My Love-Hate Relationship With Lemmy – Gavi's Blog : fediverse

[–] sunaurus@lemm.ee 24 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I just want to add a counter-point to the argument that Lemmy devs are somehow opposed to contributions. In my experience, there has been no resistance to contributing any type of change (I have personally added niche features for running Lemmy in a distributed manner, optimizations, bug fixes, etc). In fact I would claim the complete opposite - I have received plenty of support and good code reviews from maintainers whenever I have wanted to contribute anything.

I think there is truth to the claim that Lemmy maintainers don’t have a lot of patience for people making demands and snarky comments, but that is very different from being opposed to contributions. Also, after running a big instance for a while now, I completely understand this lack of patience - when some of your users just keep being rude to you, it wears down your patience. It’s easy to patiently and kindly respond to the first 100 rude users, but at some point after that, it just becomes gradually more mentally exhausting, to the point where it’s basically impossible.

Even the example provided in the blog post: I don’t think snowe had bad intentions, but I do think they had clearly misinterpreted the situation with that issue, and their comments were needlessly condescending.

[–] MargotRobbie@lemm.ee 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Gabe, a couple of weeks ago, nutomic was asking for ideas on a name for his federated wiki alternative project, I put forth my suggestion that I thought was better (also because I didn't want it to be named after the bin chicken), but he told me, pretty bluntly in fact, that he is sticking with his original choice.

Am I bummed about it? Of course.

But it would be silly of me if I kept pestering him because he didn't do exactly what I want, because at the end of the day, he doesn't owe me anything.

I can make suggestions to him, but he doesn't have to take them, I'm not his manager, and I can take no as an answer. (He could have let me down a little easier though.)

From reading your blog post, I get the impression that you are venting because 1. the Lemmy devs didn't prioritize on the "improved moderation tools" that you wanted and 2. you are unhappy with the way they are running their own instance, which is kind of the point of decentralization that instances are ran independently from development.

Let me ask you a follow-up question to think about (you don't have to answer me): You are putting weight into Sublinks right now, what's to say that you wouldn't have any disagreement with jgrim about the development priorities of Sublinks?

Lastly, sorry I never did the thing that I promised you to do a few months about moderating a comm on lit cafe, been kind of stressed and irritable recently and can't really find the energy to do much creative writing. Sorry.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sorry I didnt mean to be rude to you, unfortunately its always tricky to convey the right meaning over text. I definitely appreciated your input for the naming!

[–] MargotRobbie@lemm.ee 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Totally fine, and I didn't mean to impose, because at the end of the day, I'm just a normal user who shitposts and make dumb jokes here and there.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 points 8 months ago

I wish everyone could be so humble.

[–] gabe@literature.cafe 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's not the case at all. I have had disagreements with jgrim and will continue in the future. The difference in that differing opinions are open for discussion and are not immediately met with hostility or completely shutdown.

The lemmy devs are blatantly lying under this post, and I'm not engaging for the reason that I have better things to do than to argue with them and convince them to accept criticism they are clearly never going to be willing to hear. There's more that goes beyond discussing and making github requests on this project, and a portion of this is based on interactions on the backend within matrix admin channels as well as watching interaction within the github repository itself as well. I have engaged heavily in the matrix chats amongst large lemmy instances on this stuff numerous times. My frustration is shared.

My issue isn't that they aren't doing what I want, it's that they have such opinionated development that they seem truly incapable of taking criticism or feedback from others. Everyone is wrong or the problem except for them. All of the criticism I have laid out has been dismissed under this post as "false criticism" which exemplifies the frustration held. I recognize that this is a large project that requires a lot of energy and time that is difficult for hobbyists to engage in, but they actively push away other hobbyists who try to work on the project with them. I am one of them. All passion and desire to engage in this project is gone.

I am truly despondent about lemmy as a platform and simply login and engage when I feel the random spurt of energy to do so. Outside of that, I just monitor and moderate in the background. This blog post simply explains why. Take with it what you will. 🤷

[–] iknt@lemmy.ml 11 points 8 months ago

The lemmy devs are blatantly lying under this post, and I’m not engaging for the reason that I have better things to do than to argue with them and convince them to accept criticism they are clearly never going to be willing to hear.

