this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023

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Announcements

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Official announcements from the Lemmy project. Subscribe to this community or add it to your RSS reader in order to be notified about new releases and important updates.

You can also find major news on join-lemmy.org

founded 5 years ago

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[email protected]

We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @[email protected] 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.

Original Announcement thread

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Neither @[email protected] 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 Legal section 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I'd imagine it would be the same way it worked on Reddit when there were multiple communities with identical topics/similar names:

One gets a bit larger, therefore shows up in feeds more, appears higher in search results, etc.

Unless the other community has some kind of differentiation, it will wither and die.

And everything will be fine.

I keep seeing people being this up as if it's some huge problem. There's tons of /c/memes out there, but [email protected] is clearly the place to go. It's not confusing, IMO.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Since you're very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?

Thanks for your work, it's projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What kind of political preferences are you referring to?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

The devs are openly tankies. Pro-CPP/Russia, anti anything US or western in general.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

First, just want to say thanks for building and maintaining Lemmy. It's an incredible project, and it provides an incredibly valuable public forum that's completely open. This is the way internet was always meant to work before it got hijacked by corporations.

The questions I'd like to ask would be whether the platform is developing in the way you originally envisioned, what surprised you in terms of how the platform ended up being used in the wild, and what were the biggest technical and non technical problems that came from the rapid growth after the Reddit migration. And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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.