nutomic

nutomic, 2 months ago

I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side. This is not how journalism should work.

Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free. You also completely ignore that this is an exception, there are thousands of issues and pull requests in the Lemmy repos which are handled without any problems.

Besides you claim that we dont care about moderation, user safety and tooling which is simply not true. If you look at the 0.19.0 release notes there are numerous features in these areas, such as instance blocking, better reports handling and a new moderator view. However we also have to work on improvements to many other features, and our time is limited.

Finally you act like 4000€ per month is a lot of money, however thats only 2000€ for each of us. We could stop developing Lemmy right now and work for a startup or corporation for three or four times the amount of money. Then we also wouldnt have to deal with this kind of meaningless drama. Is that what you want to achieve with your website?

nutomic, 2 months ago

Its simply not true that we have zero consideration for privacy or user safety. But that is only one aspect of Lemmy, we also have to work on many other things. And we werent silent during the CSAM wave, but most of it was handled by admins and all the related issues are long resolved. Lemmy has 50k active users, its obvious that we are too busy to work on every single thing that some individual user demands.

There is a reason that Lemmy still has version 0.x. If you have such high demands then you shouldnt use it, and switch to another platform instead. And yes you are clearly stoking an attack against Lemmy, I wonder why you hate our project so much.

nutomic, 2 months ago

massive fragile ego, frankly horrible, acting shitty

So this is how you see me, all based on two issues out of thousands and never having talked with me directly. Honestly this comment would be a good reason to ban you for harassment and violating the site’s code of conduct. But lucky for you I don’t care what random strangers on the internet think about me.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Thanks that is a bit better. Unfortunately people who have already read the article wont see the update, and even people who read it now may not read all the way to the end, and still leave with a negative impression. Still its better than nothing.

To get an idea how most Lemmy users feel, have a look at this thread. Practically every comment is positive about Lemmy, you can hardly find any negative sentiment. And certainly no one cares about this image deletion issue, which proves that the complaints of a few individuals are completely blown out of proportion.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Its funny because there is no one in the world who signed any sort of development contract with us. All the money we have ever received for Lemmy have been donations which means there is no obligation for us to do anything. This includes money from NLnet which provided most of our income for the past years. And I bet the people complaining so loudly no have never even made any donation.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Thanks for the donation!

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.

nutomic, 2 months ago

No we arent getting paid, there is no employment contract with anyone. We are working on Lemmy in our own time, and receiving donations from some users. It may seem like a minor difference but its important, because donations dont include any obligation to give something specific in return, or prioritize specific tasks.

nutomic, 2 months ago

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.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Really?. Does this relate? Not related, not a feature request. I mean there probably wasn’t a specific feature request for the exact specific matter at hand. But plenty of noise and discussion around something needing to help address the problem.

All of these are resolved, what more do you expect?

I personally got kicked out of and banned on everything Lemmy Matrix related for daring to challenge you and and Dessalines. You are petty AF.

I dont remember the exact details but the reason you got banned was because you actively attacked a Lemmy maintainer. Someone who actually works on the project to make it better, as opposed to you who only complains. Such a ban is well deserved.

Anyway Im done talking to you. Please switch Beehaw away from Lemmy and use another platform so you can stop bothering us.

nutomic, 2 months ago

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.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Youre welcome :)

nutomic, 2 months ago

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!

nutomic, 2 months ago

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

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/…/defaults.hjson#L…

nutomic, 2 months ago

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.

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.

nutomic, 2 months ago

You clearly put a lot of effort into writing this blog post, creating the header image and sharing it across dozens of Lemmy communities and Github issues. I only wish you would put even a fraction of this effort into actually resolving some of the mentioned issues. After all you are a programmer and many of them are relatively easy to resolve with a bit of time.

What you dont seem to realize is that Lemmy only has two fulltime developers (Dessalines and me). We are both working every day to fix bugs and implement new features in Lemmy, but there are only so many hours in a day. Whenever we resolve one issue, a new one gets reported so its impossible to resolve all of them. The repos for lemmy and lemmy-ui currently have 750 issues. So there is no other way but to strictly prioritize what we work on, and ignore things we dont have time for. Obviously people will disagree with the exact priorities, that is inevitable.

The only solution is to get more contributors who help work through the issue backlog. Or if you are not willing to do that, switch to a different platform which is backed by venture capital and can pay dozens of developers to work on it.

nutomic, 2 months ago

I bet your project doesnt have 50.000 monthly users so its not comparable at all. Out of all these users only you and one or two others care so much about GDPR (yet not enough to make actual contributions yourself). We really cant change our priorities for a single user out of thousands.

nutomic, 2 months ago

I was a Java developer before starting to contribute to Lemmy. Didnt know anything about Rust, just wrote code and resolved compiler errors until things worked. Rust is definitely not as hard to learn as some people think.

nutomic, 2 months ago

Or these people could learn Rust and contribute to the existing project. That would save years of duplicated effort. I personally knew zero Rust before starting to contribute to Lemmy, its really not that hard to learn.

nutomic, 2 months ago

No schade-throwing, but I know how much effort it took to get Lemmy ready for production. Namely multiple years of fulltime work. Sublinks seems to have only volunteer contributors, so it will likely take even more time.

nutomic, 2 months ago

It’s already largely resolved through the feature to export/import user profile.