Firstly, I want to say I appreciate your dedication to creating a well moderated and maintained community.
However, I feel like this is an overall bad decision.
Essentially what I'm thinking is, how is this sustainable?
The amount of control that youre trying to achieve here is going to create an increasingly small and insular community. Also, there is a serious risk of burn out on the moderation end if you're attempting to currate this much, the more this server grows the harder this is going to be to maintain.
With the type of platform that this is, we're going to have a wide variety of people. A lot of them are just going to be bad people. Simply defederating won't fix this, and it will also be a problem here even with manually approved sign ups.
If people want to, they will just lie to get in. Essentially your system right now relies on people not lying to you when they sign up. A targeted harassment campaign could easily overcome that.
What's next? Are we going to deferate kbin.social and mastodon.social? Why don't we just defederate every instance? Even the biggest social media platforms have a seriously hard time moderating content they actually don't want on their platform. You can literally find porn on Youtube.
Tipping your hand on the scales this much is really stressful for a small team, and often doesn't lead to the outcomes that you thought you wanted. I hope in the near future you refederate, but I understand if you don't.
In my opinion this might have a bad effect too, trolls will see this as a reaction, a reaction that they maybe were looking for.
Beehaw is showing that trolls have a huge effect in its mods, making them go out of their way to troll more.
I think you've got valid concerns here, and while it doesn't completely address them I think it's worth keeping in mind that Beehaw isn't here to be the next reddit, and growth for the sake of growth isn't the goal of this instance. Having a smaller scope and a more tightly knit community here is probably actually desirable, in the long run. Also, I don't think there's too much concern about people making fake applications to get in, as that's a much higher effort (and thus lower volume) vector of attack for bad actors.
With respect to sustainability, we'll hopefully get better moderation tools in the (near) future to solve these problems in a way besides total defederation, but at the moment lemmy doesn't support that kind of granularity. As better tools become available, refederation is not off the table.
Growth for the sake of growth isn't always bad. I think the problem with Reddit is that it's growth for the sake of profit.
When we try to grow our communities it gives us wider influence over what a space looks like. Imagine if there is a cause a lot of users here want to promote and fight for, but they're defederated from some of the biggest instances?
The ability to grow gives you a seat at the table, and also allows you to influence others. That's essentially why people often centralize in one place on social media platforms.
I do understand your point of view though, I still disagree but respect it.
This may be a space in which I diverge from the other admins but the only space I am concerned about here is Beehaw itself. Having a seat at the Lemmy table is not important to me. Yes, it would afford us more attention when it comes to development and direction, but I am primarily concerned with creating a different kind of culture on the internet. The platform itself and the space that occupies are not important to me except as a vector to see if we can influence human behavior and find ways to promote positivity and kindness.
Having a seat at the Lemmy table is not important to me.
So you guys made this community on the Fediverse because...? It sounds like what you want is to be your own traditional phpBB forum. Of course, you'd lose out on the user base that other instances have fed to you—I've seen how dead this place was before the reddit blackout. This really smells like you guys just want to eat your cake and have it too.
As you can see, I'm not on beehaw, but I think this is a perfectly reasonable stance. Building a diverse fediverse, where there is a place for everyone seems a laudible aim. That may be possible with broad federation, or in some instances it may require narrow or no federation. It's all good.
I didn't say it was! It's just not the goal of beehaw in particular. Other instances have decided that they would like to be the new home for everybody who cares to apply (for example, lemmy.world). And there's nothing wrong with that at all, but ultimately it's also the reason we're not federated with them anymore.
Mastodon communities currently defederate from instances of over a certain size (including .social) because of how hard it is to moderate large instances, beehaw isn't doing anything weird in this case.
As someone who used to moderate default communities on Reddit, I can see how you can reach this conclusion. I agree with many of your points in that it isn't possible to completely block attack vectors, but I don't agree with the idea that we need to interact with a lot of "bad" people. I think the feeling that we need to interact with a lot of "bad" people comes from so much experience with bad platforms and the cultures that originate from these places. I think it's also important to note that we are not here for growth at all costs. We do not intend to be at the scale of YouTube or anywhere close. In the end our experiment may be a failure, but I'd rather try something new than give up before I even try.
