This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.
Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.
I mostly imagined the slow but steady growth we’d been having, and def didn’t anticipate that reddit would mess up so badly that a massive chunk of users would migrate from a multi-million dollar enterprise software, to a hobby project developed by a couple of marxist-leninists 🤣 . But so it goes, with all these late-capitalist social media companies alienating their users, monetizing them in any way possible in search of declining surplus.
The biggest non-tech problem, is just the overwhelming amount of notifications. Companies have multiple layers between devs and users, to separate, order, and create a more controlled explosion. That doesn’t exist here, so we get hundreds of notifications every day, with everyone treating us as their personal issue tracker… and I basically would get nothing done if all I did was respond to them. Luckily things are calming down a bit now.
The biggest tech-problem was the performance and security issues of so many users joining the network all at once, and luckily we had so many wonderful community contributions to help stabilize that.
We should be ambitious, and wantthe fediverse as a whole, on the long term, to replace big-tech. Every user we draw away from them, is one less person exploited for their data and treated as a commodity.
Technically, I’d just like us to continue making the software better, maintaining the code, and adding features.
The point regarding notifications is really important. Managing a popular open source project can be really overwhelming in that regard, and it’s easy for individual users to forget that it’s only a couple of people dealing with all their issues on the other end.
People stepping up and contributing is a great development. Community involvement is key for the success of open source platforms in my opinion.
And love the long term vision, I completely agree that the fediverse replacing corporate platforms would be the ideal scenario in the future. From what I can see, fediverse has already reached the point of sustainability. It’s still niche compared to mainstream platforms, but I think it’s clear that it can exist in its current form indefinitely. And I think this provides an important advantage over corporate platforms. Commercial companies have to continuously demonstrate profit and growth to their shareholder or die. This means having to constantly chase new ways to attract new users and monetize the platform leading to the sort of behaviors we see happening with Reddit. On the other hand, open platforms can grow slowly and sustainably. This allows the fediverse to evolve on a completely different time scale. I’m optimistic that the fediverse will likely outlive every single corporate platform that’s around today.
Thanks again for all the hard work you’re doing, it’s very much appreciated!