Show us what they lie about. The devs have better things to do too btw.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 21 points 8 months ago (5 children)

There is a lot of misleading information in this post.

Something that I notice said consistently by those who have little experience in Lemmy admin spaces is “why not just contribute then?”And the answer people try. And this happens. This unfortunately leads into the next point that is the developer teams behavior.

Dessalines and I had some discussion whether the linked issue should be closed or not. Anyway we decided to leave it open in the end. Then some weeks later a user came along and made a completely offtopic complaint that this decision making process is somehow wrong. I admit that I overreacted by giving a temporary ban for this, but mistakes happen and its completely disingenious to spin this as some sort of general toxic behaviour from our side.

There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.

This is your opinion and I doubt it is as widespread as you think.

Another aspect of this is that the Lemmy devs run two instances: lemmy.ml & lemmygrad.ml

What makes you believe this? I can only speak for myself, and I am not involved with lemmygrad in any way.

The biggest piece that broke all confidence in the Lemmy developers amongst many admins including myself is that during the CSAM spam attacks there was complete radio silence. The developers made no statement on the matter. And when Github requests were made to try and propose ideas about how to fix what happened, the developers explicitly stated they didn’t have time to focus on that. No dialogue.

Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.

As well, when a post was made about Sublinks (A project I will touch a bit more on, and am involved in due to the reasons I have highlighted above) the comments that were made by Lemmy’s lead developers were extremely petty. This lessens peoples confidence in your project, not improves it.

Why do you consider it petty? Its a fact that jgrim never opened any issue for the features he wanted, not did he attempt to contribute with a pull request. Its also true that it took multiple years of fulltime work to get Lemmy ready for production, and I dont see how Sublinks can be any faster when it has only volunteer contributors. That doesnt mean I wish for Sublinks to fail, in fact I hope it will be successful so that admins and users have more choices available, and to improve resilience through independent codebases and development teams.

Generally you seem to have an extremely entitled attitude. Lemmy is an open source project that is provided for free. I would also love to fix all the problems that users report, and implement all those features. But unlike Reddit we are not a billion dollar company with thousands of employees. We are just two individuals funded by donations and working from our homes. There is only a limited number of hours in each day and only so much work we can finish in that time. If you are unhappy with Lemmy then by all means switch to a different platform, because we dont get any direct benefit from having more users.

[–] nix@merv.news 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

“Anyways they would have taken too long to implement” seems like a very odd take considering this is an ongoing issue that is pretty damn important. Some features that should be available is for instances to wipe images from certain dates, “muting” instances to prevent storing any images from instances that are not on an approve list and prevent users outside this list from uploading images to your instance, and an option to prevent any user outside your instance from uploading images to your instance.

Theres many mod tools like these that need priority right now but it seems like they keep getting pushed away

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You can already block federation with certain instances. And the only ones who can upload images are users that are locally registered to your instance.

[–] nix@merv.news 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I dont want to block full federation i want to block image federation from other servers so when the big ones are attacked with csam my server doesnt download it. If someone uploads an image to a community on my server does it not federate and get downloaded by my server?

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 5 points 8 months ago

Thumbnails from remote posts are stored on your server by default. However there is a setting to disable this.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/0.19.3/config/defaults.hjson#L54

[–] gabe@literature.cafe 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It is unfortunate that this is what you have decided to take away from the blog post instead of reflecting on the criticism I have provided. Instead of reflecting on my list of legitimate criticism you have decided to call me entitled and hone in on small aspects of the blog post in attempt to dismiss it completely. Per usual, it is everyone else that seems to be the problem but you. I outlined my own issues with lemmy after a LOT of patience and goodwill. That's lost, and this comment solidifies further why I will switch away from lemmy as soon as I get the chance. Whether you decide to accept the points I have made is on you but ultimately your refusal to recognize the issues I have outlined will cause this project to fade away completely. And that's really sad. I love lemmy as a project and an idea.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

Responding to false criticism is important. For example you were under the mistaken impression that we reject pull requests or issues, or don't care about moderation? All of those are provably false. Look at all the moderation PRs I've closed in the past MONTH alone. This is all easily verifiable if you go to our github accounts and see what we're working on.

You also heard second hand that the sublinks developer is making sublinks because they got a bad reception from us, or were told that we'd reject features? They've never opened a single issue or PR.