This is why Fediverse can never compete with centralized social media. Mastodon and Lemmy to be specific are obsessed with defederation. Because users on platforms like Reddit and Twitter are used to having access to everything. Not waking up suddenly and realizing they've lost access to a large number of communities they were part of just until last night. All in the name of creating "safe space".
Yup. I guess they can have their safe bubble, and the rest of the fediverse can just keep growing. Shame to see a community cut themselves off from the world, but it’s their community and if a bubble / chamber is what they want, then we have to just shrug and move on.
I’m inclined to agree. But I also don’t think anyone should be forced to deal with these shitters coming in and causing chaos due to the lack of signup oversite. For instance Reddit could IP shadow ban you but that’s not an option on Lemmy. If the federated servers could share user data it would be fine but that would cause so many issues it’s not even funny.
This will become a lot less of an issue after account migration gets some eyes looking at it. Hopefully.
Only my personal opinion. Seems very odd that they would sign an NDA. The deal is that when two companies meet it is more common that both companies will say that they do not want to exchange confidential information. There might be exceptions to that... but generally one should always say NO. Then only consider if there is a very good reason.
Other thing I would say is that NDAs have a scope. So you cannot really evaluate the NDA unless you read the document and know the scope. Could have been very limited scope.
One needs to understand the other party. Generally the other party may likely be looking to learn as much as possible, then internalize that and the project cutting you out. For a simple consulting agreement fine. If you expect to have a long term business relationship or go in with other expectations, that has to be carefully considered and anything not in writing does not exists.
No, that would not be a good reason for me. Generally I would want to discuss everything you could without an NDA. Keep in mind most of the time receiving confidential information is more of a concern then disclosing it. If I then determined I need an NDA, then maybe it is better to have a JDA (Joint Development Agreement) that specifies how jointly developed IP is going to be handled. I am speaking very generally.
In this context maybe the concern would have been business plans not patentable IP for example so maybe they wanted an NDA solely restricted to the business plans of the company and maybe it could be worded very narrowly. Not sure how I would react to that. It would have to be very tightly worded and passed in front of my attorney.
The other reason as someone else pointed out that might be going on at the meeting is a $ amount for a contract of some sort. Companies often want to such business agreements confidential, especially the $ amounts.
I would like to point out to you, this decision doesn't impact you at all. Your account appears to be on lemmy.ml. the only thing this decision does is prevent users on Beehaw from interacting with content on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works and vice-versa.
As a user of beehaw.org, I'm fine with this choice. If I discover content I want to engage with on a defederate instance I will create an account that can interact with it along with my existing account on Beehaw.
If it's a bad decision, the fediverse will move on without fragile instances like beehaw. If it's a good decision, beehaw will be even better from now on.
Just wait and see. The invisible hand of the free market will set things right!
I agree in theory, but if we want to attract regular people from Reddit, this is really bad - if one day they wake up and don't see half of the communities they expect they'll just be pissed and probably leave entirely.
I think that the whole point of federation is that you, the end user, have the option of choosing where you want to go. You want to use those other instances, nobody is stopping you. You can actually use as many as you want. The instance owner gets to choose what is displayed on their instance, and that's OK as well. You even have the option of making your very own instance and displaying everything from everywhere. Nobody is dictating what you can or can't see. They're just choosing not to be the ones to show it to you.
I'm a bit new to this whole federation thing. As I understand it, it's supposed to be like email?
I don't think I've ever heard something similar happening in email space. For example: Hotmail can suddenly decide that Hotmail users can only email other Hotmail users going forward.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the admins' concerns. Just trying to understand about federation more.
I think the imortant difference to email here is that communication is open to everyone, not person to person. This creates the need for moderation and selection.
