of all involved in maintaining this server as an alternative bastion of Star Trek discussion on the internet.

I just noticed today that old.startrek.website isn't loading properly. The fact that zero people have said anything to the admins makes me wonder if anyone's using it at all. So speak up if you are! I will be happy to fix it for you, but otherwise may just uninstall.

EDIT: It's fixed, we'll leave it for now

http://old.startrek.website/

It'd be nice to see Memory Alpha make the same move...

We had been waiting at 0.18.5 for a while because 0.19 came with some federation bugs (and obviously it would be extremely embarrassing if this instance had issues in that department).

The biggest changes for users are a new scaled sorting method that should prioritize posts from smaller communities (no more Risa dominating the entire feed), the ability for users to block whole instances, and the ability to import/export accounts with other instances (or just back up your account).

Also I'd like to apologize for the downtime; we expected this to be a simple update taking only a few minutes, so I didn't post an alert in advance, but then were some issues that caused us to go offline for several hours.

Lastly, after the update I found I had to clear my browser cache/cookies in order to log in, similarly, users using apps have been reporting they needed to remove and re-add their accounts. You may find you need to do that too!

EDIT: The app Liftoff has a bug preventing login on any Lemmy instance over v0.19.0

WASHINGTON (TND) — A recent survey found nearly 40% of employers avoid hiring recent college graduates in favor of older employees.

Survey reveals tough job market for Gen Z grads due to employer preferences (TND)

According to Intelligent.com, Gen Z college graduates are struggling with many aspects of professional life.

Their survey of 800 U.S. managers, directors, and executives who are involved in hiring, found these key results:

38% of employers avoid hiring recent college graduates in favor of older employees

1 in 5 employers have had a recent college graduate bring a parent to a job interview

58% say recent college graduates are unprepared for the workforce

Nearly half of employers have had to fire a recent college graduate

I've made quite a few posts to /c/risa that are actual OC. I'm either horrible at humor, the timing is bad, or it doesn't work for whatever reason. Extremely low effort memes? Lots of upvotes. If I do high effort stuff that takes an hour or more, I'm just discouraged by the lack of even comments.

So, to tie this all up - is it worth a latinum bar to keep trying to do OC? Do you all even want that (seriously)?

I never played CoH, but this is neat.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9631322

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

Last Friday we finally released Lemmy 0.19.0, after a long development time and extensive bug fixing. Read the announcement to find out about the major changes. A few days later on Wednesday we had to publish 0.19.1 to fix a few more bugs that slipped through.

@phiresky fixed the critical bug with outgoing federation in 0.19. Previously he fixed an authentication bug in lemmy-ui which was blocking the 0.19 release.

@dessalines fixed the broken logic for "hide read posts". He also fixed a problem with email login being case sensitive

@nutomic reenabled pushing to crates.io so Rust developers can easily interact with Lemmy. He also made performance optimizations for /api/v3/site and the optimized the Activitypub context sent by Lemmy, reducing the database size and the amount of data sent between instances. He fixed various tests to prevent random failures in continuous integration 1 2

@dullbananas has long been busy improving the database queries for Lemmy, such as fixing a bug in the way different posts sorts are combined, and improving the test cases.

This is our last update for 2023. It was a very busy year for Lemmy, and it looks like 2024 might have even more changes in store. So lets enjoy these holidays, have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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
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