Announcements

!reddit@lemmy.world started to ban people based on upvotes

!buyeuropean@feddit.uk movement has motivated people to look around for European alternatives to Reddit

Anyone that wants to scrape Lemmy would have an easier time setting up their own server, federating with everyone, and reading straight from their DB. No web scraping required. Though, web scraping defenses would be useful against general web scrapers/crawlers.

!librewolf@lemmy.ml

There's a KDE one, if I'm not mistaken

I get a chuckle out of the "Tankie Triad" talking point some people keep using. It sounds like a villain organization from a Saturday morning cartoon.

The anti-communist witch-hunters are extremely peeved that they can't remove our communities like they can on reddit. Overall it doesn't bother me because I don't work for them, and they can always go back to reddit where their views are already dominant.

Anyone trying to make the world a better place, will always be hated and hunted by some people; it's a fact of life, and the sooner we accept it, the better.

Communities that go against hegemonic capitalist/imperialist discourse will always get marginalised. Not being able to take down those communities easily like on Reddit is a huge win by itself for Lemmy. The software offers a valuable savehaven for e.g ex r/chapotraphouse, r/genzedong etc.

It seems some people simply need some target to hate on. Hopefully they will learn to accept different opinions when they arent being manipulated by for-profit social media anymore.

Which tools specifically? I ask because this is a common complaint, but 99% of the time its something we already have, that most ppl are unaware of.

The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities.

Lemmy like all federated services, can't rewrite history, but you can already cross-post (although it would be the mod cross-posting, as we don't let mods alter user data except to remove it). It would just take someone adding that as an issue to lemmy-ui and working on it.

Not bad, the swiss chard and spinach I planted recently are sprouting, so that's got me excited.

A bit tired because my whole family is half sick. Luckily the kids are still okay to go to school.

Otherwise Im excited for this AMA, because I rarely have such direct conversations with users about Lemmy. The discussions on Github are usually quite technical.

the apps! the app support is really great for Lemmy

Yes I'm very excited about the growth of other fediverse software, and a lot of the cool new features they're adding. Its a great eco-system where we can experiment, be creative, and learn from each other.

Yes this is a major benefit of an open network. Lemmy is a very large project already, so it takes a lot of effort to implement new features, because they have to meet high standards for quality and performance and also work together with all the existing features. A project like Piefed is much smaller and can implement new features more quickly. This allows for more experimentation, and successful features can later be added to Lemmy.

Also users who are not happy with Lemmy for any reason can switch to a different platform while still interacting with those on Lemmy. So if Piefed and Mbin grow that is also a benefit for Lemmy.

Thx! Really appreciate it, and I'm glad someone thinks its worthwhile work we're doing.

What exactly is it you're asking for, though? A change in user behaviour towards consolidation? Some new feature of the platform similar to multi-reddits? How exactly do you suggest that should work?

Lemmy is not for microblogging, so I dont think hashtags make sense.

2nding @nutomic, that I'm really happy with the stack.

The one that seems really magical to me, is diesel. With it we get a compile-time-checked database, that's tightly integrated to the rust objects / code.

Every single join, select, insert, etc is checked before lemmy is even run, and it eliminates a whole category of errors resulting from mismaps.

Its made adding columns, and changing our data structures so much less error-prone than when I lived in the java-world.

Whenever we find that we'd want to do things differently, we usually do a refactor ASAP so as not to keep rolling spaghetti code. We've had to do this many times for the federation and DB code, and even have 2 major refactors that also add features ongoing. But luckily we've been able to stay in the rust eco-system for that.

As for UI, leptos didn't exist when I built lemmy-ui, so I went with a fast react-like alternative, inferno. Its showing its age now, so @sleepless1917 is working on lemmy-ui-leptos, which hopefully will supercede lemmy-ui.

The stack is great, I wouldnt want to change anything. Postgres is very mature and performant, with a high focus on correctness. It can sometimes be difficult to optimize queries, but there are wizards like @dullbananas@lemmy.ca who know how to do that. Anyway there is no better alternative that I know of. Rust is also great, just like Postgres it is very performant and has a focus on correctness. Unlike most programming languages it is almost impossible to get any runtime crashes, which is very valuable for a webservice.

The high performance means that less hardware is required to host a given number of users, compared to something like NodeJS or PHP. For example when kbin.social was popular, I remember it had to run on multiple beefy servers. Meanwhile lemmy.ml is still running on a single dedicated server, with much more active users. Or Mastodon having to handle incoming federation activities in background tasks which makes the code more complicated, while Lemmy can process them directly in the HTTP handler.

Nevertheless, scaling for more users always has its surprises. I remember very early in development, Lemmy wasnt able to handle more than a dozen requests per second. Turns out we only used a single database connection instead of a connection pool, so each db query was running after that last one was finished, which of course is very slow. It seems obvious in retrospect, but you never notice this problem until there are a dozen or so users active at the same time.

With the Reddit migration two years ago a lot of performance problems came up, as active users on Lemmy suddenly grew around 70 times. You can see some of that in the 0.18.x release announcements. One part of the solution was to add missing database indexes. Another was to remove websocket support, which was keeping a connection open for each user. That works fine with 100 users, but completely breaks down with 1000 or more.

After all there is nothing I would do different really. It would have been good to know about these scaling problems earlier, but thats impossible. In fact for my project Ibis (federated wiki) Im using the exact same architecture as Lemmy.

• Tags are work in progress
• Not exactly sure what you mean by "direct messages outside Lemmy", but in version 1.0 they will be compatible with Mastodon and other platforms
• Its a known problem with Mastodon because it only renders Note objects properly, which are meant for short texts less than a paragraph. Lemmy uses Page which is meant for longer text. Some platforms like Wordpress (iirc) have an option to federate even long posts as Note so that it gets rendered fully in Mastodon, but that seems like a bad idea to me. In the end its up to Mastodon how to render different types of federated content on their frontend, so it needs to be fixed by them. Here is an entire discussion about this by developers of different Fediverse platforms (including a Mastodon dev).