It absolutely does happen with email, you just don't notice it. You could just start sending porn to as many emails as you can find. If you use a reputable email provider like Gmail or Yahoo, it won't take them too long to ban you. If you stand up your own email server and do the same, your whole server will be blocked.
Mostly this ends up as transparent to users, but it does happen and is actively managed.
It's a bit of a tangent, because public communities are different from private email, but the defederation concept exists in both.
I think your idea of what federation should look like is not quite right, which is okay, it’s not an insult, it’s new to many of us.
The idea isn’t that everything is open, with a unified platform that shares everything, everywhere. The Lemmy software is open source, but the way instances are moderated is highly customizable, and that is an intentional design decision.
You’re probably used to common moderation styles on Reddit, where users have more control over content via up/downvotes, and some Lemmy instances may run just like that, taking a more hands-off approach to moderation. But Beehaw is not like that. The goals and moderation style here are different. Beehaw is looking to create a different kind of space, with more control over what’s posted. There are pros and cons to this, which are beyond the scope of this comment to explore. The point is this: different Lemmy instances are run by different people, with different visions and styles. If you don’t like how Beehaw is run, it’s probably going to be a better experience for you, as well as the people here who do like how it’s run, if you find an instance that more closely aligns with what you’re looking for.
But coming onto someone else’s instance and aggressively demanding things conform to your desires or trying to inform the owners of what you will or won’t “stand for” is rude, though. There’s a better way to communicate with people, and in the future I hope you choose grace.
The idea isn’t that everything is open, with a unified platform that shares everything, everywhere. The Lemmy software is open source, but the way instances are moderated is highly customizable, and that is an intentional design decision.
I dunno, that's like saying "various mailservers choose to have different rules for their users, and we choose to block some of those mailservers because we disagree with how they're ran".
And while that's technically in your power, and might make sense if it actually is a mailserver that's sending 100% just spam, it doesn't really make sense if you block any significant number of normal users.
I think the ideal way forward would be having individual blocklists, where each instance would have defaults for its users, but the user could choose to un-block the remote instances if they wish. Defederation should be reserved only for extremely disruptive instances, and even then there should be an appeal process or a yearly (or so) re-evaluation.
(obligatory I'm not on beehaw but still think this sets a dangerous precedent and should be discussed)
“I’m not going to stand for this” Dude just move to another instance. Literally no one is stopping you. It’s the whole reason for the fediverse. They can manage their instance as they see fit. You sound like a complete keyboard warrior, get over yourself and move on.
Honestly, I've been using an alternate account on Mastodon, and until recently, I wasn't aware that this was such a significant issue on other Lemmy instances until you started to clearly communicate it to me. I've temporarily taken a few additional steps to reduce the spam intensity. By the end of September, kbin.social will receive an update that should address the federation issues.
update: yeah if @reddog is you then your account exists; we'll get to it when we sort out the email situation which hopefully will be tomorrow because i'm tired of not being able to approve people lol
Awesome! I applied for beehaw the first day of the blackout. It lets me do a forgot password and I get the email so I imagine I’m in the system but not finalized yet.
Awesome! Yeah, it's me there too. Thanks for the feedback and know that it's appreciated. No rush on my behalf -- I'm still figuring all this out and do have other fedi-accounts to feed the fix, so to speak. :)
I actually really liked it as an exercise in reflection.
I probably wrote too much in mine, a good full paragraph for each. They really just need to create the slightest barrier to entry to make moderating 10x easier.
Or if you're just going to lurk... you don't need to make an account at all! As I did for the first week before deciding on whether or not to join, lmao
Right? If you can’t come up with a minimal answer to a very simple question, how could you possibly contribute positively in any way whatsoever here? And why would you even want to join this instance? This isn’t meant to be a shitposting low effort instance…
This is all well and good, but in practical terms it means that if your account is not on beehaw then you should divest your involvement with beehaw communities because it is less likely to remain federated with your home instance. Which may be what the beehaw community wants, from the sound of it.
