Yeah I’ve considered leaving Lemmy because of who is in charge of development right now. They were not ready for its sudden burst in popularity and are not handling it well.
Kushan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
We desperately need a company like Mozilla to take the reigns of something like Lemmy. The original developers are far too biased and short sighted to see the bigger picture, it needs to be an independent group that promotes more open source development.
AdmiralShat@programming.dev 10 months ago
copylefty@lemmy.fosshost.com 10 months ago
Could you expand? How aren’t they handling it well?
spaduf@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
The biggest issues that have come up so far are moderation and database optimization. The moderation issue is significant enough that large instances have considered shutting down, but the database optimization thing is what really drives me crazy. It is absurdly expensive for hosts considering we only have 35k MAU (just one of our midsized instances should be able to host the whole userbase for the cost they currently pay) and it has been largely deprioritized to the point that contributors who have tried to fix it have been told off.
It’s one thing if it’s just a couple of devs working on the project and trying their best, it’s an entirely different thing when a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues. At this point a significant number of users have been lost because the devs have been largely unable to capitalize on previous waves on growth due to slow development.
Not to mention things like authorized fetch, which if fixed would ensure Lemmy/Mastodon interoperability and would effectively make Lemmy the go to place for groups on the fediverse. This would constitute a huge boost in engagement from the broader fediverse.
0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Exhibit 1: programming.dev/post/5180682
Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
Definitely seen arguments on bugzilla, should disqualify Mozilla too.
ericjmorey@programming.dev 10 months ago
That post seems like an overreaction. Which makes me think that the linked GitHub issue is just the straw that broke the patience of the developer that has moved on. Which is fair, but their action to post an emotional and negative public announcement is as immature as thething they’re complaining about.
Serinus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I am a dev, but not a Rust dev.
Rust, Go, and C# look like the future to me. Everyone is moving to strongly typed, explicitly typed languages for a reason.
Rust is as fast as it gets, and much much safer and easier than C or C++ at the cost of slightly odder syntax than higher level languages.
Microsoft has done great things with C# and open source and multi-platforming. It’s the easiest, quickest, safest way to develop business applications. The performance is really pretty good until you compare it to Rust.
Go is between the two, but probably a little closer to Rust.
Other languages will stick around the same way Fortran has still been in use despite being deprecated for 30 years. But really nobody should be developing anything new in PHP.
AdmiralShat@programming.dev 10 months ago
Lol, this was what I was going to link to
TheGreenGolem@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Yeah, that’s a major fuckup from Snowe.
tehbilly@le.ptr.is 10 months ago
Oh snap, as someone who’s recently joined, do you have some information you could point me to?
itmike@fikaverse.club 10 months ago
@AdmiralShat @Kushan It's federated right? so you don't need to leave, just move on to a different federated server in the network.. or am I missing something?
AdmiralShat@programming.dev 10 months ago
It’s the developers of the software itself, not the hosts of any particular instanve.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Time for a repo fork?
Kichae@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
You can have as many forks as you want, but that’s a software engineer’s solution to a social problem. Lemmy is the “name brand” now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation, and it will be orders of magnitudes more difficult to get support for forks, both from a contributor and from a user perspective.
Just look at last year’s Twitter migration, and the sea of people complaining about Mastodon not having features they felt were a requirement for adoption, while also ignoring every other Mastodon alternative on the Fediverse that had everything they were looking for.
spaduf@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Lemmy is the “name brand” now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation
Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.
art@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The solution for capitalism-out-of-control is not more capitalism. The less big money players in the fediverse the better.
Midnight@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Mozilla is a non profit. The most “capitalist” they get is the Mozilla Corp a company owned by the foundation which is basically just for tax purposes. Having a big player in the fediverse helps.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
They are funded by Google. I much prefer the “some random guys or whoever will fork their code” model of software for this sort of thing.
Kushan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Google pays them to be the default search engine, they’re not funded by Google.
Fungah@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Amen. Everything google touches turns to shit. Everything.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
What we need is a bunch of small groups and companies. It isn’t a problem if there isn’t a giant centralization of power.
You don’t see Salsa companies ruining tomatoes
echodot@feddit.uk 10 months ago
It’s open source, anyone can fork the repo any time they want. The original Devs won’t like it but alosnyhere is bugger all they can do about it. It’s just that it would be a full time job to take on and no one has the time.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
lemmy and reddit are too niche. mozilla getting into mastodon or friendica is far better
ikidd@lemmy.world 10 months ago
One of those half-billion user niches, eh.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Specifically, the model should be the Wikimedia Foundation. That is, a non-profit organization with lots of stakeholders and resources and slow procedures to guarantee accountability. This is the pragmatic least-bad solution to the problem of centralization on the internet.
ericjmorey@programming.dev 10 months ago
Wikipedia Foundation is also bloated and unfocused outside of their mainstay product. But like Mozilla, they generally do good with the bloat and unfocused resources. Inefficiencies are easy to identify but hard to mitigate.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yes, bloat and mission creep is going to be an issue with any big non-profit. But maybe that’s also their advantage: any organization that becomes focused on sustaining itself is going to provide decent long-term stability. I guess it’s a bit like a state.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
I think Mozilla has poor judgment and bad leadership. I don’t mind if they participate but they shouldn’t be in charge
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 10 months ago
What do you mean? I haven’t followed the development directly, I’ve just been a user and so far things seem to be going pretty well. Curious what shortsightedness you are talking about?
ikidd@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Where do you get that from? I have no love for tankies, but from what I’ve seen, they’ve built a product that’s free of their biases, opensourced it and thrown it over the wall with no strings attached.
