Yet there are tens of thousands of users and hundreds of admins who are happy with Lemmy in its current state.
And I’m one of those. Thank you for your service Nutomic!
Comment on The playground schematic analogy for designing a fediverse service.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 9 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.
starman@programming.dev 9 months ago
nutomic@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Youre welcome :)
Carrolade@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You sound like you actually want to end up with another niche alternative that never does get big.
Is your perfect-world idea for Lemmy just a modestly-sized userbase? Is it already bigger than you’d prefer?
nutomic@lemmy.ml 9 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.
spaduf@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
It’s normal that there will be forks and alternatives
This is not the sentiment you tend to express in direct response to these forks and alternatives. Thinking specifically about your activity in the sublinks announcement posts.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 9 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.
THE_ANTIHERO@lemmy.today 9 months ago
Seems likes the guy would like to burn (if i may say as he has invested five years into it) one of his life’s work to the ground
Carrolade@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Honestly, I think the Beehaw admin might’ve simply nailed it when they talked about vision. There’s nothing inherently wrong with not wanting to be the lead over a project having hundreds of thousands or millions of people involved. That’s not inherently necessary to always grow.
I hate to bring political/economic ideology into this, but I’m reminded of Marxist philosophy. In that ideology, properly realized, there are no huge, massively-scaled organizations that lead top-down. Only smaller independent ones that work cooperatively, nothing much bigger than a city-state. The idea of endlessly-growing scale being beneficial is generally a capitalist value.
The ones making the mistake could be us, if we misunderstood the devs real wishes. We would just be projecting onto them, with our own ambitions and goals. That’s not actually healthy.
THE_ANTIHERO@lemmy.today 9 months ago
I feel like i do have to say i agree with everything you said except this.
Use a different type of playground instead.
Like why ?
nutomic@lemmy.ml 9 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.
THE_ANTIHERO@lemmy.today 9 months ago
I get it and i don’t give a fuck about the features i know the image issue is hard to implement because of federation all i want from you is to not ask everyone to leave the moment a criticism comes to light then you will be the king of a ghost town.
THE_ANTIHERO@lemmy.today 9 months ago
Really sad to see you go this way my man i had high hopes but oh well it is your work and you have the right to destroy it.
sunaurus@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I think something is being lost in communication here. Nothing is being destroyed.
I keep seeing this disconnect, I think it needs to be emphasized: Lemmy maintainers have been focusing (and continue to focus on) safety and moderation improvements. Anybody can verify this by looking through PRs/commits/RFCs on GitHub.
I think I understand where the disconnect is coming from - there have been a few responses in some of these threads by Lemmy devs where they tell people to be less rude and demanding, and to contribute if they desperately want some feature. Perhaps as an observer, this sounds like “we do not care about mod tools” or whatever, but reality is just different.
Perhaps it would be useful to do a more in-depth post about all the stuff Lemmy devs have worked on and are currently working on? I mean things like:
- When purging a federated user, federate local community removals. (#4505)
- Mods and admins can comment in locked posts (fixes #4116) (#4488)
- When site banning a federated user, also remove their content from our local communities. (#4464)
- Store password reset token after email successfully sent (fixes #3757) (#4489)
- Require verified email to reset password (#4482)
- Correctly synchronize collection of community featured posts (fixes #3867) (#4475)
- Ignore expired bans in CommentReportView::read, just like in CommentReportQuery::list (#4457)
- Auto resolve reports on removing a comment or post. Fixes #4390 (#4402)
- … the list goes on and on and on, these are just a couple of examples
I feel like there is this meme developing in Lemmy that maintainers are putting out a message of not caring about mod tools, which anybody with context will know is completely false, but I think most Lemmy users (and even many admins!) just don’t have this context.
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
I agree. A lot of the friction here is due to miscommunication. That said, if what I said kept being misunderstood, then I would make a priority to improve my communication style.
This shit is hard. If one has ASD like I do, it’s even harder. Personally try to be very exact on what I say, even when speaking casually, and pepper smilies and caveats to try to ensure people don’t take what I say the wrong way.
My perspective is that lemmy found perhaps a very unexpected success, and caught the devs flatfooted. In short, they walk the walk, but can’t talk the talk.
