This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they'd like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky@lemmy.world about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
NLNet Funding
First of all some good news: We are currently applying for new funding from NLnet and have reached the second round. If it gets approved then @phiresky@lemmy.world and SleeplessOne will work on the paid milestones, while @dessalines and @nutomic will keep being funded by direct user donations. This will increase the number of paid Lemmy developers to four and allow for faster development.
You can see a preliminary draft for the milestones. This can give you a general idea what the development priorities will be over the next year or so. However the exact details will almost certainly change until the application process is finalized.
Development Update
@ismailkarsli added a community statistic for number of local subscribers.
@jmcharter added a view for denied Registration Applications.
@dullbananas made various improvements to database code, like batching insertions for better performance, SQL comments and support for backwards pagination.
@SleeplessOne1917 made a change that besides admins also allows community moderators to see who voted on posts. Additionally he made improvements to the 2FA modal and made it more obvious when a community is locked.
@nutomic completed the implementation of local only communities, which don't federate and can only be seen by authenticated users. Additionally he finished the image proxy feature, which user IPs being exposed to external servers via embedded images. Admin purges of content are now federated. He also made a change which reduces the problem of instances being marked as dead.
@dessalines has been adding moderation abilities to Jerboa, including bans, locks, removes, featured posts, and vote viewing.
In other news there will soon be a security audit of the Lemmy federation code, thanks to Radically Open Security and NLnet.
Support development
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
- Liberapay (preferred option)
- Open Collective
- Patreon
- Cryptocurrency
When will there be default view agglomeration of posts sent to identically named communities. For example /c/books. The current setup cntralizes power into the hands of whoever gets traction first on the platform. If I go to /c/books on any server, all posts of all federated servers' /c/books should be visible. This way no server owner gets the stranglehold on the community that they host.
I'd like that. I think some other platforms/projects have features like this. And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw.
Are they not allowed to?
Beehaw exists for people who wanted a heavily-moderated space, and they seem to be doing well activity-wise. Do you want to force them with the rest of the instances?
Sure, that's not the point at all. But wouldn't it be great if the knitting community (for example) on beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and feddit.de would be merged for me into one entity for a better browsing experience? And people wouldn't post the same breaking news 3 times and the cross-posts always showed up 3 times in my timeline? (And sometimes it's the same 30 people anyways that are subscribed to all of them so the cross-posting doesn't add anything?)
I currently don't have a good idea for a UI design for that. But I think a feature like that would add to federated platforms (if done right.) But nobody said you're not allowed or it's bad to open a dozen communities with the same name and topic on different servers. That's perfectly alright. In the real world we also sometimes discuss the same topic with different people at different locations.
Why wouldn't they merge on one instance? Seems easier, and can be done today compared to having to ask the developers to implement a complex feature.
Is there a client that does that? Sorry I lost track of the different clients. But I'd like to try. I know Eternity (which I use on my Android phone) and the default webui can't do that. But I haven't tried all the options.
I don't quite get your wording. If you mean similar communities should be merged in all cases, I think I'd disagree. People might want to subscribe to a specific community. And it'd be complex to figure out moderation etc, since the root of the platform is a federated architecture and this somewhat goes against that. I think it'd be more a UI / client feature, tied into a cross-posting mechanism.