Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT
Lemmy Developer AMA and Dev Update, 2024-01-26, 1500 CEDT
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they'd like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky@lemmy.world about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
NLNet Funding
First of all some good news: We are currently applying for new funding from NLnet and have reached the second round. If it gets approved then @phiresky@lemmy.world and SleeplessOne will work on the paid milestones, while @dessalines and @nutomic will keep being funded by direct user donations. This will increase the number of paid Lemmy developers to four and allow for faster development.
You can see a preliminary draft for the milestones. This can give you a general idea what the development priorities will be over the next year or so. However the exact details will almost certainly change until the application process is finalized.
Development Update
@ismailkarsli added a community statistic for number of local subscribers.
@jmcharter added a view for denied Registration Applications.
@dullbananas made various improvements to database code, like batching insertions for better performance, SQL comments and support for backwards pagination.
@SleeplessOne1917 made a change that besides admins also allows community moderators to see who voted on posts. Additionally he made improvements to the 2FA modal and made it more obvious when a community is locked.
@nutomic completed the implementation of local only communities, which don't federate and can only be seen by authenticated users. Additionally he finished the image proxy feature, which user IPs being exposed to external servers via embedded images. Admin purges of content are now federated. He also made a change which reduces the problem of instances being marked as dead.
@dessalines has been adding moderation abilities to Jerboa, including bans, locks, removes, featured posts, and vote viewing.
In other news there will soon be a security audit of the Lemmy federation code, thanks to Radically Open Security and NLnet.
Support development
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
- Liberapay (preferred option)
- Open Collective
- Patreon
- Cryptocurrency
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First, I want to say thank you for the incredible job you already have done in this area. However, do you have any thoughts on further improving some fundamental Lemmy UX painpoints? Examples such as:
- Migrating accounts between instances
- Tagging users across instances
- Linking communities across instances
- Finding communities across instances
Migrating accounts between instances
Isn't that implemented in the 19.2 and later versions? I just migrated using that feature a few days back, worked quite well
That would be awesome if true. It's progressing faster than I thought. I'm still just learning about the scaled sort and enjoying that new feature lol.
I'm pretty sure it is there, you can export and import your subscriptions in the settings
It's only subscriptions, blocks, and user settings iirc. Your posts and comments don't migrate for example.
Importing posts and comments could cause a security risk if someone would to abuse that function.
Even Mastodon doesn't support it
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.
More importantly it would make exports extremely large and would cause a lot of server load to import/export. Plus you would end up with duplicate posts and comments which seems like a bad idea.
Yes, that's what I meant by security risk, that's like a DoS feature.
Still that's not bad. Wish they could get saved posts to transfer, too. That would be useful.
As @phiresky@lemmy.world mentioned we have improvements coming down the pipe for linking content across instances.
Community linking and user linking do work currently (for example I just linked phiresky above), and a community example would be !risa@startrek.website , but we could improve this by extending it to posts and comments, as well as creating a url link standard that would work across apps.
For migration we recently added a feature to export your user data. But "real" migrating accounts is something I put on our "todo" list, though it probably also first needs a proposal to define how it should work exactly (should it still work when the original instance is down?) As soon as we start giving users more control over their private key issues start appearing like not having any infrastructure for key rotation / revocation. Without that it will only work when the original instance still exists.
I'm not sure if by tagging users you mean linking / mentioning them? Or adding tags to them like you can tag posts / users on other platform. For tagging in general there's a pending proposal https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4 . So far it focuses on post tagging though to reduce the scope. I think the goal is going to be to start with one kind of tagging and add more kinds of tagging later.
For improving cross-instance linking (both communities, posts, and users) we also have a open milestone. There's a few spitballing issues about it, but no real concrete proposal on how to build it yet.
Can you add one to your list? Linking posts across instances? Like you can do
!community@instanceand the community will open viewed through your instance. But for linking posts there is no such equivalent. Like if I make an HTTP link it will be through my instance or possibly the one the community is hosted on which would be annoying for users of other instances.Also, linking communities across instances is possible already, but you can leave it up since it's confusing. I still see a lot of folks try to do the reddit approach if
c/communityReally like your protocol handlers contribution here. Seems tough to square with multiple accounts though.
Turning the fediverse button into an "open on my instance" with similar functionality to subscribing may also be a solution here. Bonus points if it'll also open a comment on mastodon.
Yup that'd be sick