• nutomic@lemmy.ml
    3813·
    8 months ago

    There is a lot of misleading information in this post.

    Something that I notice said consistently by those who have little experience in Lemmy admin spaces is “why not just contribute then?”And the answer people try. And this happens. This unfortunately leads into the next point that is the developer teams behavior.

    Dessalines and I had some discussion whether the linked issue should be closed or not. Anyway we decided to leave it open in the end. Then some weeks later a user came along and made a completely offtopic complaint that this decision making process is somehow wrong. I admit that I overreacted by giving a temporary ban for this, but mistakes happen and its completely disingenious to spin this as some sort of general toxic behaviour from our side.

    There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.

    This is your opinion and I doubt it is as widespread as you think.

    Another aspect of this is that the Lemmy devs run two instances: lemmy.ml & lemmygrad.ml

    What makes you believe this? I can only speak for myself, and I am not involved with lemmygrad in any way.

    The biggest piece that broke all confidence in the Lemmy developers amongst many admins including myself is that during the CSAM spam attacks there was complete radio silence. The developers made no statement on the matter. And when Github requests were made to try and propose ideas about how to fix what happened, the developers explicitly stated they didn’t have time to focus on that. No dialogue.

    Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.

    As well, when a post was made about Sublinks (A project I will touch a bit more on, and am involved in due to the reasons I have highlighted above) the comments that were made by Lemmy’s lead developers were extremely petty. This lessens peoples confidence in your project, not improves it.

    Why do you consider it petty? Its a fact that jgrim never opened any issue for the features he wanted, not did he attempt to contribute with a pull request. Its also true that it took multiple years of fulltime work to get Lemmy ready for production, and I dont see how Sublinks can be any faster when it has only volunteer contributors. That doesnt mean I wish for Sublinks to fail, in fact I hope it will be successful so that admins and users have more choices available, and to improve resilience through independent codebases and development teams.

    Generally you seem to have an extremely entitled attitude. Lemmy is an open source project that is provided for free. I would also love to fix all the problems that users report, and implement all those features. But unlike Reddit we are not a billion dollar company with thousands of employees. We are just two individuals funded by donations and working from our homes. There is only a limited number of hours in each day and only so much work we can finish in that time. If you are unhappy with Lemmy then by all means switch to a different platform, because we dont get any direct benefit from having more users.

    • Nix@merv.newsEnglish
      131·
      8 months ago

      “Anyways they would have taken too long to implement” seems like a very odd take considering this is an ongoing issue that is pretty damn important. Some features that should be available is for instances to wipe images from certain dates, “muting” instances to prevent storing any images from instances that are not on an approve list and prevent users outside this list from uploading images to your instance, and an option to prevent any user outside your instance from uploading images to your instance.

      Theres many mod tools like these that need priority right now but it seems like they keep getting pushed away

      • nutomic@lemmy.ml
        95·
        8 months ago

        You can already block federation with certain instances. And the only ones who can upload images are users that are locally registered to your instance.

    • Rooki@lemmy.world
      115·
      8 months ago

      Sorry but i have to rant.

      There is a lot of misleading information in this post.
      Not misleading, straight to the point, on things no one else wanted to point out.

      Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.

      Yes we were put just aside because the feature we recommended was “pictrs” stuff.

      There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.

      Thats true and so far many instances ( i dont want to say who, because they should come out if they want to be known ) i and the lemmy.world team have many reports from users, admins that they want a better replacement for lemmy. ( e.g. Sublinks ).

      The moderation is TERRIBLE after 0.19, the sorting totally wrong unchangeable, every “resolve” leads to page refresh ( have fun finding your report you left on ). New reports are just never seen again, because you cant sort by new. The “All” view is terrible in reports and private messages. Marking Private Messages as “read” just refreshes the page and on the ui doesnt change anything, but after refresh it is marked as read.

      On 0.19 there are some occasions of untested things, like “Remove an admin” is not correctly translated. Something THAT primitive.

      We / Jgrim never opened a feature request because we already got enough by seeing in the history of feature requests of others.

      The ui gets just worse and worse, untested features goes to prod and not getting even a “Warning Untested feature” flag.
      We know you are just some guys in their free time. But then why not take your time, test it, make sure everything works, then release it.
      Quality is the key for a thriving software, not pushing versions like its a tournament on how many versions can someone push to prod.
      You are not a big corpo that can deploy fast fixes that fix any issues that could block instances, so quality is here even a higher priority.

    • gabe [he/him]@literature.cafeOP
      1513·
      8 months ago

      It is unfortunate that this is what you have decided to take away from the blog post instead of reflecting on the criticism I have provided. Instead of reflecting on my list of legitimate criticism you have decided to call me entitled and hone in on small aspects of the blog post in attempt to dismiss it completely. Per usual, it is everyone else that seems to be the problem but you. I outlined my own issues with lemmy after a LOT of patience and goodwill. That’s lost, and this comment solidifies further why I will switch away from lemmy as soon as I get the chance. Whether you decide to accept the points I have made is on you but ultimately your refusal to recognize the issues I have outlined will cause this project to fade away completely. And that’s really sad. I love lemmy as a project and an idea.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
        2611·
        8 months ago

        Responding to false criticism is important. For example you were under the mistaken impression that we reject pull requests or issues, or don’t care about moderation? All of those are provably false. Look at all the moderation PRs I’ve closed in the past MONTH alone. This is all easily verifiable if you go to our github accounts and see what we’re working on.

        You also heard second hand that the sublinks developer is making sublinks because they got a bad reception from us, or were told that we’d reject features? They’ve never opened a single issue or PR.

        Your post seems to mostly be 2nd-hand rumors from people who already don’t like us, and not from any people that are actually working on Lemmy. That’s perfectly fine, but it’d be wrong to not address these false criticisms.

        Entitlement in open source is a real thing, and you would know our pain if you ran a codebase currently in use by > 40k people monthly. To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person. It’d be like if I criticized my grandmother’s free meal for it not being to my liking, and demanded she make it my way.

      • hightrix@lemmy.world
        112·
        8 months ago

        It is unfortunate that this is what you have decided to take away from the blog post instead of reflecting on the criticism I have provided.

        This is a serious problem across Lemmy(and elsewhere). Someone makes a reasonable argument and the responses will all pile on either something in the users comment history or one sentence in 5 paragraphs that they disagree with.