Your post seems to mostly be 2nd-hand rumors from people who already don't like us, and not from any people that are actually working on Lemmy. That's perfectly fine, but it'd be wrong to not address these false criticisms.

Entitlement in open source is a real thing, and you would know our pain if you ran a codebase currently in use by > 40k people monthly. To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person. It'd be like if I criticized my grandmother's free meal for it not being to my liking, and demanded she make it my way.

[–] Lionir@beehaw.org 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person.

I don't know how you managed to do this in one thread but I'll leave these two contradictions here:

Lemmy devs claim to both "work full time" on the project because of donations and NLNet grants so sublinks could never reach parity in a reasonable timeframe
Lemmy devs claim that Lemmy is all a labour of love and that asking for a change in leadership and priorities is just "entitled"

Like, I'm not going to deny that entitlement in open source is a thing - it is a thing and it is awful.

However, people are giving you their time, effort and money - you keep dismissing that and doubling down on erasing this work.

I mean, unless you want to tell me how I'm acting entitled to your work despite spending countless hours trying to support my community, spending hours sorting through issues that Lemmy has to label them, spending countless hours advocating for people to make issues and for change in the Lemmy project.

And after all that, trying to have any input on prioritising moderation was met with : (paraphrasing) "I will not change my priorities", "I think you're exagerating moderation issues, they work fine" and plain out refusing to acknowledge lolicon pornography as CSAM, refusing to acknowledge my request to put moderators in Lemmy's matrix channels despite obvious problems during weekend.

Seriously, I kinda expected better from you. I have no trust in Lemmy's leadership and your response here just examplifies that.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I appreciate your work in organizing issues and helping to label them, and I'm sorry if I did not give some things proper weight. But are my priorities not my own? Why is this such an affront that I choose what I think is important? Would you like it if I did the same to you, demanded that you change your priorities to do what I want you to do? What if there are thousands of other people asking you the same thing?

Scale is also left out of the equation here. Thousands people are asking 2-4 devs for features. It is simply impossible to please everyone, unless some people do the open source thing, and work on a feature they'd like to have. Many people have and continue to do this, rather than dismissing the project because the small number of developers can't keep pace with issues.

[–] Lionir@beehaw.org 9 points 8 months ago

But are my priorities not my own? Why is this such an affront that I choose what I think is important? Would you like it if I did the same to you, demanded that you change your priorities to do what I want you to do? What if there are thousands of other people asking you the same thing?

When you accept donations and grants for Lemmy's development and when you work with other people, I think it is normal and good to think about priorities in a more collaborative fashion. I cannot write rust code and many other people cannot do that. When their issues are left ignored, dismissed and repeatedly told that they have no input towards Lemmy's direction - people tend to not want to work with you because they feel that their work is pointless.

Why make an issue if developers admit to not reading them and not changing priorities? Why help towards a collective goal if everyone is just working on their own personal thing? As someone who is not good at writing code - it just feels like shit. My work felt entirely pointless because there was no way for my effort to amount to anything I wanted. Only people who can write code can actually influence the Lemmy project.

I understand feeling burned out but I tried contributing, I tried making things better and all I was met with was "I will not change my priorities" or "I do not think it is valuable to try to bring direction in the Lemmy project" or straight up dismissal or silence. If what you wanted all this time was for you to work on your own thing with no outside input, well, all I can say is you've done good work to make that happen.

I don't think there's anything left for me to tell you.

[–] Penguincoder@beehaw.org 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

because the small number of developers can’t keep pace with issues.

Maybe there'd be plenty more devs if it wasn't written in a new, up and coming, difficult language to understand let alone master. Maybe there'd be more code contributions if existing ones weren't closed because you don't see this being an issue. Maybe there'd be more developers if you'd let there be.

[–] pixelscript@lemmy.ml 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

This is a tremendous amount of cope. Implying there are Lemmy users just lining up to contribute PRs if only it wasn't written in Rust. Give me a break!

If someone was competent enough to author code that's fit to pull into a project like Lemmy, they're more than capable of translating those skills to Rust. No language seeing modern significant use is so esoteric that a reasonably seasoned developer couldn't make something competent in it within a week of starting to learn its syntax. Maybe a day, even, if the language you are trying to learn is highly similar to one you already know.

