this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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They've now said they're open to a PR that implements captchas in 0.18, which will require new work since it's not just a matter of reverting the removal from 0.17. I look forward to seeing OP's submission.
Looks like someone already opened a PR to roll back to a retrofitted solution (I had to wait until the weekend before I could find the time to work on this).
The devs are willing to accept a retro-fitted captcha (rather than just mCaptcha) in time for v0.18 and they communicated as such about 9 hours ago (for me). So for me, my push for visibility is complete unless they block the incoming PR for whatever reason. The devs have been made aware that this is contentious and the community could be impacted negatively and they see the need for it.
For me, that indicates that the Lemmy devs will listen to key, important issues, that impact the health of the larger fediverse as long as the community is clear about what the largest issues actually are.
A lot of folks here characterized me as someone wanting to "brigade", but that's not quite true. I just know that sometimes developers don't know what's going on with admins unless the admins are loud, clear, and coordinated. That doesn't mean that I was asking folks to "force" the devs to do anything or be abusive, just that enough feedback might convince them to see things from a different perspective than a perfect technical solution.
The language of your post was quite hostile and painted (and continues to paint) the developers as being out of touch with instance admins. The instance admins are already "loud, clear and coordinated", and are working in full communication with the maintainers.
The majority of PR's coming into the project are coming from instance admins seeking to solve their personal pain points.
Both the issue and the PR you're referring to were created by ruud, the admin of the single largest Lemmy instance, lemmy.world. Both your signaling to this issue and the outcry it attempted to rally were completely unnecessary.
Right now the instance admins that I'm working with are largely independent with only a couple of outliers. The newer instances that have just joined the fediverse didn't really echo back their concerns. So while you're statement might be true (I dunno, I don't see any coordination, and it's not always clear what admin concerns are important.) the rapid growth has brought even more stakeholders and admins to the fediverse. Some far less technical than others. I'm going to need more proof of deeper coordination, because as it stands many Admins say "Devs are tankies" and refuse to federate with the maintainer's instance, let alone contribute code or money.
This is a new phenomenon, the total lines of code written by the primary devs are still much larger than any other combination of PRs. I don't envy the position of having to sort through thousands upon thousands of PRs that may or may not coincide to the project's vision or code quality standards. Rolling back to a known prior state is almost always lower effort than minting a fresh new implementation.
Also, ruud did not create the PR I'm referring to, that honor goes to TKillFree. Heck, why do you think I'm attacking the author here rather than trying to bring more weight to his Github issue? It's because of ruud that I even know what's going on - and the instance admins I know were pretty clueless about the pending change.
I'll grant you that my tone and signalling needs work, but I do think that an attempt to rally more folks did indeed influence the solutions that the maintainers were willing to accept. From "New, better implementation only - remove the existing flawed one now" to "Okay we can keep the flawed method, but we need an enhanced version and soon".
At this point its hard to tell because we don't live in a universe where I didn't make that post to compare. Maybe you're right and this would've all shaken out eventually.
Are you in the Matrix server? This is where the coordination is happening between both maintainers and the development community, as well as playing out across Github issues.
You just said you're only interacting with a small group of independent admins, but now you're making a conflated statement of "many Admins". They have a right to their opinion, but they can't also expect the maintainers and devs/admins who are contributing code to listen to their demands when they're bringing nothing to the table except complaints and personal attacks.
You have the choice to either support with code, support with money, or be happy with what you got for free and if you don't like something you can make changes to it yourself.
The only reason you got what you wanted in the end was because someone else put in the work to make it happen, which I'm certain would have happened regardless of your post because it was already being raised both in the Matrix channel amongst other admins as well as by ruud.
Guess I best get over there then. Sounds like a place to voice my concerns without resorting to public appeals.
I can be working with a small set of independent instance admins (brought together by a newer instance and discussions mostly through discord) and I've helped them test a few things and our little discord meta-community is already constructing new features, auto-posting bots of different types (RSS feeds, even posts, etc), and a few other things.
However, this is different from "Most Admins" where my interactions are largely based in the meta/support channels for other instances. This is a much more confusing population to me since many were exposed to the entire "Lemmy is for Authoritarian Communists" that was making the rounds on reddit. It's resulted in a newer cohort of Admins that aren't nearly as friendly to the development team.
Nah, I would've made the change myself, but it wouldn't do a darn thing because it depends on the inherent security of less technical admins. This project is as much impacted by individual decisions as they are collective ones.
And until the maintainers changed their mind, they likely wouldn't have allowed a resurrection of the old Captcha anyways - so your point about another person "doing the work" only was really possible once the maintainers communicated that it was acceptable. Because, as stated in my previous point, an individual instance with this change (reverting captcha) doesn't protect them from instances that don't.
This all points back to my original point which revolves around new admins understanding the importance of engaging the maintainers and making themselves heard. The fact that people who already do this took offence to my post is a little bizarre because I'm clearly not talking about the people who haven been communicating.
Sure, those who've been with the Fediverse for a bit are familiar with Matrix and how to use it to communicate back to the core developers. But the new influx of instances and their admins either A - don't know where to go, B - don't care, or C - are so ideologically opposed to the rumors they want nothing to do with them.