Yep. My comment was showing “if you want to read/see that there’s a spam problem despite what one would see as a user on kbin, the mod log on beehaw will show you the removal of spam that made its way to beehaw.”
I think you will find this conundrum on any software you switch to. FOSS is hard, and needs a big enough community of motivated people with the right skills to make a project successful. People are largely doing this work as hobbies; it's hard to fund such projects. Doable but hard.
The most obvious alternative to go for is the Reddit code base which was open source and has been forked as Saidit. This is the most likely place to find something mature enough and feature rich enough for what you may need but again whether things will progress is another conundrum as who else is maintaining or using that codebase?
Lemmy and any other project like Kbin will need people and work to get it where you want, not just suggestions and a list of requests. The problem is not a lack of interest in achieving what you want from Lemmy, it is realistically that it is a small project team with a big task on their hands and Beehaw are not it's only users.
Ultimately Lemmy may not be the software now to do what you want for your community. Federation may also not be the right thing for a community of your ethos. Maybe the simplest solution is complete defederation and build the community in an environment you can completely control, even with the limits Lemmy current provides with it's software. Come back to the fediverse when you feel the software matches the ambitions, but in the meantime build the community you want.
I agree with this one. I love FOSS software. But (much like many hobbies), hobbiest stuff generally is a patchwork quilt of skill, ambition, and people’s time off (or lack thereof, as uni, bf/gfs, and then families come into the picture). Regardless of whatever you do, there will be problems. For what it’s worth, I think a whitelist is probably a reasonable start vs the attrition of starting from scratch on a new FOSS software, losing content and users, and then find similarly annoying issues on the new software. Even closed source is gonna have annoying shit saddled to it.
That’s essentially the white-list idea, which I agree may be the way to go. Which would be unfortunate for my account, but I guess I could always make another account in Beehaw.
Ultimately Lemmy may not be the software now to do what you want for your community. Federation may also not be the right thing for a community of your ethos. Maybe the simplest solution is complete defederation and build the community in an environment you can completely control, even with the limits Lemmy current provides with it’s software. Come back to the fediverse when you feel the software matches the ambitions, but in the meantime build the community you want.
This is it and what they’ve always really wanted in my eyes, but the userbase here and in their communities still values federation so they don’t want to actually make that jump.
The rules and culture of this instance demands centralization, not federation. They might as well just make their own site.
I don’t love the drama and FUD about the platform and devs.
Lemmy started as a passion project and been growing slowly over years and then out of nowhere a small group of developers had to not only adjust to new influx of people, but also a barrage of ideas, suggestions and comments on what they should prioritize. I’m not sure how much experience different people here have with open source development, but the amount of changes in 3 months Lemmy developers managed to do is impressive to say the least. And there will never be open source project that manages to satisfy everyone.
Fundamentally people assume that with open source project all ideas will get implemented either by developers or if someone does the work and makes a pull request. But like with every other project the maintainers are allowed to have their own vision and not implement everything someone asks for or have different priorities or specific structure in mind.
Beehaw always tried to create something where they have complete control over everything. And that worked with federation when they were one of a few “big” instances (some people might not know but Beehaw is 21 months old, opened on 2021-11-12), but once influx of new users came in the existing tools weren’t enough to have the level of control they wanted. So they clsoed the doors on new users and isolated themselves and at the same time angered a big portion of fediverse users for taking advantage of new user influx but the cutting them off from the rest of the fediverse.
I’m not sure if people checked the posts where Beehaw listed features and tools they want and a lot of them are super tailored to Beehaw vision which is not in step with federated Lemmy as a whole.
I don’t think that the Beehaw vision and fediverse can coexist as they have diametrically opposed ideas.
I’m not sure if people checked the posts where Beehaw listed features and tools they want and a lot of them are super tailored to Beehaw vision which is not in step with federated Lemmy as a whole.
I don’t think that the Beehaw vision and fediverse can coexist as they have diametrically opposed ideas.
As another outsider, I disagree. All the ideas and suggestions from the beehaw team seem like things that would benefit the whole Fediverse (or other lemmy instances at least). I’m curious what suggestions you think are incompatible?