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[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Maybe there'd be plenty more devs if it wasn't written in a new, up and coming, difficult language to understand let alone master.

Sorry but this is a pretty weird criticism to have. It's like saying that a squirrel would be a better fish if it were a trout. A squirrel is a mammal, not a fish. Lemmy was intentionally written in Rust when the devs started the project. It's clear that it's in Rust by looking at any of the documentation. Yet this comes across as criticizing their project for what they've always said it was, while using said project to do so. Just a bit boggling.

If you like Java, contribute to Sublinks, if you like PHP, there's kbin or many other AP projects. Pick, use, and contribute to the project(s) that use languages and tech that you get excited about. Noone is forcing you to use someone written in Rust. No need to piss on other peoples' parades over language choice (it's not like they're using C# or Perl - kidding there, nothing wrong with Perl :P ).

[–] Penguincoder@beehaw.org 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Yet this comes across as criticizing their project for what they’ve always said it was, while using said project to do so. Just a bit boggling.

No I'm criticising the Developers complaint that there's only a few active developers for Lemmy, and the rest of you freeloaders don't contribute and code.

The number of people who understand Rust, can code in it, know of Lemmy and want to contribute is very few. There would be More developers contributing to Lemmy if it weren't written in Rust.

[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure that it's a complaint from them, so much as an explanation. It's important to realize that developers are human beings with human needs, wants, and feelings. The popularity of Lemmy is not their "fault" and the language choice is rather fundamental to the project itself. Would it be nice if some features were taken up more quickly or implemented in other ways? Yes. But others needs, wants, and feelings are not more important than those of the devs. They need to eat, sleep, provide shelter for themselves, and, importantly, do things that are not coding (for physical, social, and mental health).

The number of people who understand Rust, can code in it, know of Lemmy and want to contribute is very few. There would be More developers contributing to Lemmy if it weren't written in Rust.

And there would be more developers if more people wanted to learn Rust. The low number is just a fact to accept. If one can't accept it, there are plenty of other platforms.

Would you be criticizing them equally if, instead of Rust, they created the project using FORTRAN and made a point of mentioning explicitly that using FORTRAN was the main intent? It's just a weird criticism to me - Lemmy is fundamentally a project started so that the devs could work with Rust. You are criticizing them for their project not fundamentally being a different project. Maybe another comparison would be criticizing specialty water-based paint manufacturing for using a water rather than a VOC-solvent for water-based paint - they're not trying to make other types so, the criticism doesn't make logical sense.

[–] Penguincoder@beehaw.org 6 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the insight and well thought out response. I'll think on it.

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[–] hightrix@lemmy.world 9 points 8 months ago

It is unfortunate that this is what you have decided to take away from the blog post instead of reflecting on the criticism I have provided.

This is a serious problem across Lemmy(and elsewhere). Someone makes a reasonable argument and the responses will all pile on either something in the users comment history or one sentence in 5 paragraphs that they disagree with.

[–] Lionir@beehaw.org 8 points 8 months ago (14 children)

How do I put this? If this is how you respond to criticism, and that's what you've clearly shown repeatedly to do, then you should not be in any leadership position.

You do not apologize even when you admit to be wrong, you blame others instead of taking responsibilities for anything that was said here. It's entirely a dismissive response. You might not have noticed but people do not feel valued at all when they speak to Lemmy's developers. Their input is dismissed, they are told to make issues that you do not care for and when they ask for something to be better prioritized, you effectively tell them to fuck off. You make people feel that their time and effort towards Lemmy is worthless.

With the way you've acted, you have pushed back people from making issues, from contributing in code or otherwise, from wanting to host Lemmy and wanting to be associated with the project. Sincerely, all I can hope at this point is for Lemmy to be forked by better people or to be forgotten about.

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[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Sorry but i have to rant.

There is a lot of misleading information in this post.
Not misleading, straight to the point, on things no one else wanted to point out.

Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.

Yes we were put just aside because the feature we recommended was "pictrs" stuff.

There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.

Thats true and so far many instances ( i dont want to say who, because they should come out if they want to be known ) i and the lemmy.world team have many reports from users, admins that they want a better replacement for lemmy. ( e.g. Sublinks ).

