This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they'd like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky@lemmy.world about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
NLNet Funding
First of all some good news: We are currently applying for new funding from NLnet and have reached the second round. If it gets approved then @phiresky@lemmy.world and SleeplessOne will work on the paid milestones, while @dessalines and @nutomic will keep being funded by direct user donations. This will increase the number of paid Lemmy developers to four and allow for faster development.
You can see a preliminary draft for the milestones. This can give you a general idea what the development priorities will be over the next year or so. However the exact details will almost certainly change until the application process is finalized.
Development Update
@ismailkarsli added a community statistic for number of local subscribers.
@jmcharter added a view for denied Registration Applications.
@dullbananas made various improvements to database code, like batching insertions for better performance, SQL comments and support for backwards pagination.
@SleeplessOne1917 made a change that besides admins also allows community moderators to see who voted on posts. Additionally he made improvements to the 2FA modal and made it more obvious when a community is locked.
@nutomic completed the implementation of local only communities, which don't federate and can only be seen by authenticated users. Additionally he finished the image proxy feature, which user IPs being exposed to external servers via embedded images. Admin purges of content are now federated. He also made a change which reduces the problem of instances being marked as dead.
@dessalines has been adding moderation abilities to Jerboa, including bans, locks, removes, featured posts, and vote viewing.
In other news there will soon be a security audit of the Lemmy federation code, thanks to Radically Open Security and NLnet.
Support development
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
- Liberapay (preferred option)
- Open Collective
- Patreon
- Cryptocurrency
Another option here is FEP-d36d which is a standard for group-to-group following. This looks to me like a slightly more organic and opt-in approach.
Any opt-in approach will be irrelevant. Most user never change the defaults.
Example are "multireddit" feature. Statistically speaking, nobody used them and they never mattered.
Imagine a combination of /r/books /r/books2 and /r/books3
Owner of /r/books goes mad with power (as tgey all do) abd sells out the community.
So you post in /r/books2 because you use the multireddit, and if everyone else did, the defective owner would be transparently bypassed.
But what actually happens ?
To 99% if users in /r/books, you have simply ceased to exist. New users still to biggest /r/books and never know of the alternatives.
Multireddits are socially irrelevant.
The default MUST whole fediverse aggloneration which the users filters out what they don't like out of
By manual removal of individual communities
By including or subscribing to circulating blacklists of communities (think spamfilter lists)
And by the owner of their instance defederating from other servers.
I think one thing you're missing here is that under such a system the defaults would likely become your locally hosted /c/books rather than the largest one. Even still you'd probably see posts from the largest books communities because /c/books@your_instance follows multiple /c/books@big_instance. Community blocking would likely still work as it currently does so any books communities that you were not fond of could still be blocked.
There is still the issue of where do you post and I think the answer looks something like:
Which is more or less how most people would decide where to post book stuff anyway.
Yes, the majority of content would still come from bigcommunity/c/books, the crucial difference in that system is that posting in otherserver/c/books would get the same probabibility of being viewed by random and non logged users.
I cannot emphasize enough how important that is. It is the only way to break the stranglehold that bigcommunity/c/books will always have over almist every lemmy users.
Without this, this is just reddit all over again. Meet the new boss, same as old boss.
Who's Lemmy's spez?
The main difference of Lemmy compared to Reddit is the ability that communities have to walk away, as I explained in another comment: https://discuss.online/comment/5393546
The problem is communities could just as easily walk away from reddit as they do lemmy. Yet they don't. Lemmy has the same issue with critical mass of users.
The communities should be fediverse wide, not under the grips on one mod team.
I just had an issue that might be interesting in your case. You can read it up on !newcommunities@lemmy.world, but long story short, the mod of a community wasn't happy with the way I wanted to bring some meta discussion into the community.
The main difference in this kind of situation between Lemmy and Reddit is that