I asked in the other thread about GDPR.
Nobody thinks it's very interesting but if instances don't follow gdpr, the entire network is at risk of legal consequences.
So please bring this up, even though it's not very fun.
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don't know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn't do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.
We have a Legal section under admin settings, that's an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We'd need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.
As a person who oversaw the implementation of GDPR in a large software house (which wasn't EU specific, but had to in order to operate legally in the EU), the requirements were:
- Allow users to request data deletion or a copy of their data.
- If the former, delete all data of their data on the server, send it to them, and then (this was the important part) forward the data deletion request to every single partner we were working with.
For us, this was multiple ad companies. We had to e-mail each one, ask them about their GDPR implementation (most of them were somewhere between "we're thinking about it" and "we have an e-mail address you can send something automated to and we'll get to it sometime within the next month"), and then build an automated back-end system to either query their APIs for automated deletion, or craft/send e-mails for the more primitive companies.
As far as the data being deleted, it was anonymized IDs that were tied to their advertising IDs from their mobile phones. I used to try and argue that "no, it's anonymous" - but we also had some player data (these were games) associated with that, so we ended up just clearing house and deleting everything on request.
So, legally, this means every instance - in order to be GDPR compliant - would have to inform every instance it federates with that a user wants their data deleted. If you're not doing that, you're not fully compliant.
Kind of shitty, but that's how it went for me. (this was back when GDPR was first being released)
Edit: Also, the one month thing was relevant: you have 30 days to delete GDPR stuff after receiving a data clear request. I don't recall what the time was for a "see my data" request. Presumably, though, on Lemmy the latter is superfluous as all your data is already present on your profile page. An account export option would be enough to satisfy that.
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Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?
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I'm gonna be asking hard questions, I think, sorry about that. I hope you consider it tough love considering our past interactions.
As an instance admin, I have some questions:
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How are you doing? I know there was a lot of pressure when things blew up and it seems to be calming down a bit now.
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How is Lemmy doing financially?
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Considering past releases and their associated breaking bugs (including 0.18.3), what measures are you taking to help prevent that?
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Can we consider the possibility of downgrades being supported?
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Why are bugs affecting moderation not release blockers? Does anything block releases?
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Are there plans to give instance administrators a voice in shaping the future of Lemmy's development?
As someone who is trying to help with Lemmy's development, I have some other questions:
- What do you think are the biggest problems with Lemmy as a software project and what are your priorities for Lemmy?
- Considering fairly low amounts of developers contributing to Lemmy, how are you working to help new people get into the project?
- Do you worry about the message it sends to potential contributors when the main developers are working on a different project which competes with the former? (Example: Lemmy-ui vs Lemmy-ui-Leptos)
- Considering most work is done voluntarily, how are you trying to organize and prioritize work?
- Do you believe you are stretching yourself too thin between Lemmy, Lemmy-ui, Lemmy-ui-leptos, Jerboa and Lemmy.ml? If so, what are you doing to help you focus?
Wow lots of questions here.
- Im doing well, its exciting to know that so many people like the software Ive worked on for the last years. The first month after the migration was really stressful, but by now its calmed down a lot. Plus there are many contributors now which are helping a lot.
- Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
- I think the "breaking bugs" were really minor considering how we had to constantly rush out performance and security fixes. This should get better as we dont need to make emergency fixes, and have more time to let the community test release candidates before making the full release.
- Supporting downgrades means that someone has to test them and report/fix problems. We dont have time for that, but feel free to do it.
- Like I said, our recent releases had urgent performance/security fixes so we didnt have enough time for testing. We also didnt find out about these problems until later. Part of the problem is that keeping up with issues is almost a full-time job on its own, so I rarely read them anymore. If you see something important reported, do let me know.
- No concrete plans, but I definitely think that admins are the main actors who should have a voice in development. Its impossible for us to listen to all the individual users, because there are too many and they often dont have the necessary technical knowledge. If you have some ideas how to facilitate communication between devs and admins, let me know.
Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.
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Right now, instances with transphobic and racist content like exploding-heads are still listed on join-lemmy.org. Are you planning to implement a Server Convenant like on joinmastodon.org? To be listed on joinmastodon.org, an instance needs “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.
The instance list is fine as is. Think about it like this: do you want racists to join a single instance so they are all in one place? Or do you want them to spread across all different instances, causing moderation problems everywhere?
Yes, I think it would be best if they would all gather on one instance that can get defederated. Right now they attract users on join-lemmy with "Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable", no other info.
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And if the racist is here to cause problems rather than commiserate with fellow racists, they now know exactly which community to avoid, thus restoring moderation problems everywhere. I don't think anyone is asking you to moderate every instance to ensure they are sticking to your TOS or your viewpoints, but it's a very minor ask to not showcase off the racists and transphobes and bigots on the 'join this platform' page.