I’ll have to chat more with Lionir about item 1, because I’ve seen and resolved reports that came from off instance users of Beehaw users misbehaving on their instance (or another they were browsing).
For source 2, that was referring to various tools which exist on other federated software.
Either way neither of these are incompatible or new requests within activitypub and calling them against the principles of federation is an ideological discussion, one not suited for this announcement thread.
Why should Beehaw get a report for something not done on their instance? Instance rules only apply to that instance activities.
Spammers have been a bit of an issue recently, and federated reports would help them get removed quicker I think
That is fundamentally anti federation suggestion
True to some extent IMO. The HB instance does this on their announcements/meta community, so apparently it might be possible unless HB added that feature into their codebase themselves
Spammers have been a bit of an issue recently, and federated reports would help them get removed quicker I think
Sure, but that’s just shifting the issue to instance level instead of dealing with it on community level.
True to some extent IMO. The HB instance does this on their announcements/meta community, so apparently it might be possible unless HB added that feature into their codebase themselves
Why should Beehaw get a report for something not done on their instance? Instance rules only apply to that instance activities.
You’d still like to know if you users are causing ruckus elsewhere, especially since that may escalate to defederatation in the worst case. Also instance rules can apply to external communities too since they are saved locally. Thus admins are responsible for all content, not just local content.
That is fundamentally anti federation suggestion.
I disagree. The alternative is total defederation. Being able to “soft” defederate in certain ways could be useful as a less extreme version of defederation. Right now it’s very binary. Even Mastodon has more granular controls I believe?
You’d still like to know if you users are causing ruckus elsewhere, especially since that may escalate to defederatation in the worst case. Also instance rules can apply to external communities too since they are saved locally. Thus admins are responsible for all content, not just local content.
Why though? If the user is not breaking your rules, what reason do you have to know that? See that’s where the fundamental idealogy of fediverse and Beehaw splits. Beehaw wants total control over every single aspect of their users and fediverse allows to create micro communities that are all tied together and moderated on community level.
I disagree. The alternative is total defederation. Being able to “soft” defederate in certain ways could be useful as a less extreme version of defederation. Right now it’s very binary. Even Mastodon has more granular controls I beli
And I disagree with you, but that’s allowed. There is a difference between giving users choice and giving instance admins that ability to remove the users choice.
P.S. I’m not sure if it’s coincidence that your views align with Beehaw, but feddit.dk is another instance with huge amount of isolation with 533 instances defederated.
Why though? If the user is not breaking your rules, what reason do you have to know that?
I just told you, having users that are reported a lot is a defederation risk. Also the reports may actually indicate problems that also break instance wide rules and you’d never know.
feddit.dk is another instance with huge amount of isolation with 533 instances defederated.
I don’t think it’s very isolated actually. I implore you to take a look at the instances on my block list. It’s not instances you’d want to have an influence on votes. Basically all “normal” lemmy instances are not denylisted.
I just told you, having users that are reported a lot is a defederation risk. Also the reports may actually indicate problems that also break instance wide rules and you’d never know.
And again that’s the mindset issue, not software issue. If user X did something on Instance A, there is no comprehensible reason for Instance A to defederate from instance X. Ban the user X for breaking your instance rules and move on.
No, I wouldn’t. If those 20% were valid reports I or community moderators would handle them and then there would be 0 reports left. It’s primarily community moderators job to handle reports from their communities.
But Beehaw wants ultimate control over their users and Lemmy just doesn’t work like that. You could debate pros and cons of each approach, but in the end Beehaw wants something different and I’m not surprised they want to move away from ActivityPub.
Going to stop this conversation here - you have strong opinions on how moderation should be handled. We get it. This conversation is ideological and won’t go anywhere from here. Please cease.
the amount of changes in 3 months Lemmy developers managed to do is impressive to say the least.
