nutomic

nutomic, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Its important to keep in mind that Lemmy is provided for free and as-is. It also hasnt reached version 1.0 yet so obviously there are still many features missing. Yet there are tens of thousands of users and hundreds of admins who are happy with Lemmy in its current state.

To continue with the analogy, if the Lemmy playground is not safe enough for your particular neighborhood, you have a few different choices:

• Wait for someone else to solve the problem (but this may take very long or forever)
• Solve the problem yourself, or pay someone to do it
• Use a different type of playground instead

Beehaw in particular has $5,470 in donation balance. This would cover my income for around 2.5 months. They could easily take this money to hire a developer and implement the features they require. Yet they believe that they are somehow entitled to dictating what I or Dessalines should work on.

Edit: This doesn’t mean that I don’t care about implementing better mod tools, in fact if you look at the pull requests there have been numerous improvements in this area. But resources are limited and mod tools cannot be the only priority as some people seem to expect.

Edit 2: To be very clear, this comment is only aimed at Beehaw admins and a few other individuals who are extremely entitled and think they can dictate me to work on features they specifically want. The vast majority of users and admins on Lemmy are not like that, so of course my comment is not aimed at them and Im working hard every day to make Lemmy better for the majority. But that means I cant get distracted and waste time on features that only a tiny minority wants.

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

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

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

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 (edited 2 months ago)

As someone hosting a service like this, especially when it has 12K people in it, this is very scary! While 2 lemmy core developers were in the chat, the help they provided was very limited overall and this session mostly relied on my own skills to troubleshoot.

This reinforced in my mind that as much as I like the idea of lemmy (or any of the other threadiverse SW), this is only something experts should try hosting. Sadly, this will lead to more centralization of the lemmy community to few big servers instead of many small ones, but given the nature of problems one can encounter and the lack of support to fix them if they’re not experts, I don’t see an option.

I disagree with this conclusion. If you had installed Lemmy according to the official instructions, you would have the database, backend and everything else on the same server and would never have run into this particular issue. And any problems youd have would likely be noticed (and debugged) by many other instances too. Your setup is heavily customized so it is only natural that there are few people who can help with it.

Anyway its an interesting journey, thanks for writing down your experience and for improving the documenation!

nutomic, 2 months ago

I’m not saying you did it wrong, it’s open source so of course you can use it in any way you like. But some ways have a higher risk of breaking than others.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Images can be stored in S3 so that’s not an issue. And Lemmy has some tracing logs as well as Prometheus stats, not sure if db0 tried looking into those.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Lemmy.ml runs on a single server and is much bigger than db0. Sure you can’t get 100% availability this way but no one expects that.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Thanks for the donation!

nutomic, 2 months ago

You really think I should be grateful that you stuck by my software? Why arent you grateful for the years of work I put into this software, and for allowing you to use it for free? There are many instances which have “stuck by” Lemmy for years, such as hexbear or lemmygrad, and none of them ever showed the sort of entitled attitude that beehaw admins have.

Again I dont have any obligation or even incentive to do any work for you specifically. If you dont like how I act as “spokesperson” or “community manager” (in reality Im an open source maintainer), then stop using Lemmy and go to Sublinks, Reddit or any other platform.

nutomic, 2 months ago

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.

nutomic, 2 months ago

I wish everyone could be so humble.

nutomic, 2 months ago

If my work on Lemmy is meaningless then please stop using it. You cant have it both ways.