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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
