This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.
Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.
Have you considered a feature like “sibling community”?
What I mean is, for example, car community on server 1 marks itself as a sibling community to a car community on server 2. Similarly server 2 marks itself as a sibling community to server 1, ie it is two-way.
When communities have been linked bi-directionally, any post and comment are shared between the two sibling communities.
This would allow bigger communities to form out of smaller communities, thereby preventing discussions from being fragmented and showing the true size of Lemmy, across servers.
Right now, instances with transphobic and racist content like exploding-heads are still listed on join-lemmy.org. Are you planning to implement a Server Convenant like on joinmastodon.org? To be listed on joinmastodon.org, an instance needs “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.
The instance list is fine as is. Think about it like this: do you want racists to join a single instance so they are all in one place? Or do you want them to spread across all different instances, causing moderation problems everywhere?
Yes, I think it would be best if they would all gather on one instance that can get defederated. Right now they attract users on join-lemmy with “Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable”, no other info.
deleted by creator
I think you got downvoted because people were not looking for a way to make it ok for the racist instances to stay on join-lemmy.
I am not really familiar with shadowbannig, but users could just check their posts from another instance and find out about the ban.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
And if the racist is here to cause problems rather than commiserate with fellow racists, they now know exactly which community to avoid, thus restoring moderation problems everywhere. I don’t think anyone is asking you to moderate every instance to ensure they are sticking to your TOS or your viewpoints, but it’s a very minor ask to not showcase off the racists and transphobes and bigots on the ‘join this platform’ page.
There are plenty of other instance lists across the internet. So its not even a real solution for your theoretical problem.
I don’t think the people raising this as a concern are trying to solve the problem of bigots on the internet; they are just asking for you to change the advertising you provide to remove the bigots from a place of visibility.
And then we should block lemmygrad, lemmy.world, hexbear and hundreds of other instances? Thats not gonna happen. If you want to block instances, do that on the beehaw side.
I’m not here to proselytize about what we decide to block or not. I’m explaining what the person above is requesting - not a block, but a conscious decision about what shows up on the join-lemmy list.
I’m new to the fediverse, and even I can tell you’re missing the point.
This brings up an interesting point. On Mastodon, besides Block User, there is also a Block Instance option. Will we ever see that on Lemmy? Seems like an easy way to resolve what has been a big issue for me (and obviously other people too).
Aka, you don’t really want to start over on another instance (hey, not migration tools yet!) but you also don’t really want to see posts from a specific server any more. Rather than people having to lobby the server admins about whether or not to defederate, wouldn’t it just be easier to allow user-level instance blocking? (I know I say “just” while knowing zip about how hard that as in the back end, but yes, from a logistics perspective, seems like you could make a lot of spam-level requests leave the admin’s plates by implementing this.)
It’s possible that anti-racist, queer or any other serious organisations might not want to link to join-lemmy.org because of it.
Thats fine, they can provide their own list of instances where users can choose from.
They are on your list (which is seen as the official one by many and has most visits) to guide transphobes and fascists to their fitting community?? Exploding-heads is not labeled as transphobe and fascist on join-lemmy. So that does’t make sense.
i would rather want the racists to not be able to go anywhere at all
It doesnt really matter what you want. The software is open source so anyone can use the software freely. No way to prevent it.
yea sure there will always be racist instances but they shouldn’t be promoted on sites like join-lemmy.org
Well said. It’s rare to see such a good mindset!
What type(s) of transphobia?
Here are some examples on exploding-heads.com and rammy.site though I kinda doubt you don’t know about them. Their members frequently harass trans and queer communities as well.
Warning trans/queerphobic
https://exploding-heads.com/post/635111 https://exploding-heads.com/post/635113 https://exploding-heads.com/post/635122 https://exploding-heads.com/post/627109 https://exploding-heads.com/post/628678 https://exploding-heads.com/post/627044 https://exploding-heads.com/post/630190 https://exploding-heads.com/post/191408 https://exploding-heads.com/post/618400 https://rammy.site/c/saynotogroomers
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !saynotogroomers@rammy.site
*facepalms
lol…
Wasnt free speech all about being able to express your opinion without getting banned?
No. It’s about being able to voice your opinion without going to jail for it. No one is going to jail for making transphobic memes or comments. But that doesn’t protect them from me blocking them or banning them from my instance.
