cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623718
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623713
I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.
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.
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!
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.
I wish everyone could be so humble.
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. 🤷
@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.
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).
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 😂
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’.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Entitlement in open source is a real thing
Goes both ways, from/by developers and from/by users.
demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person.
Demands:
- They’ve never opened a single issue or PR.
- no specific feature requests t
- never opened any issue for the features he wanted
- not[sic] did he attempt to contribute with a pull request
- switch to a different platform, …
And the entitlement is pretty damn strong from your side too. It’s an open source project that is your baby; I get it. What makes you entitled to other people doing everything except the actual code portion, for YOU? If it gets to the point of needing an ‘RFC’ to contribute code to Lemmy or even request a change…
Well, good luck. Why should people do your work that you get paid to do (as said often by yourself and Nutomic), when they aren’t getting paid a cent?? That is the epitome of entitled. You want free work, but you don’t want to give your work for free
It is absolutely impossible for 2-4 devs to please everyone in a codebase used by >40k people. If you ran a codebase used by this many people, you’d understand our pain. You cannot make everyone happy.
You want free work, but you don’t want to give your work for free
Check out our github profiles if you think we aren’t doing work. This is easily verifiable.
How can you think that this tiny group of people, fielding the requests of thousands, is entitled? We’re simply requesting that people do the open source thing, and contribute a PR, when we don’t have time to work on an issue. Would you like it if I made you change your priorities and work on what I wanted you to work on?
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.“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
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.
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?
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
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.
I remember Beehaw wanted to switch away from Lemmy to another platform months ago. I encourage you to do that and point your demands and entitlement at someone else. We have enough users who actually appreciate our work.
I encourage you to do that and point your demands and entitlement at someone else.
respectfully (and as someone who has not paid attention to this thread outside of my one comment): i am continually failing to understand how asking you guys to give us better moderation tools to do our jobs–which is our primary reason we’re even looking elsewhere and, if resolved, would likely placate about 90% of the problem we have with continuing to use your software–is entitlement. we’re basically handing you a silver platter entitled “hey, here is our problem, and here is how you can keep us on Lemmy in the long term” and you guys seem to just not take that seriously at all? and now you seem to want to debate us out of thinking it’s an issue while simultaneously telling us to fuck off for investing in your software at all!
What makes you think that I want you to to keep using Lemmy? As far as I remember, Beehaw admins have only brought negativity and complaints to Lemmy development. You have never made any code contributions and based on your attitude I doubt that you donate any money. You need to realize that having more users on Lemmy gives us zero benefits, in fact more users means more work. So if you leave Lemmy it means less work and less complaints for us. Meanwhile Beehaw users who like Lemmy can easily switch to another instance.
I think this is a pretty clear example of what I mean when I say that my work was never valued.
I did do work that was non-code - I labeled tons of issues, closed duplicates and those which had already been fixed.
I did try to write code contributions (here and here). One of which was rejected based on purely aesthetic preferences and whose follow-up PR was made dormant forever afterwards.
I tried to help and contribute in the ways I could - apparently this work is just “negativity and complaints”.
Changing a total of three lines is hardly worth mentioning. The issue labeling was somewhat helpful, but in the end this task should be done by someone who is familiar with the code. And anyway it was too risky to continue this after relations with beehaw soured. So yes there were some positive contributions, but they dont outweigh the negativity and complaints.
Changing a total of three lines is hardly worth mentioning.
As a professional software I know that the actual typing is hardly any of the work - let alone on someone else’s code!
And you’re a developer too, so you know this. This minimising of his contributions comes across as you arguing in bad faith, not to mention backing up the complaints about your hostile attitude.
i mean, if your response to a community which has stuck by your software for over two years now and hasn’t even publicly committed to leaving is “fuck you” because you don’t like that we are vocally opinionated on our problems, frictions, and perceived deficiencies with your software—yeah, why would we ever do anything to help you guys? you’re strongly vindicating us here in supposedly “never ma[king] any code contributions” or “donat[ing] any money” (and i’m just going to grant you that for the sake of argument, i’m not even sure it’s true). i’m not going to contribute to someone’s software when they’re openly contemptuous of me for trying to make their software better.
if i was on the fence previously about the upthread critique that you guys are kind of assholes to anybody who dissents about what you think should be the way forward, i am no longer. all i can say further is that you are acting severely out of pocket here as a spokesperson for the software and as a community manager and i would strongly encourage you to log off at this point before you say something that make your community relations even worse than they already are.
We gain nothing from you using Lemmy. It’s free software, a free meal that we’re providing freely to anyone as a public service.
Don’t like it? Don’t eat it!
