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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When and how are you going to address the thousands of open issues in the Github repository, that contain UI bugs, missing error messages (something looks as if it was sent for example if you send a direct message with too many characters, but actually isn't), backend issues and other assorted bugs?
When we have about a dozen more developers. So far only dessalines and i work on Lemmy fulltime, and besides solving issues we also have to review pull requests, prepare releases and much more. So its just not enough time to keep up with all the new issues let alone resolve the whole backlog.
Thank you. A follow-up question: You sound like most things have to be done by full-time developers. Is there a healthy open-source community around Lemmy development? Do people submit enough pull-requests to fix bugs? Do people from the community contribute a substancial amount? features?
Of course contributions by volunteers are also welcome. However there are very few of those who are consistently contributing (particularly phiresky and sleepless one mentioned in op). And because they have a fulltime job their contributions are much smaller than mine or dessalines'. After the Reddit migration lots of people opened pull requests to implement new features, but most of them were abandoned after noticing how much work it takes to address review comments and actually get the pr merged. So fulltime devs seem very much preferable because they can put their full attention to Lemmy, and get a lot more done.
We're no different from 99% of open source projects: there are a lot of one-off contributors that just do a feature or two they'd like to have, but the vast majority of work is done by a handful of core devs. This is why you should always base your infrastructure and decisions to support those devs, rather than cater to one-off contributors.
I hope those wants and needs aren't mutually exclusive. I think most open source projects do a good job in catering for both. I'm not involved in Lemmy development so I don't really know what's going on here. But I've sent one-off contribution to various projects, sometimes contributed single features or helped to sort something out. It always felt appreciated.
Sure, a drive-by commit every now and then and no responsibility is a completely different level than maintaining a (large) project and putting in that effort and dedication. I think a healthy open source project has both. Maintenance and the responsibility/decisions by a core team. And the community contributions make up by adding diversity, being close to what the user needs and adding manpower by a larger group of people, meaning the individual contributions might be smaller, but by many more people. Good communication between the devs and the community usually helps to get quality contributions.