Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:

• https://startrek.website/c/news
• https://starwars.website/c/news

This also isn’t unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.

Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.

There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.

Overall tho, I’m against the concept of “combining / merging communities” that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.

Aside from any impracticality that could arise in implementation, I like the idea of federated communities between servers. I mean why not extend the possibilities of federation even further? Community mods or users could de/federate from communities on other servers with the same names or core themes should they so choose. In consideration of difficulties with moderating spam and other materials from other communities generated with the same name, I think it makes sense for that kind of community federation to be opt-in rather than opt-out.

If it goes the Reddit route, one of those communities will definitely border on dead and the risk for moderators/servers having too much power/influence within the larger communities continues.

I’m personally a hard copyleft developer, so I’d prefer that people making apps and tools for the lemmy eco-system, open source them, to benefit the community as a whole. Nearly all lemmy projects have adopted that standard, and are using the GPL and other hard copy-left licenses, and sharing their code freely with the community.

One example: various devs of lemmy apps have asked me how we build comment trees. Because lemmy’s source code is open, I was able to share the exact code from lemmy-ui (typescript) and jerboa (kotlin). This is not something closed source developers are able / willing to share.

So I continue to recommend that developers heed calls to open source their applications. I developed my ThumbKey android keyboard, specifically because my requests to the MessageEase developers to open-source their codebase, after development had stopped, went unheeded for years.

Side note, but I’ve seen a lot of the discourse around Sync confuse FOSS, with making money. Of course developers deserve to get paid for their labor time! The thing is, FOSS makes no demands on how you monetize your software: “free as in freedom, not free as in beer”, is the saying. So its entirely possible to open source your app, and still charge for it if you like. And If someone wants your app for free (say via an unlocked APK), they’ll get it, whether its closed source, or not.

And yes, if an instance decided to insert ads, or becomes full of blog/cryptospam, I’d def recommend other instances defederate from them. I’d rather not lemmy become the ad-machine that other social media has become.

I definitely didnt expect it, nor did I expect that there would suddenly be more than a dozen different apps. But its not a problem, the more choices users have the better. Those who like such clients can use them, thout it affecting anyone else. Plus monetization of apps could potentially help to fund development of Lemmy itself.

For instances with ads its pretty much the same, more choice for users. But I really doubt that model can have any success considering how many free instances are around which are run by volunteers. Defederation should be unnecessary assuming that ads are only shown to local users.

Haha youre a very curious one :D

1. See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2348893
2. It sure isnt perfect, partly because Mastodon makes no efforts to be compatible and expects everyone else to cater to their way of doing things. Regardless, the fact that you can interact between different platforms is a huge improvement over current social media platforms. And Im certain that interoperability will only get better over time.
3. Its already happening, look at Kbin combining the concepts of Reddit and Twitter into one. Or mitra which adds cryptocurrency integrations. There are probably others which Im unaware of.
4. Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements.
5. Its really genius because it combines the best aspect of centralized (simple login with username/password and an admin who manages technical stuff) with those of p2p (no central point of failure). Real p2p is great in theory, but it requires way too much technical knowledge for the average user, so its unlikely to ever gain mass appeal.
6. Personally I think the Fediverse is really the future of social media, so it will grow whether we want it or not. And its much healthier than the corporate platforms with their tracking, advertising and manipulating algorithms, so the more people leave them behind, the better. I dont see a way to influence this growth, we just need to adapt and deal with it.
7. Basically my previous reply, I dont know enough about journalism to give a more specific answer.
8. The biggest and proudest was definitely when tens of thousands of Reddit users suddenly came here, and most of them actually liked it. Cant say there was anything bad or embarrassing, the experience for me is really positive.
9. It feels great, I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.

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.

And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.

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.

To be honest I never had any long-term vision, and still dont have. I just thought that decentralized software in general and Activitypub in particular is very exciting and lets us take power away from corporations like Reddit, Google, Facebook etc.

