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.
Right now, instances with transphobic and racist content like exploding-heads are still listed on join-lemmy.org. Are you planning to implement a Server Convenant like on joinmastodon.org? To be listed on joinmastodon.org, an instance needs “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.
The instance list is fine as is. Think about it like this: do you want racists to join a single instance so they are all in one place? Or do you want them to spread across all different instances, causing moderation problems everywhere?
And if the racist is here to cause problems rather than commiserate with fellow racists, they now know exactly which community to avoid, thus restoring moderation problems everywhere. I don’t think anyone is asking you to moderate every instance to ensure they are sticking to your TOS or your viewpoints, but it’s a very minor ask to not showcase off the racists and transphobes and bigots on the ‘join this platform’ page.
There are plenty of other instance lists across the internet. So its not even a real solution for your theoretical problem.
I don’t think the people raising this as a concern are trying to solve the problem of bigots on the internet; they are just asking for you to change the advertising you provide to remove the bigots from a place of visibility.
And then we should block lemmygrad, lemmy.world, hexbear and hundreds of other instances? Thats not gonna happen. If you want to block instances, do that on the beehaw side.
I’m not here to proselytize about what we decide to block or not. I’m explaining what the person above is requesting - not a block, but a conscious decision about what shows up on the join-lemmy list.
I’m new to the fediverse, and even I can tell you’re missing the point.
It’s possible that anti-racist, queer or any other serious organisations might not want to link to join-lemmy.org because of it.
Thats fine, they can provide their own list of instances where users can choose from.
They are on your list (which is seen as the official one by many and has most visits) to guide transphobes and fascists to their fitting community?? Exploding-heads is not labeled as transphobe and fascist on join-lemmy. So that does’t make sense.
i would rather want the racists to not be able to go anywhere at all
It doesnt really matter what you want. The software is open source so anyone can use the software freely. No way to prevent it.
yea sure there will always be racist instances but they shouldn’t be promoted on sites like join-lemmy.org
Wasnt free speech all about being able to express your opinion without getting banned?
What type(s) of transphobia?
Any plans for improving SEO? One of Reddit’s biggest strengths was being able to get very relevant results with a simple internet search. In time can you see something similar for Lemmy, even with its decentralized nature? I really you for doing this, thank you for your time!
Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there’s anything else needs to be added, we’re open to PRs.
Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn’t be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I’d rather focus on improving lemmy’s search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.
Would you please consider having only local post/community/users indexed by search engines? A lemmy.ml user complained that their username is first result on Google with lemmynsfw.com domain name. Also implementing this would decrease chance of duplicate content.
It can resolved with a simple noindex meta tag.
I’d be open to a PR for that, sure.
I hate Inferno (specifically class components) but I’ll check what I can do 🙏
I do too now (I created lemmy-ui when react was king), which is why the new UI will be written in leptos, using signal-based reactivity, and functional components.
How do you see Lemmy working with duplicate communities on different instances? For example if Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ml have a PersonalFinance community, are people expected to cross-post? Or have you conceived of a system to allow people to find the right community efficiently?
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: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.
I agree that community structure should not change to handle duplicates. If anything, having a feature similar to hashtags or topics that can aggregate a stream of posts from multiple communities would be nice.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !news@startrek.website
Is this link supposed to work?
No, it’s a fictional instance used to make a point.
Hi! This isn’t really a question, but I was a former admin on Lemmy.ml and I just want to say that I really appreciated the opportunity to be on your team and it was a really valuable experience for me! I’m no longer an admin due to inactivity and personal life events causing me to no longer have the time to serve such a role, but I enjoyed the time I was and I really hope I was able to make a positive contribution to the instance!
Thank you for your continued work developing this project and running your instance comrades! This is still by far my favourite fediverse platform, actually, favourite social media in general. I intend to continue using both Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad and I hope I can continue to contribute by using Lemmy when I have the chance!
Comrade Dessalines, you rock. Your audiobooks and essays are great. No questions.
o7 comrade. I’m glad I can help out in any way.
Chances that hexbear emojis become the Lemmy standard across all instances ?
Thank you for your service.
Each instance should be in control of their own emojis IMO, for example a star trek instance would have only star-trek related emojis.
I want a statement on the apparent lemmygrad connections and supporting human rights violations. The recent blog post was a PR non-answer, free speech is important, but human rights violations are just not acceptable.
