The playground schematic analogy for designing a fediverse service.
The playground schematic analogy for designing a fediverse service.
In recent days, the discussion around Lemmy has become a bit...spicy. There's a few points of impact here. To list some examples: Beehaw being frustrated enough to ponder leaving the software Sublinks being started out of uncertainty with the lemmy roadmap Drama about inability to delete images and ...
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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.
Edit: This doesn't mean that I don't care about implementing better mod tools, in fact if you look at the pull requests there have been numerous improvements in this area. But resources are limited and mod tools cannot be the only priority as some people seem to expect.
Edit 2: To be very clear, this comment is only aimed at Beehaw admins and a few other individuals who are extremely entitled and think they can dictate me to work on features they specifically want. The vast majority of users and admins on Lemmy are not like that, so of course my comment is not aimed at them and Im working hard every day to make Lemmy better for the majority. But that means I cant get distracted and waste time on features that only a tiny minority wants.
Use a different type of playground instead
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.
Your biggest benefit as FOSS developers is your community goodwill. I can't stress enough how much you need to be careful on what you say and how you communicate to maintain it.
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.
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.
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.
Regrettably, complaining tends to be a common pastime for many individuals. I acknowledge your frustrations with certain users who may appear entitled or unappreciative of the considerable effort you've dedicated to developing Lemmy. Shifting towards a mindset that perceives complaints as opportunities for enhancement can be transformative. Establishing a set of transparent rules or guidelines on how you prioritize issues and feature requests could help turn critiques into opportunities for improvement. 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 philosophy of Complaint-Driven Development provides a simple, transparent way to prioritize issues based on user feedback:
- Get the platform in front of as many users as possible.
- Listen openly to all user complaints and feedback. Expect a lot of it.
- Identify the top 3 most frequently reported issues/pain points.
- Prioritize fixing those top 3 issues.
- Repeat the process, continuously improving based on prominent user complaints.
Following these straightforward rules allows you to address the most pressing concerns voiced by your broad user community, rather than prioritizing the vocal demands of a few individuals. It keeps development efforts focused on solving real, widespread issues in a transparent, user-driven manner.
Here's a suggestion that could help you implement this approach: Consider periodically making a post like What are your complaints about Lemmy? Developers may want your feedback. This post encourages users to leave one top-level comment per complaint, allowing others to reply with ideas or existing GitHub issues that could address those complaints. This will help you identify common complaints and potential solutions from your community.
Once you have a collection of complaints and suggestions, review them carefully and choose the top 3 most frequently reported issues to focus on for the next development cycle. Clearly communicate to the community which issues you and the team will be prioritizing based on this user feedback, and explain why you've chosen those particular issues. This transparency will help users understand your thought process and feel heard.
As you work on addressing those prioritized issues, keep the community updated on your progress. When the issues are resolved, make a new release and announce it to the community, acknowledging their feedback that helped shape the improvements.
Then, repeat the process: Make a new post gathering complaints and suggestions, review them, prioritize the top 3 issues, communicate your priorities, work on addressing them, release the improvements, and start the cycle again.
By continuously involving the community in this feedback loop, you foster a sense of ownership and leverage the collective wisdom of your user base in a transparent, user-driven manner.
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 rude ways i am not throwing shades here but maybe just take a breath nutomic ? Like we all do love lemmy and will stand with you even tho some won't but you are litterally chasing away the loyal ones .
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.
And i do appreciate the 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 u 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 .
Thanks for the support, I appreciate it and definitely don't want people like you to go away. However there has been a lot of negativity during the last week, so automatically my attitude also got more negative in general.
I agree some people just leaves a sour taste in mouth but you do have to learn to differentiate between them and the normal ones and i am glad we have come to an agreement kudos .
no software out that is as mature as lemmy,
Doesn't mbin have feature parity?
I honestly haven't heard back much from mbin so I dunno
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
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?
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.
It’s normal that there will be forks and alternatives
This is not the sentiment you have previously expressed in direct response to these forks and alternatives. Thinking specifically about your activity in the sublinks announcement posts.
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.
I think sublinks is more similar to mbin/kbin than lemmy anyway and people don't seem to get that.
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
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.
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!
Youre welcome :)
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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 very small and incomplete list of examples of already merged PRs which took me 30 seconds to quickly find on GitHub
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.
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. And even then I've stepped in it a number of times.
My perspective is that lemmy found perhaps a very unexpected success, and caught the devs flatfooted and this is how the stress of that success is manifesting. In short, they walk the walk, but can't talk the talk.
There's a saying where I'm from, that the Queen doesn't just need to be pure, she needs to appear pure. And those two things are completely different skillsets.
I know i have been defending lemmy 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 .
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.
I'm not sure why Beehaw is coming up specifically in recent day (did something happen that I missed? E: Yes, a new write up from the Beehaw team, see Blaze's reply), but their moderation issues and needs came up as early as June and July of last year, but was definitely being talked about by September between Beehaw admins and users. Here's the thread I remember on it.
Another thread on one of the major CSAM content attack events against Lemmy (the one that took out vlemmy.net as you probably will recall) highlighted their desire for a better platform.
I'm OOTL if anything specific happened between the Lemmy devs and Beehaw admins this week that caused more beef, but the mindset that the development of much needed moderation features was progressing too slowly was with the Beehaw admins for many months now.
Thank you for the link! I can see yeah it appears like drama on the face of it, but from what I see it's nutomic continuing to be defensive (as far as I'm concerned it's their right to be) and the write up is a mere extension of genuine uneasiness expressed last fall, it all just adds up to mean that Beehaw and Lemmy's goals still haven't fully aligned in the last 6 months.
I've donated to the Beehaw project because I support their vision, if they separate entirely from Lemmy on a new service I'll be happy for them for it, but I will stay on Lemmy.
Thank you for the link!
You are welcome!
it all just adds up to mean that Beehaw and Lemmy’s goals still haven’t fully aligned in the last 6 months.
Yes indeed
I do agree we should conteibute to lemmy rather than start building our own at a whim which beehaw admins don't seem to understand or care about as they have'nt put forth a PR or anything . We can always fork lemmy if the devs shat the bed but i think beehaw admins has their own egostatical problem and as i have said my only problem ia nutomic and dessalines ( sometimes ) have turned into snowflakes and can't accept any constructive criticism and asks others to fuck off i think they have decided they have hit it big to not care about anyone anymore and that irks me like a lot.
(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).
Strong agree.
Hopefully there can be some renewed collaboration in the future.
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.