I’m trying to be nice, but two full time paid people did not manage to do much in 3 months if you mean May, June, and July regarding the Reddit API change period. It seems Rust is their main focus and in the middle of all this they decided to start a new front-end in Rust. When dozens of new front-ends were being developed by eager newcomers, including replacements like Photon that even have admin and moderation interfaces.
I’m not sure if people checked the posts where Beehaw listed features and tools they want and a lot of them are super tailored to Beehaw vision which is not in step with federated Lemmy as a whole.
I’ve checked their listed features and tools, and I have no idea what you are talking about. They are features that Lemmy needs. What exactly do you mean that Beehaw is “super tailored”?
I’m very sad to see this. The saddest thing is the state of development I guess and this is just the fallout. I do hope that you will try an allowlist at first (at least before deciding to leave the fediverse altogether) and maybe struggle through until things get better (I do believe they will get better; software development is just inherently not a super fast process).
The problem with forking Lemmy is in starting from all the bad that is inherently there, and trying to make it better. That is way more work than starting fresh with more developers. IE, not using Rust for a web app and UI, better database queries from the start, better logging/functions from the start; not adding on bandaids.
FWIW I actually think Rust is the perfect language for the backend. It’s just that the quality of the code in Lemmys backend isn’t great (from my limited experience). You can write bad code in any language. What you really need are professionals that are good at coding (unfortunately this is rare even among professionals). (Humbly) I am one such person. If you are serious about trying to start a better Lemmy alternative from scratch, I’d love to be involved in the backend discussions.
Perhaps Beehaws issues could be something a new development community could gather around. My perception is that you have a lot of non-technical people who would be great at project management, requirements analysis, UX design and that sort of thing. This is kind of what Lemmy has been lacking from the start.
I am not part of Beehaw, but that’s only since I admin another instance. I could see myself having joined Beehaw if it wasn’t for that. So again, if you are really serious about a potential new development, I’d love to be in on it.
Right now I disagree. Rust is a bad choice for this community because not a lot know rust so extending and fixing it means a lot of people are having to learn a new language with entirely new ways of making software. It’s not just a language switch it’s a programming concept switch.
I am so tempted to say F-it and just start my own ActivityPub Fediverse project to replace Lemmy. It’s such a daunting commitment, though, and we each have our lives to live. I wish the admins of Beehaw all the luck and success in what they’re having to wrangle with. It’s too bad the Lemmy maintainers are so unwilling to work toward fixing the clear major pain points of the software.
You should read the OP here. Forking the Lemmy code would do exactly what they say: you get all the garbage/baggage, and now you own it. If I were to write an ActivityPub Fediverse Reddit-like web-app, it wouldn’t be in Rust.
As someone who’s very proficient in Rust, I actually think it’s the perfect language for a backend API. But the Lemmy code (from my tbh limited experience with it) seems quite verbose and cumbersome for the amount of features it needs to support. I have also been tempted by the thought of a Rust rewrite. The features needed honestly don’t seem that complicated.
Part of the problem I’d like to solve for is that Lemmy is hard for outside contributors to contribute to which is a function of both the verbosity you called out and the weirdnesses that can come to the uninitiated with Rust
I know that Rust can have a bit of a learning curve, but it is also extremely reliable, especially when taking contributions from all kinds of people as different changes are unlikely to slowly break each other over time.
I would for example be extremely cautious when it comes to dynamically typed languages like Python. If you think bad Rust can be verbose or complicated, you’ve never seen bad Python. It can devovle into a mess very easily due to the lack of static analysis.
Also Rust has great performance which is important for keeping operational costs low. Corporations running Python just eat that cost because it’s nothing compared to an engineers salary but operational cost will be everything when it comes to a volunteer run service.
Having tried to do this in Rust, the ActivityPub protocol is not very Rust-friendly. There’s a lot of weirdness, like how objects can have multiple types at once (aka @type is an array) and how JSON-LD allows for basically any format to be passed as long as an appropriate context is passed (and the json-ld library has a lot of limitations from my experience including lack of serde support and no framing). I’ve tried looking at how the ActivityPub implementation Lemmy uses works, but from what I can see it just ignores these problems entirely, which at least seems to be working out for them right now.
