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.
@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.
When do we get advanced moderation features? And for example the ability to block all users from a single instance to prevent for example brigading? I mean for the user, so we don't have to rely on defederation so much.
Are you planning to revamp defederation? I mean it's rather complicated the way it works and the triangle that is the user's instance, the other user's instance and the instance the community is located.
What about features like automatically kicking of moderators / revoking their ownership. In the early days of the Reddit exodus, some people reserved lots of communities just so they'd be the owner of the community, but they don't do anything with it. I think admins mostly already dealt with that. But there are ideas floating around to migitate for things like that and other common annoyances. I think good moderation is key (and the tools that go with that and the whole architecture of the platform should favor a good atmosphere.)
When do we get advanced moderation features? And for example the ability to block all users from a single instance to prevent for example brigading? I mean for the user, so we don’t have to rely on defederation so much.
This could be added to the existing instance block feature, but so far no one has even bothered to open an issue I think.
Are you planning to revamp defederation? I mean it’s rather complicated the way it works and the triangle that is the user’s instance, the other user’s instance and the instance the community is located.
Its very simple and effective in that in prevents all network connections to the blocked instance. So I dont think it makes sense to change that, but other tools can be added on top for more fine-grained restrictions (eg user-level instance blocks in 0.19).