The moderation is TERRIBLE after 0.19, the sorting totally wrong unchangeable, every "resolve" leads to page refresh ( have fun finding your report you left on ). New reports are just never seen again, because you cant sort by new. The "All" view is terrible in reports and private messages. Marking Private Messages as "read" just refreshes the page and on the ui doesnt change anything, but after refresh it is marked as read.

On 0.19 there are some occasions of untested things, like "Remove an admin" is not correctly translated. Something THAT primitive.

We / Jgrim never opened a feature request because we already got enough by seeing in the history of feature requests of others.

The ui gets just worse and worse, untested features goes to prod and not getting even a "Warning Untested feature" flag.
We know you are just some guys in their free time. But then why not take your time, test it, make sure everything works, then release it.
Quality is the key for a thriving software, not pushing versions like its a tournament on how many versions can someone push to prod.
You are not a big corpo that can deploy fast fixes that fix any issues that could block instances, so quality is here even a higher priority.

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Your frustration is palpable and that's disappointing. Lemmy has improved a lot since we all arrived while the software experience is a lot smoother, admins have been clamouring for moderation tools the whole time. Ultimately there needs to be more contribution to do everything that everyone wants, but moderation needs to be a higher priority for sure.

I will say this though. I know you dislike developers discussing, disagreeing or even arguing, but I actually think it's nice to see things in the open.

Whether you find happiness here or elsewhere in the fediverse, I wish you the best of success and not just because you host one of my communities 😂

[–] WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Nicholas Cage looking disappointed as “coders with opinions”, Pedro Pascal looking delighted as “me who likes it here”

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 4 points 8 months ago

I like it here too.

[–] Annoyed_Crabby@monyet.cc 15 points 8 months ago

It's quite exciting to have a similar link aggregation as an option, hope it will federate well with lemmy and the rest of the fediverse. If it can fully federate with mastodon(like able to follow user like a community or something) it will be super. Not sure i understand why open modlog is an issue but to each its own.

Terribly unsearchable name though.

[–] suspended@lemmy.ml 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

@dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml

I am one of the Beehaw admins.

I, personally, have not had negative experiences with you or anyone else associated with the Lemmy software platform.

I appreciate that everyone here, in this thread, has been able to vocalize their praises and constructive criticisms.

I believe that it is very important, for the further development of the fediverse, to keep these conversations open to everyone involved.

Please, let us all reflect on the reasons that we are invested in the fediverse.

Personally, I believe that the fediverse has an enormous potential to replace all of the corporate-run social media platforms.

I am invested in Beehaw and the fediverse for the sake of the people.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 7 points 8 months ago

I appreciate it, Thank you. It can seem pretty thankless to put so much time into something that you hope is making the world a (slightly) better place, only to have a few people get angry that this free public good you're providing, isn't up to their high standards (and they're not willing to help fix it).

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Feels like a lot of recent complaints about lemmy come down to a funding issue; the main reason things aren't accepted is the devs are too busy.

[–] poVoq 13 points 8 months ago

Yes, but also that moderation tooling is largely an UI issue, and the official frontend (lemmy-ui) is semi-abandoned in favour of the leptos rewrite and other alternative frontends. Not wanting to implement complex moderation features in a messy legacy code-base is IMHO understandable, if it is soon to be replaced anyways.

Personally I think the best would be for an alternative frontend to really push into the direction of having great mod tools. Photon already does that to some extend, but I am sure the single developer could use some help with that.

[–] Deus@charcha.cc 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Thanks for sharing about Sublinks. It still has the mouse(?) Lemmy icon BTW. Hopefully, they'll keep the Federation issues in priority. E.g. this (see pic) - I can never see what pic/video is posted on a Lemmy instance. Just this attachment icon and a 'blank'.

[–] Ategon@programming.dev 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

sublinks.org should have the icon for the project

Once it reaches parity next on the milestones is moderation features and then federation. All of the currently planned tasks are available for viewing on the github https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1

Im still heavily designing a bunch of the UI for sublinks that will eventually be used instead of the current demo (current one is just showing it has lemmy api compatibility) but if you want a very early sneak peek

[–] gabe@literature.cafe 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The front end is a work in progress but making significant headway. The lemmy frontend it has on the demo instance is just a placeholder, but the work has been progressing rapidly. I've thankfully been able to be there for it and provide input as I can.

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