Ok fair enough. But (outside of the context) defederating/banning certain communities because they don’t have the same beliefs as you can lead to a fully opinionated/based fediverse and should be prevented imo. Everybody should be able to express their opinions no matter what. I don’t want lemmy to change into some kind off mass media like everything else rn. If a post isn’t showing a good/kind, people respecting vibe, it will be downvoted and thus not shown to anybody. And later if lemmy creates an algorithm of some kind, these posts can be ghosted for certain individuals. But i don’t think they should be completely removed and banned from the connected fediverse as this platform is one of the only ways to express ourselves online at this point. I hope i could get my point across
Defederation doesn’t prevent them from being able to access the fediverse nobody has a right to harassing people thats like saying you are being discriminated against because you aren’t allowed in the public park because you throw garbage everywhere and spray paint the children’s play equipment but it’s a public park my rights
I’m not asking anything because I’m a potato when it comes to software. I just wanted to drop by and say: thank you both for Lemmy. The platform is amazing, and it’s clear that you guys are pouring some heavy love (and labour hours) in it, as it’s improving at an amazing pace.
I asked in the other thread about GDPR.
Nobody thinks it’s very interesting but if instances don’t follow gdpr, the entire network is at risk of legal consequences.
So please bring this up, even though it’s not very fun.
Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don’t know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn’t do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.
We have a
Legalsection under admin settings, that’s an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We’d need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn’t EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:
- Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
- If the former, delete all data of their data on the server, send it to them, and then (this was the important part) forward the data deletion request to every single partner we were working with.
For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between “we’re thinking about it” and “we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we’ll get to it sometime within the next month”), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.
As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that “no, it’s anonymous” - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.
So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you’re not doing that, you’re not fully compliant.
Kind of shitty, but that’s how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)
Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don’t recall what the time was for a “see my data” request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.
There a different levels of personal data but a unique identifier for a user is one of them because it allows linking information together about a single person, and from there you can try to identify the real person. So an option would be to overwrite all the occurrences of this identifier with random data so you can’t link data together anymore, as long as it’s not also personal data.
Sure, but you’d still have to delete all their written posts - which is really what all this is about.
You actually would not. The content of the post can stay but the username/identifier has to be removed. Written text is not PII to my knowledge and every social platforms I’ve actively used only delete the identifier (Reddit, GitHub).
Written content can contain pii, but it’s rarer. Written content isn’t, by default, pii, but if someone tells anything reasonably pii the entire text can be consisted pii even when anonymized.
Yeah as someone who had to deal with GDPR in a professional capacity, it’s probably better to just assume that content written by users contains PII since you really have no way of telling whether it does or doesn’t.
Naturally you can just ignore that and leave the content as-is, but then you run the risk of some data protection authority ruining your day.
So, I wonder if Lemmy instances would be responsible for the instances that federate with them. It’s my understanding that the Lemmy instance doesn’t send the user’s data to other instances, rather it is just posted, and the other instances copy it onto their local instance.
It’s almost like those reddit services that would show deleted content. A user can delete their profile on Reddit, but Reddit isn’t required (that I know of) to go to these services and make sure the user’s data is being wiped out.
It’s often too expensive to support GDPR for Europeans and disable it for other people. Most services just support GDPR for everyone.
Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?
Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social’s privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy
As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.
That sounds like its something for instance admins to handle, nothing we as developers need to care about. Maybe we should add a privacy policy for lemmy.ml but thats it.
Yea it is ultimately on the admins, but Lemmy just needs to not make it hard to comply with GDPR. So it’s up to admins to raise issues when Lemmy is seen as an obstacle to compliance, and it’s up to devs to listen and implement compliance features.
You don’t have to bother with GDPR until you’re a certain size company
That’s what I thought too until I looked it up. It applies to individuals as well.
If an individual runs a web server and processes personal data of individuals within the European Union, then they are subject to the requirements of GDPR. GDPR applies to anyone, including individuals, who processes personal data of EU residents, regardless of whether they are operating as a business or on a personal basis. It’s important for the individual running the web server to comply with GDPR’s data protection principles and obligations to safeguard the personal data they process.
As someone not residing in the EU, I don’t see how they could possibly enforce that. Best they could do is block my instance I suppose. Have they done that for any small site?
I mean, I would delete/provide all data of any user who requests me to do so for themselves. But I’m likely not following every facet of the GDPR.
They don’t work like that, they have no technical capabilites. I think it would work more like a company being ordered to pay a fine if a user on your instance finds out that his data is not deleted if he asks.
But this is complicated so I hope someone else has good input on this topic. Someone must have run a website with registered users in Europe before without being a corporation.
The fediverse brings a new touch to all of this also, since the posts and comments are replicated across instances. Will that matter to the EU law? Maybe, maybe not.
