They have a explanation here. they claim part of the problem was banning people who are harmless and not homophobes (they show at least one comment ).

The website is already linking to google play store and apple store. right now apps that are purely web don’t have a platform to read reviews on . plus neodb lib.reviews are open source although they might not yet be ready for the task yet.

Besides Lemmy mainly gets promoted by word of mouth (eg people recommending it on Reddit)

I doubt that, any data? similarweb shows the top referring site for now is openalternative.co (although at least one of the referring sites mentioned doesn’t seem to make sense for me ).

If people want to review Lemmy communities, it would make more sense to make a Lemmy community for that purpose.

I think people would want to see average ratings. reading a community page means you only read 1-3 reviews and that sample size is too small and potentially biased. you could just run into people who hate a instance for some particular reason (and it’s not hard for me to think of reasons like that).

Two ideas i like:

linking to a bunch of platforms that have reviews of lemmy, fynd does this:

A neodb instance (but maybe another platform would do) where you can read and write reviews about fediverse instances (but that would require at least one volunteer to moderate it).

It costs real world money to keep that data. tbf i don’t think you would find a service that does not delete inactive accounts. iirc when i did a market survey to find a new email address basically all free providers didn’t guarantee keeping your data if the account is free and inactive.

Using custom libraries sounds like a problem that is easy to miss. sure the super diligent developer will be fine but its like saying there is no point in linters because people just don’t read coding guidelines.

Looks like a few services already have a mechanism like i described in place. e.g. Kubernetes throws a “APIRemovedInNextReleaseInUse”.

We have lemmy apps that still aren’t supporting API changes added over a year ago. We even had one such case last week.

That sounds like something could be improve. is there some sort of warning mechanism in place?

Say when using a lemmy client. the client either specifies its a production build. or if its not then the lemmy server reports where deprecated API’s are used.

Not sure that is the correct approach. break frequently break often seems better (that’s what PHP and java seem to do as far as i can tell, unlike python 3 which caused a lot of drama).

notify a API is deprecated. give some time for users to update to the new API (1 year?) and then remove it.

Of course after version 1.0 there might be less breakage so it won’t be a be problem.

Why not provide a option to use an a desktop app?. maybe also add a flatpak. self hosting seems kinda complicated and i am not sure what are the benefits of that.

Also a demo instance would be nice.

This isn’t what i had in mind. i meant more like changing the line to something like:

We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, donating money and helping find and fix bugs.

With “donating money” maybe replaced with “funding”.

I think liberapay has that feature.

We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs

I feel like people giving their hard earned money for lemmy also should get a show of appreciation.

Why is it not a part of the project itself if you don’t mind me asking? i would imagine plugins are for the more opinionated or experimental features.

If its off by default that is a reasonable suggestion.

Lemmy has a similar number of active users and makes about 3K . That money would be good for the ecosystem and could help fund upstream projects (I am sure wine could use the money for example). But they will have to use fundraising methods similar to lemmy to reach that number (popup, good message etc)

The donate page is kinda a mess IMO to be honest. There should be one organisation to donate to otherwise this creates overchoice.

What i am worried about is that the federation system is already kinda hard to understand. New users who are not hardcore fediverse nerds (Like me and probably the rest of the people answering this post). Could start thinking “what the hell is going on?!” and might think lemmy is obtuse and drop it.

Lemmy could at some point benefit from a UX study where new users volunteer to be observed while the software is first use (software companies sometimes do that). maybe that could verify there are no problems . adding a searchable FAQ and a introductory tutorial (saying something "this will take about 5/10/15 minutes) could help.

Any github or codeberg people can star?

Also if so many people want it. starting to fund raise money might be good. paralives is already making good money and because it is closed source there is a incentive to make modding harder (so they could sell improvements). Plus this sounds really hard and labor intensive. being able to work on it full time could help you stay motivated. even seeing people giving money might help you feel the work is really appreciated and its not just cheap words.

Maybe a survey can disprove my opinion. but i would argue the option of having ads plus paying for the ability to remove ads is something most users would accept (even if there is a vocal minority). especially if you explain that researching and developing some forms of content (documentaries, video courses, investigative journalism) can take dozen of hours and is not feasible to do without getting paid when aiming for the highest quality.

That could be better then just restricting videos (mitra could also be a open source alternative to patreon).

a little more then 24h into the campaign.

patreon increased from $871 to $1,138 (+30%).

liberapay rose from $301 to $393.66 (+30%).

I think it could have been improved further , the text could be a bit longer (I talked to Nutomic and few suggestion were kinda shortened too much IMO). but i think we can overall call the campaign a success. I realize we can tweak and experiment with this for far too long and without A/B testing we could be “fooled by randomness” and make the wrong choices. but we could measure how many people leave the page of the text before we expect them to finish reading to get a indication if it is too small or big. information beats speculation.

Anyway this text is now “field tested” and should probably be used more with maybe minor tweaks (link to it from the website donate page and the pop up).

Is there any evidence the pop up asking for donation is working as intended? , adding randomness to this could make it too hard to debug.

I think what it does prove beyond all doubt if the pop up is working is that the pop up text is not enough. People want a clear and persuasive rational. underestimation potential donors ability to read a short text could be a costly mistake. a quick googling indicates a optimal length of about 1,000 to 2,500 words while the current text stands at about 500 words.

This should probably be documented on the open collective page.

Regarding mental health . avoidance is generally not considered a good thing. one of the criticism of why technology is bad for cognition is that it creates a very pleasant experience but solving problems and achieving meaningful outcomes in the real world requires delaying gratification and accepting negative experiences

Emotional regulation and resilience are skills. if you don’t get negative experiences you don’t get to practice those skills. this is why helicopter parenting where well meaning parents do too much for their kids end up creating psychological problems like lowered self esteem.