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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.
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I'd imagine it would be the same way it worked on Reddit when there were multiple communities with identical topics/similar names:
One gets a bit larger, therefore shows up in feeds more, appears higher in search results, etc.
Unless the other community has some kind of differentiation, it will wither and die.
And everything will be fine.
I keep seeing people being this up as if it's some huge problem. There's tons of /c/memes out there, but !memes@lemmy.ml is clearly the place to go. It's not confusing, IMO.
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What's your opinion on app developers making Lemmy clients with tracker-infused ads on their free version? Is it something you ever anticipated when you were first developing Lemmy?
EDIT: Also a similar one, what about instances potentially deciding to display ads out of nowhere? Could defederation be a tool here to discourage that?
I'm personally a hard copyleft developer, so I'd prefer that people making apps and tools for the lemmy eco-system, open source them, to benefit the community as a whole. Nearly all lemmy projects have adopted that standard, and are using the GPL and other hard copy-left licenses, and sharing their code freely with the community.
One example: various devs of lemmy apps have asked me how we build comment trees. Because lemmy's source code is open, I was able to share the exact code from lemmy-ui (typescript) and jerboa (kotlin). This is not something closed source developers are able / willing to share.
So I continue to recommend that developers heed calls to open source their applications. I developed my ThumbKey android keyboard, specifically because my requests to the MessageEase developers to open-source their codebase, after development had stopped, went unheeded for years.
Side note, but I've seen a lot of the discourse around Sync confuse FOSS, with making money. Of course developers deserve to get paid for their labor time! The thing is, FOSS makes no demands on how you monetize your software: "free as in freedom, not free as in beer", is the saying. So its entirely possible to open source your app, and still charge for it if you like. And If someone wants your app for free (say via an unlocked APK), they'll get it, whether its closed source, or not.
And yes, if an instance decided to insert ads, or becomes full of blog/cryptospam, I'd def recommend other instances defederate from them. I'd rather not lemmy become the ad-machine that other social media has become.
I definitely didnt expect it, nor did I expect that there would suddenly be more than a dozen different apps. But its not a problem, the more choices users have the better. Those who like such clients can use them, thout it affecting anyone else. Plus monetization of apps could potentially help to fund development of Lemmy itself.
For instances with ads its pretty much the same, more choice for users. But I really doubt that model can have any success considering how many free instances are around which are run by volunteers. Defederation should be unnecessary assuming that ads are only shown to local users.
Hope multiples are ok ...
- As platform developers, do you have any thoughts about ActivityPub? Positive/negative critiques, needed developments (in your opinions), usage gripes or tips for other platform devs, future predictions?
- As devs of (now) the second largest platform next to mastodon (by some metrics), which are probably as distinct platforms can be in terms of format, do you have any views on interoperability between platfroms over ActivityPub, where a common critique (AFAIK), from *diaspora devs for example, is that sharing posts/information of different formats just doesn't work well over AtivityPub and so is one of its major flaws?
- Arguably the fediverse has so far sought to replicate the corporate big-social platforms ... should new design evolution occur now and if so how?
- Much has been made by some of how the lack of user-friendliness of the fediverse really isn't anything to celebrate and should be taken more seriously by users and devs alike (see, eg, Erin Kissane who focuses on mastodon). However much this applies to lemmy (where issues of user mobility probably do apply), do you think the fediverse needs a better story around catering to user needs?
- Do you have any thoughts on the server-based architecture of the fediverse (where all user accounts are bound to a particular user) and whether alternative architectures have a future or could be better (p2p, more single-user based for instance)?
- Should lemmy and the fediverse seek to grow with any and all users or seek to stay relatively small and limited to ensure a healthy cutlure?
- Journalism and journalists ... should they be on the fediverse (like the BBC recently with their own mastodon instance) ... and if so, how?
- What are the biggest or proudest moments you've had with Lemmy so far, and the worst or most embarrassing?
- How does it feel to have so many users using and developing against your software?!
Haha youre a very curious one :D
- See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2348893
- It sure isnt perfect, partly because Mastodon makes no efforts to be compatible and expects everyone else to cater to their way of doing things. Regardless, the fact that you can interact between different platforms is a huge improvement over current social media platforms. And Im certain that interoperability will only get better over time.
- Its already happening, look at Kbin combining the concepts of Reddit and Twitter into one. Or mitra which adds cryptocurrency integrations. There are probably others which Im unaware of.
- Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements.
- Its really genius because it combines the best aspect of centralized (simple login with username/password and an admin who manages technical stuff) with those of p2p (no central point of failure). Real p2p is great in theory, but it requires way too much technical knowledge for the average user, so its unlikely to ever gain mass appeal.