Edit: it’s obvious at this point there will never be a proper statement. I just want to say that regardless of the country of origin, US, China, EU, South Africa, India, it doesn’t matter to me, all human rights violations are violations and unacceptable. This isn’t a communism vs capitalism debate, this is a situation of whether to support the guy creating this software if that individual supports genocidal tendencies.
Please add a statement on the apparent connection between lemmy.world and their support to the US led NATO: The United States is the worst human rights violator in post-war history. The United States is responsible for over 300 million deaths directly and as the sole world superpower that has imposed its economic system on nearly the entire world, its system based upon deprivation for many (in exchange for luxury for a few) has led to the intentional starvation of 9 million people annually and imposition of poverty that has led to 5 million deaths annually from lack of medical care. On top of the 300 million the United States has killed directly, the 14 million lives taken annually by its world-wide imposed economic system has killed 448 million people through social murder since 1991 when its economic system was finally imposed nearly worldwide.
The United States, through its international secret police organization (CIA), also runs secret black sites throughout much of the world where people are detained without charge or trial and often tortured. The United States has openly admitted to running a torture program in breach of international conventions it has signed.
The United States also illegally invaded, and currently occupies 30% of Syria, controlling 90% of its petroleum. This illegal occupation violates Syrian sovereignty and occurred long before the conflict in Ukraine.
As the user wrote above, free speech is important, but human rights violations are just not acceptable.
Edit: I forgot to add, the United States has a system of racial apartheid and mass incarceration targeting ethnic minorities within its own borders. As a country representing about 4% of the worlds population, it contains more the 20% of the worlds prisoners. These prisoners are forced into labor for private corporations and often subject to solitary confinement (which the UN has called a method of torture) This system of mass incarceration and forced labor is unlike any other in the world, and is largely a holdover of the United States system of race-based chattel slavery, that was subsequently replaced by a codified racial caste system that denied Black Americans all human rights until a few decades ago.
All of those situations are unacceptable, but come on, none of the articles you posted other than the CIA Wikipedia page and the Syria article (to which I absolutely don’t condone) lists the US as the sole country responsible for those statistics. Regardless of those sources, it’s important to call these things out, which I commend you for trying. Which is why I want a proper statement, not some PR nonsense answer that avoids the subject.
I don’t understand. Do you have some sort of analysis that says that the United States does not impose its economic system on the world? I think the people of Vietnam, Korea, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, Haiti, Afghanistan, Laos, Grenada (to name only a few) would disagree. The system of capitalism is one in which the economic system revolves around profit. This system of profitability robs people of the value of their labor and imposes inequality through rent-seeking behavior in housing and food markets. lemmy.world identified their support for the US-led IMF and World Bank which impose political reform to their liking on overexploited nations in exchange for much-needed liquidity. (That is when the US does not install puppet governments that take out huge loans immediately, like Bolivia in 2019) The need for cash infusions is a direct result of the US world economic policy and its imposition, but then these loans cause a tremendous debt-burden and the cost of debt-service often outpaces any social programs in the affected countries. … Is there some other global super-power imposing this on the world? The UN has said that the cost of ending world hunger is merely $40 billion dollars annually. Yet the United States spends nearly $1 trillion on military spending annually. So they United States imposes its system on other countries, causing deprivation and social murder, yet the capacity to resolve the problem is entirely within their ability to do so? That sounds like it is intentional and something they are responsible for. Even if you claim that this is not “intentional” because you blame these systemic problems on individual choice or a lack of responsibility on the part of the wealthy, that doesn’t make it any less true. Capitalism was imposed on the world by the US and the result is social murder on a mass scale. The isn’t even considering the other human rights violations by the US, which I didn’t even bother citing them all.
Also, the US’s treatment of Black Americans, including extrajudicial killings by the state and torture, is most definitely the responsibility of the United States. I would like a real statement on the relationship to lemmy.world and abusers of human rights, not some PR nonsense that avoids the subject.
I’m not trying to start a communism vs capitalism debate here, capitalism has its benefits, but that doesn’t mean I support every sick and twisted thing the US does.
This is simply a request for a statement on alleged ties the developer has to human rights violations. I don’t support the incarceration of African Americans one bit and think it’s absolutely disgusting what we’ve done. I don’t support those systems at all. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to prove here. I honestly commend your efforts. You’re clearly passionate about your united states hate boner, there’s nothing wrong with that and that’s the beauty of free speech. However, when you say things like “capitalism bad communism good!” but then turn around and support things like uyhger genocide and slave labor of North Koreans for lumber camps in syberia we have a problem. All of those situations, even the situations that the US has participated in is bad, that doesn’t mean I support them, that’s what I want to hear, do the devs support those human rights violations that they specifically have been tied too.