Biggest technical problem was implementing Activitypub, when I started there was no implementation in Rust yet, and it was very hard to find detailed information how everything is supposed to work. Over the years I had to rewrite the federation code at least 4-5 times, each time making it a bit cleaner.

Biggest nontechnical challenge is dealing with all the people who are suddenly joining and want to contribute, so that it doesnt turn into total chaos. Luckily there are many helpful community members who helped to organize things. Another challenge is with funding, now we dont have as much time to work on the paid NLnet milestones. And its not clear if NLnet will grant us another funding round once this is over. Hopefully the user donations will grow over time so that they can cover our full salaries.

Thanks for your help :)

I appreciate you a ton comrade, you’ve been such a great help in getting this instance off the ground. Personal stuff should always be more important, so I hope all goes well. If you ever decide you want to admin again, lmk!

Thanks! We’re glad ppl are finding Lemmy useful, and enjoying using it!

Limitations no, if anything the protocol is too extensive and lets you do too many things (or do the same thing in different ways). But thats somewhat expected for a protocol which can handle all types of social media platforms. I think the protocol is fine as is, but it needs minor changes here and there to keep up with how it is being used in the real world. The FEP process is doing a good job of that.

From what I know the AT protocol used by Bluesky is entirely centralized, so it doesnt look like a competitor yet. They claim that it will be decentralized in the future, but I will believe it when I see it. For now the decentralization seems more like a marketing gimmick.

We are not lawyers so we dont know much about licensing. To be honest I doubt that such bad actors would care much how posts are licensed, they are going to scrape it anyway.

1. Arch.
2. startrek.website
3. Jerboa (biased obvi, but I like boost’s UI and Jerboa’s is mostly inspired from that)

1. Manjaro for me.
2. Impossible to choose, there are too many.
3. I didnt have the time or motivation to try different clients yet. The web ui works just fine for me.

This is answered in another comment.

I’m not too familiar with it, but I’m always open to moving to stronger copyleft-licenses, if the AGPLv3 is proving inadequate.

1. Stegosaurus looks really badass
2. No, I only found out later on Lemmy that it is apparently similar (though I still dont know any details)

1. Brachiosaurus
2. Not for me either.

Growing up during the US war on the Iraqi people, the jingoistic coverage in media for all US wars, then the subsequent alienation I felt after I started working, is the main thing that turned me to Marxism. Essentially, when the extremely untrustworthy warmongers start calling everything they dislike, “communism / socialism”, then it must be worth looking into. And I found that there was good reason they carefully steer populations away from Marxist literature, and deem it a heresy: because its a clear and straightforward description of how things actually work, and it threatens their fortunes. Nearly every communist grows up in liberal-dominated cultures, and goes through their own process of rejecting the world that enshrines property and profit over human lives, and how it affected them personally. Their stories are all worth listening to.

I’ve worked in many different industries in software, and found the same issues in all of them, and just lost patience, especially seeing that all the work I did creating proprietary software was essentially thrown in the trash, and societally useless. I’d much rather be paid very little, and contribute something positive to the world; time is our most valuable resource, and we should spend it doing things that improve the world, because there is so much that needs doing.

While we had the ability to remove posts / comments early on, we didn’t have a system to report content. That was added much later, and has proved to be absolutely vital.

One of the biggest burdens on people running lemmy servers, is the disk space taken up by images. Currently the internet has a massive problem with image (and other data in general) duplication: images get posted to 9 different platforms, copied everywhere, with none of them sharing any of the hosting costs.

The static data distribution problem, is actually a completely solved problem: via torrents. The user experience of this tho, needs to be improved across the board in apps and web UIs. Lemmy’s markdown fields do support torrent links, but there’s no easy “upload audio” or “upload video” button, which ideally should hook in to an in-browser or system-wide torrent app.

I’d love to see comment trees of audio and video replies, but to me this isn’t doable, and would explode server costs, unless someone devotes time to the solution above. In the meantime, people will just have to use other services to upload their audio / video content and link to it, or ideally, create torrents and share magnet links.