Thinking about it more, I’m convinced JSON-LD’s completely dynamic format is what’s making this so difficult.
Tell me about it. But uhh… have my beer mug instead? There’s nothing I want to do more right now than make a better service (subjective of course) for Beehaw’s use. Time and obligations prevent that from being a quick enough solution though.
Mmmhmmmmmmmmmmm. My inclusion of the word was not merely rote practice of the BDFL model lodging itself in my brain. I have some strong feelings about how code is a form of communication, and that the software you develop is intrinsically mapped to the ways you approach person to person interactions. Case in point, the very best software platform for Beehaw would be one whose developers felt the ideal platform would involve be(e)ing nice. This mentality would cause a developer to put heavy phasis on good moderation tools, ones that can give clear, meaningful, and thoughtful reasonings for moderation actions being taken as well as easy ways to parse these mod logs to learn the sorts of social norms the community does and doesn’t tolerate.
Given all this the development of the software would be open to listening to diverse perspectives in feature requests. And I mean diverse perspectives in terms of “this group is vulnerable to online attacks”
I’ve played with some ideas, but turns out the ActivityPub protocol is extremely difficult to implement in strongly-typed languages, at least from my experience. Anyway, whoever picks this up, here’s my sword!
I’m tempted to read the whole codebase to start a merge request to implement some modicum of mod tools. Things like deletion propagation, including uploaded media so stuff like GDPR deletion requests can be properly executed would be great, since this would enable or facilitate “admin purge” alongside it. I’m not that well versed in rust but I’ve got my fair share of experience coding. I’ll see how regular post propagation is done and see how deletion is treated (I feel like the solution might be something that instead of truly deleting the data it delets the content but leaves the records on the BD marked for deletion so it propagates correctly, and then after some time an automated task finally deletes them.
If you want I can update you after forking and creating the merge request to work on. IF I begin this, it would be helpful to have some critique.
I personally believe that scratching the whole this is too excessive, there are ways to modify the backend codebase with forks and merge requests if the core developers are open to pull requests. If they are not the project already died lmao.
I’m checking their federation activities on the docs, it seems like user removals do federate but mod removals dont? I’ll check the code when I get out of work :). It might be interesting to look there. join-lemmy.org/docs/…/05-federation.html
Second edit: It seems like image logging is already developed databasewise. There was quite a lot of discussion on this issue and it was merged a while ago. Frontend tools need to be developed also, but it’s a start: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3927
You are a hero we need, but do not deserve. Thanks for any and all work you’re doing! If Lemmy can be fixed, I’d love to see it and maybe even help in some small way. If the maintainers are not willing to accept PRs, especially in a timely manner, then I agree, it’s not going to survive long.
As already stated in the edit, there are already contributions for user and image purges that are being merged, several accepted merge requests in the last week, so the community IS working and the devs are receptive. It seems like the code is developed as two separate servers, one for lemmy and the other for the image manager, and it interacts with any client as a REST server. Then, it connects into ActivityHub through a high level API that I have to check yet, but the functionalities people are asking don’t seem to be impossible to implement tbh. Admin / mod tools need to be implemented first as valid endpoint operations and then be exposed to the outer API so clients can then implement an interface for actual users to do stuff.
The gist of it is that all these kind of stuff takes time, and the amount of people that is up for contributions is not that high, and when lemmy exploded this july, the priority was server stability.
I am so tempted to say F-it and just start my own ActivityPub Fediverse project to replace Lemmy. It’s such a daunting commitment, though, and we each have our lives to live.
This is a conundrum I’ve had as well. I really wish I could spend my time creating a better Lemmy backend from scratch. But it seems like a massive commitment. If I would know that others would rally together for the same cause, I may go along with it though.
Yea I’m not entirely sure how you’d do that with Lemmy at the moment… As stated in the post, it may literally be less work to start from scratch with the better knowledge we have today of the requirements.
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