Wow, I mean, capitalism is bad and communism will be good. It isn’t a “hate boner” It is called having principles. If you think that the United States government, and the people who run it (the capitalist class) are committing serious crimes against humanity… why would you say “we” when you said “it’s absolutely disgusting what we’ve done.” You already identify with the crimes of your ruling class.
Those “examples” you gave of other human rights violations are spurious at best, US-ruling-class propaganda at worst. And you make several leaps in assuming that people are supportive of socialist states, or their struggle for self-determination against US empire, and support for specific instances of historic wrongs or mistakes. You clearly give “your own side” the benefit of the doubt or ignore it for the sake of attacking the US ruling-classes enemies. They aren’t your enemies, reallly. You assume that all labor in the DPRK is slave labor? That is laughable, and outright propaganda. All of the things you listed are nothing compared to what the US is doing right now, and what it has done in recent memory. It is August 7th, can you think of anything historically important that occurred the day before and the day after this date? You have a chance to admit you aren’t informed or passionate on the subject, and that you aren’t an expert. You can decide to change you mind and stop identifying so strongly with the worlds greatest oppressors. Please. Take this chance to come outside of your bubble and relearn.
The point is that your insistence that you are owed some sort of “real statement” on the lemmygrad community and dev’s support for “human rights violators” is farcical and partisan. It is a debate on communism vs capitalism because you are implying it by making a series of assumptions predicated on capitalists’ arguments. If you can’t see it, then you should spend some time reflecting on why you can’t see it. You also shouldn’t think that you are owed some sort of “real statement” if you can’t bother to investigate the question on your own.
Well then, hexbear troll account, makes complete sense now. I hope you have a good day.
How is it a troll? This is my account. I didn’t hide I was from hexbear. If you can’t argue your point, it only underlines that you aren’t standing on principle. I hope you reflect more on your own understanding of politics today, and that it brings disquiet and growth. But unfortunately, you might just continue to coddle yourself with the belief that you are right and good, and the heckin’ marvel good guy’s United States are only looking out for the human rights of Muslims and the global south, gee whiz.
We’re just asking for a statement about lemmy.world’s support for NATO’s human rights violations. Same deal.
Perfectly understandable, I honestly would love to hear their statement. Especially if it’s something specific they’ve been supporting.
Ask Us Anything
What is the meaning of life
inb4 “42”
Also if you are the creator of lemmy can you nuke all the liberal infested websites? Or does it not work like that
The creator of federated platform software doesn’t own all of the servers it runs on
Why is selfhosted Docker such a mess?
What is a mess about it? Its certainly much easier than installing without Docker.
Last time I checked, it wanted me to modify multiple upstream files before composing the container and manually create directories instead of using Docker volumes – for multiple images.
Also the compose file contains a database and a reverse proxy for no reason.
Where’s the simple Docker container that does not want me to do that? Just deploy, set some environment variables, use one volume for persistent data and the sqlite database and that’s it?
A single Docker container is not possible because Lemmy requires multiple different images (postgres, pict-rs, lemmy-ui, lemmy). Supporting two different databases would be too much effort. In the end Lemmy is optimized for large instances with hundreds or thousands of users, not for tiny instances. So more difficult installation is not a major concern.
pict-rs, lemmy-ui, lemmy
Why can’t those be bundled? I need 3 containers and another database container just to have an instance. Also, none of those is easy to setup. All of those are messy and annoying and need me to fiddle with upstream files.
Containers should be reusable. None of those is reusable for anything else.
So more difficult installation is not a major concern.
In the long run this is where it will fail. Make it intentionally hard and annoying to setup will lead to people not setting it up.
Edit: Been there, done that, failed. Since then I always try to make my stuff as easy to setup and use as possible.
Its not intentionally hard. If you see a way to simplify it, pull requests are always welcome. But running multiple services in a single docker container is generally a bad idea.
If you see a way to simplify it, pull requests are always welcome
All components that are needed to run a Lemmy instance could be provided as single stack and the containers could be made configurable using environment variables (usernames, passwords, and DB locations). Database and reverse proxy should be handled completely separated from the “Lemmy containers” and the “Lemmy stack”. manually editing upstream files before composing the containers should be avoided.
Since I do not use MS GitHub I cannot help with issues, PRs, or anything else there, sorry.
multiple services
This is what I think about. While those 3 containers contain different programs: are they really different services and not just different components of the same service?