THE_ANTIHERO@lemmy.today 9 months ago
I know i have been defending lemmu devs for a long time and i agree with all this the only gripe i have is nutomic seems to think he have hit it big and doesn’t need to give a fuck about anything and seems to tell anyone with even the slightest criticism to stop using lemmy these past weeks and i can’t simply act like that isn’t wrong. I agree beehawe admins can fuck off and they are entitled assholes but this behavior is making me rethink my stand .
sunaurus@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I am very sad about the situation with Beehaw specifically.
I think it’s a very unfortunate case where all parties have the best intentions of building something great with Lemmy, but through different circumstances, relations have soured and involved people no longer think they have a shared vision (which in my opinion is actually not true - I believe that Beehaws vision fits in very well with the direction Lemmy is going, especially with private communities being planned soon).
I am still hopeful that things can be improved, but we will see.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 9 months ago
Yet they believe that they are somehow entitled to dictating what I or Dessalines should work on.
I think this is the most frustrating thing: some people do not value free work. Some people cannot empathize, cannot understand what it is to build something for free and get shit on because it doesn’t fit somebody else’s desires. Block em and move on.
Just keep the negativity out of your life and keep up the good work for lemmy. I’ve reached by quota for opensource donations, but I’m one of those thousands of people who appreciate the work you put in. We are probably the silent majority.
wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Have you ever considered tying a feature request to a dollar amount? If people want x, prioritizing it would cost x?
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
It’s obvious that people are indeed doing or thinking of doing just that. Don’t get complacent just because things have not changed yet. There is a threshold to cross and once it crossed, things change very very fast. Currently there’s no software out that is as mature as lemmy, but if the trust thermocline is breached, people will prefer to switch to something substandard than support a project they don’t believe anymore.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 9 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.
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Mate trust me I understand all about Foss stress and burnout. I’ve been doing Foss for way longer than 4 years and the ai horde has been very demanding as well (and I also have a day job and small children) . But through all this, you have to learn to keep your cool. It’s sometimes better to just come out and say “people, I’m close to burnout and I can’t comment now” or “I am going to work on this as fast as I can but if someone can get to it first feel free” etc. It’s way better to explain that you’re overworked than to attack people. It’s also OK to say nothing at all than to go on the offensive. People can understand the former but the latter will never work the way you expect.
I keep saying that this is a pure communication issue. I (and many others like sunaurus) can clearly see you’re working hard and we understand how much there is to do, and this is why I’m dismayed when I see you escalate.
If you want we can get in a voice chat and I can share how I deal with these situations and what has worked for me. Just pm me. I really think this is made unnecessary harder than it needs to be.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 9 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.
The_Lemmington_Post@discuss.online 9 months ago
Sadly, complaining seems to be one of the activities that people like to do the most. I understand the frustration of dealing with negativity, especially when you’ve poured immense effort into developing Lemmy over the years. However, embracing a Complaint-Driven Development approach could help turn critiques into opportunities for improvement. One way to facilitate this could be to establish a set of transparent rules or guidelines on how you prioritize issues and feature requests. This transparency can help manage expectations and foster a more collaborative relationship with the users in your community. While not all complaints may be actionable, actively listening to feedback and explaining your prioritization criteria could go a long way in building trust and goodwill. Open communication and a willingness to consider diverse perspectives can lead to a stronger, more user-centric product in the long run.
THE_ANTIHERO@lemmy.today 9 months ago
Yeah i made a comment defending the devs just today now i am rethinking my stand and will have to edit it . But i can see both sides here and i find it much more pleasent when dessalines is involved in the conversation nutomic loves to defend himself from really small criticisms in big way i am not throwing shades here but maybe just take a breath nutomic ?
nutomic@lemmy.ml 9 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.
THE_ANTIHERO@lemmy.today 9 months ago
And i do appreciate tge work you put in like a lot i appreciate it a lot . But if you continue telling everyone giving feedback to go away there won’t be anyone left and that is sad as i love lemmy and how good it is . I am not a hater its like getting angry when you are watching the thing you love slightly burn away you know.
And whenever i come across a rude user or beehaw admin demanding shit there are more downvotes on them and people do defend you and i am one of them so don’t tell us to fuck off we care about lemmy as much as i do and i know you do too as you have spent almost five years on it i hope we can come to an aggreament and hopefully the past issues won’t affect lemmy in the long run .
Blaze@dormi.zone 9 months ago
Doesn’t mbin have feature parity?
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
I honestly haven’t heard back much from mbin so I dunno
Blaze@dormi.zone 9 months ago
I use it from time to time, it’s quite decent. I prefer the Lemmy UI, so I use it more, but I really could use Mbin much more if it was the opposite