What does “processing” data mean though?
Basically, anything that involves the data being present somewhere in information systems that you control. Taking decisions based on it, displaying it on a webpage, make decisions based on it, even just storing it, all counts as processing under GDPR.
Asking chat gpt, so take it with a bit of salt, but it’s usually correct about these things.
In the context of data protection and GDPR, “processing” refers to any operation or set of operations performed on personal data. This includes collecting, recording, organizing, storing, adapting, altering, retrieving, using, disclosing, transmitting, and deleting personal data.
Processing can be done both manually and automatically. It covers a wide range of activities related to personal data, such as capturing information through web forms, analyzing data for marketing purposes, storing customer records in a database, or even just viewing or accessing personal data.
Under GDPR, any entity or individual involved in processing personal data is required to comply with the regulation’s principles and obligations to protect the rights and privacy of the individuals whose data is being processed.
That’s not true. You might be thinking about the German network enforcement act. Every little ecommerce website, even when it’s a one-man operation, has to follow GDPR guidelines when they aim at people in the EU.
How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?
Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named
!news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:This also isn’t unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.
Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.
There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.
Overall tho, I’m against the concept of “combining / merging communities” that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !news@startrek.website
Classic bot. Don’t you know who you are talking to!
absolutely brilliant bot misfire 😂
Are there any plans for a “multi-community” (pka multi-reddit) to allow users to combine multiple communities into one? This could give users a neat way to browse/participate in similar communities across instances without having to navigate to each one manually.
I agree that community structure should not change to handle duplicates. If anything, having a feature similar to hashtags or topics that can aggregate a stream of posts from multiple communities would be nice.
What do you mean by combining in this context? If they mutually agree to combine because they have aligned interests I don’t see anything wrong with that. An external entity combining them I agree would lead to a bunch of problems.
I’d imagine it would be the same way it worked on Reddit when there were multiple communities with identical topics/similar names:
One gets a bit larger, therefore shows up in feeds more, appears higher in search results, etc.
Unless the other community has some kind of differentiation, it will wither and die.
And everything will be fine.
I keep seeing people being this up as if it’s some huge problem. There’s tons of /c/memes out there, but !memes@lemmy.ml is clearly the place to go. It’s not confusing, IMO.
Aside from any impracticality that could arise in implementation, I like the idea of federated communities between servers. I mean why not extend the possibilities of federation even further? Community mods or users could de/federate from communities on other servers with the same names or core themes should they so choose. In consideration of difficulties with moderating spam and other materials from other communities generated with the same name, I think it makes sense for that kind of community federation to be opt-in rather than opt-out.
If it goes the Reddit route, one of those communities will definitely border on dead and the risk for moderators/servers having too much power/influence within the larger communities continues.
Any plans to make it easier to interact with links to other instances?
The QoL value to automatically open links to other instances inside my current instance would be enormous.
I’m gonna be asking hard questions, I think, sorry about that. I hope you consider it tough love considering our past interactions.
As an instance admin, I have some questions:
-
How are you doing? I know there was a lot of pressure when things blew up and it seems to be calming down a bit now.
-
How is Lemmy doing financially?
-
Considering past releases and their associated breaking bugs (including 0.18.3), what measures are you taking to help prevent that?
-
Can we consider the possibility of downgrades being supported?
-
Why are bugs affecting moderation not release blockers? Does anything block releases?
-
Are there plans to give instance administrators a voice in shaping the future of Lemmy’s development?
As someone who is trying to help with Lemmy’s development, I have some other questions:
- What do you think are the biggest problems with Lemmy as a software project and what are your priorities for Lemmy?
- Considering fairly low amounts of developers contributing to Lemmy, how are you working to help new people get into the project?
- Do you worry about the message it sends to potential contributors when the main developers are working on a different project which competes with the former? (Example: Lemmy-ui vs Lemmy-ui-Leptos)
- Considering most work is done voluntarily, how are you trying to organize and prioritize work?
- Do you believe you are stretching yourself too thin between Lemmy, Lemmy-ui, Lemmy-ui-leptos, Jerboa and Lemmy.ml? If so, what are you doing to help you focus?
-
Any plans for improving SEO? One of Reddit’s biggest strengths was being able to get very relevant results with a simple internet search. In time can you see something similar for Lemmy, even with its decentralized nature? I really you for doing this, thank you for your time!
deleted by creator
I’m personally a hard copyleft developer, so I’d prefer that people making apps and tools for the lemmy eco-system, open source them, to benefit the community as a whole. Nearly all lemmy projects have adopted that standard, and are using the GPL and other hard copy-left licenses, and sharing their code freely with the community.