First off. How dare you‽
How do you combat bot accounts and illegal content? Is it moderation or algorithms or both?
People reporting those instances / users, then admins can add them to the blocklist, or ban them and remove their content.
Who are you guys if you don’t mind me asking. What’s your background?
Im from Germany and studied computer science. Was always very interested in open source and decentralized software. Worked in a couple different companies, but was never happy making profit for someone else. Luckily I found Lemmy shortly after Dessalines started the project, and put a lot of work into it. Then we found the NLnet funding which allowed us to work fulltime on the project.
I asked in the other thread about GDPR.
Nobody thinks it’s very interesting but if instances don’t follow gdpr, the entire network is at risk of legal consequences.
So please bring this up, even though it’s not very fun.
Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don’t know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn’t do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.
We have a
Legalsection under admin settings, that’s an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We’d need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn’t EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:
- Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
- If the former, delete all data of their data on the server, send it to them, and then (this was the important part) forward the data deletion request to every single partner we were working with.
For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between “we’re thinking about it” and “we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we’ll get to it sometime within the next month”), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.
As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that “no, it’s anonymous” - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.
So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you’re not doing that, you’re not fully compliant.
Kind of shitty, but that’s how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)
Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don’t recall what the time was for a “see my data” request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.
Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?
Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social’s privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy
As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.
That sounds like its something for instance admins to handle, nothing we as developers need to care about. Maybe we should add a privacy policy for lemmy.ml but thats it.
Yea it is ultimately on the admins, but Lemmy just needs to not make it hard to comply with GDPR. So it’s up to admins to raise issues when Lemmy is seen as an obstacle to compliance, and it’s up to devs to listen and implement compliance features.
You don’t have to bother with GDPR until you’re a certain size company
That’s what I thought too until I looked it up. It applies to individuals as well.
If an individual runs a web server and processes personal data of individuals within the European Union, then they are subject to the requirements of GDPR. GDPR applies to anyone, including individuals, who processes personal data of EU residents, regardless of whether they are operating as a business or on a personal basis. It’s important for the individual running the web server to comply with GDPR’s data protection principles and obligations to safeguard the personal data they process.
Thanks for the software!What is your and others Devs opinion on the pre-emptive de-federation of 20k hexbear users by 120k user instance lemmy.world?
Would you think Ranked Choice voting for admins i.e. with the Schulze method - which Debian
uses - integrated into the sites would mean that better community supported decisions can be made for both moderation as well as in comments/communities about stuff?Also: is there a remind me in 2 month of this post option?
For obvious reasons, we don’t want to be involved in inter-server conflicts. Admins are free to run their servers however they see fit.
Would you think Ranked Choice voting for admins i.e. with the Schulze method - which Debian power-genius uses - integrated into the sites would mean that better community supported decisions can be made for both moderation as well as in comments/communities about stuff?
I don’t know how the debian one works (I’m also personally a fan of olympic score / range voting over ranked choice). Because of the possibility of weaknesses of these community-moderation proposals(people creating fake users to vote, and gaming them in hundreds of other ways I can’t think about) I’d rather not stress-test them in lemmy.
We don’t have a remind-me, but someone could implement it, it’d def be useful. I don’t even think there’s an open issue for that one yet.
Do you know about majority judgement? If you know about it or check it out, what do you think about it? What do you wonder about it? Do you want to challenge something about it? What would you want to explore about it?
Looks like its a subset of range / score voting, but only scores of [1-4] are allowed (as opposed to range voting which doesn’t specify the number of scores, but its usually 1-10 or 1-100), and it uses the median, instead of the average for some reason.
I see how majority judgement could be seen as a subset of range or score voting.
A crucial difference between range/score voting and majority judgement is that one uses numbers and the others judgements. A majority judgement ballot could list all the possible candidates or options, and for each of them, there’d be a list of possible judgements. You can say that you consider a candidate “terrible”, “bad”, “meh”, “good”, “amazing”.
The idea is that humans tend to think in terms of judgements more readily than with numbers. A good ballot would find what words evoke useful judgements for candidates, as each group of voters has its own social language.
For example, with my partner we have a list of movies that we vote on. We have judgements that include “I’ll leave the house if you play that sh*t”, or “Omg yes!”. It’s great to add a movie to the list and find that one of the judgements in our made up ballot matches our personal judgements so well!