If you want to make a rooten-tooten white supremacist nazi instance with Lemmy, you can do exactly that. Nobody has to federate with you, and you don’t have to federate with them.
Strange take.
spaduf@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Not for folks who have been following the development. It’s one thing if it’s just a couple of devs working on the project and trying their best, it’s an entirely different thing when a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues. It’s become a pattern and will almost certainly continue. At this point a significant number of users have been lost because the devs have been largely unable to capitalize on previous waves on growth due to slow development.
xapr@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
This is the first I’ve heard of “a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues” and “Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute”.
Can you give a summary or examples? I’m not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don’t follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn’t aware of any of this.
mosscap@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
I dont know much about the primary developers of Lemmy, but from what I can tell this is a part time labor of love project for them. Its unreasonable to ask people to push beyond their boundaries or capacity so that their pet project can become a 1:1 replacement for an incredibly mature platform like Reddit overnight
spaduf@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Kushan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
With respect, maybe you shouldn’t be commenting on what’s going on behind the scenes. They are good developers but they’re not good leaders or shepherds of such a big project. They need to hand over stewardship to someone that can be trusted.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sometimes things become bigger than just what they were before, take on a life of their own.
When it gets to a humanity community level need then maybe the devs should turn it over to others who can do that, or at least accept the help of others who have been trying to help them grow it more/better.
We have a responsibility to ourselves, but we also have a responsibility to each other.
ikidd@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sounds like you should fork it.
spaduf@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
I would love to contribute but I don’t have the experience for a fork. This is kind of the essence of the whole problem though. Plenty of unutilized contributors who could be driving this project forward but are having a hard time getting involved.
Serinus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
While I generally agree with you, you can’t call that a strange take.
Their views are concerning, but so far I haven’t seen them trying to force their views anywhere yet. And having a fork as a real option helps mitigate a lot of that risk.
I’m certainly okay with the $50k/year they’re trying to make for working on this full time. I’d be fine with triple that.
If it gets out of hand, we have options. They’re aware of that (in fact offered it), and have been acting appropriately afaik.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The bottom line is, they started something that’s bigger than them, and created more than enough tools to fork from them if they become a problem.
I always like to point to Emby/Jellyfin as a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. They created something excellent, the community joined in, and it got popular. Then the maintainers decided to try and cash in, and the community immediately responded by forking into what would become Jellyfin. And nowadays, the discussion is between Plex vs Jellyfin, you rarely ever hear people talk about Emby anymore.
After a certain point of user adoption, FOSS (and copy-left) software should be able to stand on it’s own without the creator’s direct involvement. The community can take the wheel if necessary. The Lemmy devs have provided enough tools to do exactly that, and I believe there are more than enough experienced devs in this community that we would not struggle to find the necessary talent.
That’s doesn’t mean there isn’t still a risk, though. This is social media, the technology is only half the story. The other half is getting people to move. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone here how hard it is to get an entrenched user base to abandon a platform whose mainteners have gone off the rails.
Baku@aussie.zone 10 months ago
Funny enough the post right below this one in my subscribed feed was a post from db0 asking about setting up media servers. And both of the top two comments recommend jellyfin, nobody recommended emby
squirmy_wormy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If someone brings a toy to class, it’s wild to me to say that if the whole class likes it enough, they must donate their toy. If you love it, go make your own - hell, just copy it exactly as it is and make adjustments from there.
ikidd@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Also: OPNsense
jeremyparker@programming.dev 10 months ago
I’m not sure if this is what that person meant, but, usually it’s on the original development team to handle outreach and building the identity of the software - in Lemmy’s case, they have a bit of a not-great reputation… Even if they had the reach, that reputation hurts.
Having Mozilla - or any top tier foss-friendly company - kinda take the reins a bit would probably be good.
ikidd@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m not sure if Mozilla is the one for that job, they have their own issues with community relations. I wish they didn’t because the world needs Firefox.
deus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It seems to me they’re saying Lemmy needs corporate backing to grow? Cause if they were so bothered by the opinions of the Lemmy devs they could simply use Kbin instead.
Eldritch@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well that or use an instance that isn’t theirs, or doesn’t even federate with theirs, or simply block theirs.🤔 I mean this is really throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I have no strong love for leninists/stalinists, and think they accomplish little other than making actual socialists look bad while not being socialist themselves. But I’m not that put off by them. They’re generally fairly intellectually, weak and easy to maneuver around. Should you choose to interact with them.
wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one 10 months ago
They are talking about the people developing lemmy, not some petty fight with the admins of one specific instance.
ericjmorey@programming.dev 10 months ago
Kbin is not a good Lemmy replacement.