One example: various devs of lemmy apps have asked me how we build comment trees. Because lemmy’s source code is open, I was able to share the exact code from lemmy-ui (typescript) and jerboa (kotlin). This is not something closed source developers are able / willing to share.
So I continue to recommend that developers heed calls to open source their applications. I developed my ThumbKey android keyboard, specifically because my requests to the MessageEase developers to open-source their codebase, after development had stopped, went unheeded for years.
Side note, but I’ve seen a lot of the discourse around Sync confuse FOSS, with making money. Of course developers deserve to get paid for their labor time! The thing is, FOSS makes no demands on how you monetize your software: “free as in freedom, not free as in beer”, is the saying. So its entirely possible to open source your app, and still charge for it if you like. And If someone wants your app for free (say via an unlocked APK), they’ll get it, whether its closed source, or not.
And yes, if an instance decided to insert ads, or becomes full of blog/cryptospam, I’d def recommend other instances defederate from them. I’d rather not lemmy become the ad-machine that other social media has become.
I definitely didnt expect it, nor did I expect that there would suddenly be more than a dozen different apps. But its not a problem, the more choices users have the better. Those who like such clients can use them, thout it affecting anyone else. Plus monetization of apps could potentially help to fund development of Lemmy itself.
For instances with ads its pretty much the same, more choice for users. But I really doubt that model can have any success considering how many free instances are around which are run by volunteers. Defederation should be unnecessary assuming that ads are only shown to local users.
Sorry, no question, only: Thank you for your hard work :)
Will an AMA comment sort type be added? Would be convenient to scroll by new replies from OP so we can easily keep up with AMAs
There’s a “Chat” view, although I’m not sure exactly what it does.
For me the whole point of fediverse is not depending on a single party for your socials/subs. But the current climate in each instance forces users to have accounts in multiple instances.
As a Lemmy user I believe account migration should be a default Lemmy feature which enables true federation for end users. Any plans for this feature in the near future?
I have heard some respectable communities, namely r/AskHistorians, express hesitance at coming to Lemmy in part over fears of appearing biased due to the overt political stance of Lemmy’s creators. In other words, it’s hard to be a neutral body in affiliation with anything that has an overt political stance.
I wonder what the devs of Lemmy think of this hesitance. Is it unreasonable and itself biased? Or do you see any potential for finding a way to facilitate a platform that would allow for a more neutral space?
Why are Lemmy devs so adamantly opposed to a Follow User feature?
This is the one feature that is the biggest hurdle for full federation between Lemmy and all the other fediverse instances. Mastodon (and its forks), Peertube, Pixelfed, and kbin all allow this and federate extremely well together while Lemmy is the worst at federating because its the only one to exclude this feature.
(Please don’t reply with “use kbin if you want to follow users” again as its very dismissive and frustrating)
Here’s my crude write up on a somewhat hacky way this can be implemented as is:
spoiler
When creating an account the backend can automatically create a community thats the same as your username. make you the mod, and enable mod only posts to the community by default. On the update to the new version with the Follow User Feature a script can run to auto create communities with the names of users.
The script can also change any usernames that exist with the same name as a current community and add a U at the end of the user (an extremely small amount of users would be affected and usernames aren’t as important as preserving community names/urls)
Then we just need to follow the community of the same name as the user to follow them. The way mastodon already federates with Lemmy currently would allow you to recurve updates whenever the user posts to their own community since only they (and assigned mods) can post to their community.
They probably wont implement due to potential harrassment from abuse. But you can follow users using Open RSS feeds in meantime. Here’s your feed for example:
How would this open you up to abuse? Having a community with the same name as your username auto created where only you can post new threads wouldn’t open you up to abuse. But it would greatly benefit interoperability throughout the fediverse. Lemmy is currently the least interoperable fediverse software while also being the second most used. I also think its the most valuable since up/down voting and threaded replies makes the most valuable information the easiest to come by and follow. So it would be great for the best fediverse software to also be better at playing nice with the rest of the fediverse
I’m not against adding user-following, in fact I’d envisioned that we’d eventually add it way down the road. It’d just be a ton of work, and I have a backlog thats years-long, so its not anything I’ll be taking on anytime soon.
And lemmy is primarily a link-aggregator first, with a focus on following communities, rather than a micro-blogging platform with a focus on following people.
It’d make more sense to me to have user feeds separate from communities so you can have overlapping names without issue
First off. How dare you‽