This is something I think majority judgement can do better than range/score voting: it can reflect human judgements better than with scores. In that way, it is more intuitive than range/score voting.
One benefit of majority judgement is that leaders chosen through it would know the judgement that they came into power with. If someone is elected into a powerful role knowing that half of the voters think they’re “ideal” for the job, that’s quite different than knowing that they were elected with half the voters thinking they were “inadequate”. This means, ideally, that the legitimacy of incompetent leaders can be reduced.
Note that the amount of possible judgements in a ballot can vary. To make things quick and easy, I’ve had silly elections with three judgements, such as “nope”, “ok”, “omg yes”. I’ve also had elections with nine judgements.
If you want to reduce the probability of having multiple winners, more judgements are a good idea. In general, the amount of judgements should depend on what the stakes are (higher stakes should go beyond just a couple of judgements), how many options there are (few options require few judgements), and the amount of voters there are (few voters require many judgements).
I think the reason for using the median is so that a judgement can be chosen as representative of each candidate. In the “nope”, “ok”, “omg yes” example above, if the median of the winning candidate is 3, you can tell the candidate that the score that they were chosen with was “omg yes”. If the average of the winning candidate is 2.4, you can’t really translate that as succintly, given that 2.4 is between “ok” and “omg yes”.
I hope it’s clearer why I love this voting method!
One of the major complaints on Reddit was the mod governance structure, with rank dependent on who showed up first. On the roadmap, do you see implementing other ways to govern mods, maybe something like how a lot of video game guilds govern themselves?
As a communist, I’m also receptive to a more democratic and less-hierarchical style of moderation. A LOT of reddit communities have been wrecked by an absent top moderator, who suddenly and suspiciously “becomes active” and removes the moderators who have been keeping the sub going for years.
We’ve had several people make proposals on github, but my issue has always been this: these are mostly untested, and potentially insecure. In the online space without any sort of real-person verification, If some kind of voting on mod actions were implemented, people could just create fake accounts to game the system, or find other ways.
AFAIK there hasn’t been any forum or community software that doesn’t implement the top-down chain of trust model. And of course this is less of concern with decentralized software like lemmy, where people always have the option to host their own instance, or create their own community, and moderate it exactly as they see fit. That’s not an option you have with reddit.
Part of what you would need to create is a qualified voter system.
For a meme sub, maybe the qualified voters are known participants in the community over a period of time.
For a more technical sub like what AskHistorians is on Reddit, voters are those qualified to answer questions.
It doesn’t have to be open to everyone, just the interested.
And you keep coming back to the federation model as a way to keep this in check, but it is still a dictatorial model and the only answer to dealing with a bad head mod is to destroy a community and lose the history of that community.
“qualified voter system” sounds all too much like karma that’s readily gamed with repost bots creating a worse experience for everyone.
What role do you think Lemmy developers should have in limiting the way that private instances can be used?
For example, (IIRC) you can’t say the n word on any unmodified Lemmy instance—even one that you host yourself. I wonder what other such limitations are currently in place or may be added in the future. Can any open source contributor add such a limitation?
Edit: Regardless of whether you think such limitations are appropriate, I think it’s an important question. I also expressed this comment in a neutral manner.
IIRC this functionality was ripped out a long time ago, instances define their own slur lists now
Why would you want to be able to say the n word? Are you racist? Why’s your mind go to that first?
I don’t care about the n word specifically, but I think it’s a good example of something that can be positive or negative depending on the context. There was a similar post about the q word. My concern is more generally about limiting what people can do with their own hardware.
Your style of argument has been used to argue against many different kinds of personal rights and freedoms that most people now recognize as important. It seems that the slur filter was removed a little while ago, but my point still stands.
I have been running an instance without a slur filter for about a year and a half. It is not a big instance, but big enough to have some experience in the field.
In case you are curious, 100% of the many times that I have encountered the n-word in my instance it has been in the context of a very banable offense, and it often requires spending some effort investigating and purging images from the database. The slur filter would block many these federated posts and comments from reaching my instance without the troll/spammer getting any feedback about this.
The filter can be a useful practical tool. The reason I keep it off is because I’m stubborn about not policing the words that people can and can’t say. But when I consider what I have experienced and reflect about this, I become more and more skeptical about my choice. The problem is still manageable for my small instance, so I can keep the slur filter off. But I can see that when dealing with this problem at a much larger scale one would want to use any tool at their disposal to make the job easier.
Do you realize that the post you linked is 2 years old and the slur filter is no longer populated by default?
