nutomic

nutomic, 2 months ago

Because Lemmy can’t cover all the possible use cases, not with the very limited development resources we have. We need to set some priorities.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Not true, at this point it seems inevitable that Lemmy will get even bigger. And that’s a good thing in my opinion. But that doesn’t mean it can encompass all different use cases. It’s normal that there will be forks and alternatives, just look at all the different microblogging projects on the Fediverse.

nutomic, 2 months ago

The only ones I want to chase away are those who somehow feel entitled to demand some specific work from me. But that is only a very small part of the userbase. I know Lemmy isn’t perfect and I’m working every day to improve it. If anyone thinks that some area is not getting enough attention, they are welcome to make a pull request and I will happily review it to get the changes merged.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Look at it this way: I’ve spent almost every single working day for the past four years developing Lemmy. I implemented the entire federation logic and much more. Most days and nights I think about ways to improve Lemmy and it’s not easy to shut off. Especially during the Reddit blackout it was extremely stressful as we were completely bombarded with requests, I didn’t even have time to keep up with all the issues.

Yet last week some individuals came along who never made any contributions to Lemmy and never showed the slightest gratitude for my work. They essentially what I’m doing is wrong and that they should be in charge of decisionmaking for Lemmy. One Beehaw admin even said that all my work on Lemmy is meaningless.

I know you and many others have good intentions with your criticism. But after all the negativity of last week I simply don’t have the mindset to accept any of it.

nutomic, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Thanks for the support, I appreciate it and definitely don’t want people like you to go away. However there has been a lot of negativity during the last week, so automatically my attitude also got more negative in general.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Thank you for the offer but its not necessary. Ive also maintained open source projects long before Lemmy so Im familiar with the occasional entitled user on Github. In my experience its not a good idea to make any promises to these users because they will view their entitlement as justified, and make more demands.

However its a completely different quality when its not just Github comments, but multiple blog posts within a few days attacking Lemmy and me personally. Sure my responses were not ideal, but it was the best I was capable of at that time. If I had said nothing, people would assume that all the accusations are true and I have nothing to defend myself (like the claim that Im a “tankie” which has been going around on Mastodon for years).

In any case I think its better to say something and get my view out rather than being quiet. Sure there are miscommunications but those can be cleared up, and I can learn how to communicate better in the future. On the other hand if I said nothing, I may be left with the impression that my work sucks, and lose all motivation to keep working on Lemmy. Then I would be stuck doing nothing at all. Luckily that hasnt happened, Im still working on the project like before.

nutomic, 2 months ago

I only wanted to point out that Sublinks will take a long time to be ready for production and to replace Lemmy. Some people seemed to think that its only a few weeks away. However this doesnt mean I want Sublinks to fail.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Youre welcome :)

nutomic, 2 months ago

Im not good at frontend development, my goal was to create a very basic frontend which works to show off the project. Going forward I will definitely need help to improve the design or create an entirely new frontend in a different language.

Anyway the main thing about this project is the working federation, but without a basic frontend it would be very difficult to showcase.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Right ibis.wiki wasnt following open.ibis.wiki. I did that now, made an edit and it got federated as expected.

ibis.wiki/article/Lemmy@open.ibis.wiki/history

nutomic, 2 months ago

Nope

nutomic, 2 months ago

Sure if someone implements those things. I personally already invested a lot of time in the project and wont be able to do everything on my own.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Thats a good question. Obviously the first place to look for articles would be those hosted by your local instance. Then the instance admin could also maintain an article with links to relevant articles. And I suppose later there could be some software features for discovery, but I havent thought about that yet.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Adding such functionality in Lemmy would be very complicated because Lemmy itself is already quite a complicated project. So it would require test coverage, pass code review, have a stable API and so on. Its better to experiment with this in a new project so I can write some quick and dirty code to get the basic functionality working. If it proves successful it can be integrated with Lemmy later.

nutomic, 2 months ago

If an instance goes down, the articles are still stored on other federated instances.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Yes true.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Its definitely an experiment and I dont know how it will work in practice. But we have this technology, so I wanted to take advantage of it and let people give it a try. At worst Ibis wont be adopted, then I just wasted a few months of time. At best it could turn into a much better Wikipedia, so the upside potential is huge.

nutomic, 2 months ago

A plugin framework sounds great. I would be happy to see a PR for this from Beehaw, Sublinks or anyone else.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Speaking or myself, it’s simply a matter of time. Even doing the fediverse stuff I’m already doing is stretching me beyond my limits.

It’s exactly the same for us. There are hundreds of open issues for Lemmy and we can’t work on all of them.

By voting totals you mean the karma score? We intentionally decided not to show that because it has many negative effects. It was accidentally still exposed in the api so we removed that.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Sure, thats because we develop for the majority of the userbase and not what some (real or imaginary) admins might want. Its impossible to make everyone happy so we have to choose what works for most people, and hiding karma is clearly very popular.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Tagging would make sense to categorize posts within a single community. But you seem to suggest tags which are shared across communities. I dont really see the point of this, as communities themselves are already used for a global “tagging” of posts. So it would only duplicate that functionality.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Actually scores are regularly calcuated from a scheduled task which runs in Rust. Yes the score caculation is currently implemented in SQL, but it could also be changed to a Rust implementation or a plugin. This would probably need some optimization so that the plugin only calculates scores for recent posts, not every single known post. In any case it would need someone with the time and motivation to implement it.

nutomic, 2 months ago

There is already such an API endpoint which is available for mods and admins.

nutomic, 2 months ago

I agree that scaled sort is not working ideally right now. However the issues you linked were opened before the feature was released, so they are not relevant anymore. You are definitely welcome to open a new issue about improving the implementation. The scaled sort logic is here, if you have any concrete suggestions how to improve it thats even better. And I would rather improve this existing functionality to make it work as expected, before tacking on an entirely new feature which may or may not work.

nutomic, 2 months ago

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.