- Personally I think the Fediverse is really the future of social media, so it will grow whether we want it or not. And its much healthier than the corporate platforms with their tracking, advertising and manipulating algorithms, so the more people leave them behind, the better. I dont see a way to influence this growth, we just need to adapt and deal with it.
- Basically my previous reply, I dont know enough about journalism to give a more specific answer.
- The biggest and proudest was definitely when tens of thousands of Reddit users suddenly came here, and most of them actually liked it. Cant say there was anything bad or embarrassing, the experience for me is really positive.
- It feels great, I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.
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Any plans to improve the sorting algorithm so that there's a good balance of fresh posts at the top that's also fairly active? And to help promote smaller communities that would have otherwise been dominated by the posts from bigger instances.
Any concerns about duplicate communities across multiple instances? People have made the argument that it's like having different flavors of subreddits on Reddit, but it's a flawed analogy. Individual instances have incentive to make their own communities flourish, whether or not there's a duplicate already available.
Its been bothering me too, that the large communities have been swamping out smaller ones.
As one solution, the closed PR linked in this issue has some more context, but we plan to add a Best sort, that retains the qualities of hot, but gives a boost for small communities over larger ones. This shouldn't be too difficult to add, as its very similar to hot.
Another benefit of lemmy being FOSS, is that we have the option to add many more sorts as time goes on.
Any concerns about duplicate communities across multiple instances?
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First of all, I'd like to say thank you and that I appreciate your work. Lemmy is great and I've found a new home (at least for the foreseeable future). I first joined lemmy.ml once I learned about lemmy, and I have to say I had a good experience there. You guys even responded directly to my noob questions, and I honestly felt welcome which helped me decide to stay.
My questions are about account migration. As you may have already seen, I'm not with lemmy.ml anymore. The reason is I saw you guys stickied a post encouraging users to use different instances (since the server was having trouble with the influx of redditors at that time). I figured I'd help by first moving to a smaller instance. I have no regrets, although switching was a bit tricky since I had to start from scratch.
What are your thoughts on account migration? Is it in the works or is it something that's a little far into the future? No pressure since I know you guys are busy with other stuff.
Account migration is not in the works, and I consider it very low priority. Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy isnt focused on individual users, so it doesnt matter much if you start posting from another instance one day. If its important for you, you can always put a link in your profile to your other accounts. I would rather implement a way to export/import account data. Thats much simpler and can also be used as a backup in case your instance goes down.
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As some instances grow, server costs are becoming significant. Right now, servers are only funded through donations. Do you see the development of anything else to help fund server costs?
If lemmy is working as intended (many small, connected servers), hosting costs should be small: like < $10 USD / month. (images are another issue, but I'll answer that in other comments).
Of course we don't plan on adding any monetization directly into lemmy or its UI, including ads, or required payments. Right now at least the best way is to put donation links in your site sidebar.
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I'm not asking anything because I'm a potato when it comes to software. I just wanted to drop by and say: thank you both for Lemmy. The platform is amazing, and it's clear that you guys are pouring some heavy love (and labour hours) in it, as it's improving at an amazing pace.
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I asked this in the original thread but I’ll repeat it here:
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Are there any limitations with the ActivityPub protocol you find limiting? Do you have recommendations for future versions of the protocol?
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Do you have any thoughts on the AT Protocol (a potential competitor to AP)?
Limitations no, if anything the protocol is too extensive and lets you do too many things (or do the same thing in different ways). But thats somewhat expected for a protocol which can handle all types of social media platforms. I think the protocol is fine as is, but it needs minor changes here and there to keep up with how it is being used in the real world. The FEP process is doing a good job of that.
From what I know the AT protocol used by Bluesky is entirely centralized, so it doesnt look like a competitor yet. They claim that it will be decentralized in the future, but I will believe it when I see it. For now the decentralization seems more like a marketing gimmick.
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Are there any plans to make an upvote history log available for users to view? I loved looking back over my upvoted content occasionally, but now I have to specifically save them to be able to keep track of them.
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Have you considered a feature like “sibling community”?
What I mean is, for example, car community on server 1 marks itself as a sibling community to a car community on server 2. Similarly server 2 marks itself as a sibling community to server 1, ie it is two-way.
When communities have been linked bi-directionally, any post and comment are shared between the two sibling communities.
This would allow bigger communities to form out of smaller communities, thereby preventing discussions from being fragmented and showing the true size of Lemmy, across servers.
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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!
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Since you're very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?
Thanks for your work, it's projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive.
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Another one:
Thoughts on the absence of clear license terms regarding content contributed to the Fediverse? For instance, questions and answers on Stack Exchange communities are CC-BY-SA. It would probably be necessary to have this discussion as 1- LLM companies are probably looking at the Fediverse with dollar signs in their eyes and will soon be incentivized to abuse the servers with content scrapers and 2- soon bad instances (and currently already the case with certain apps) will try to monetize content that's being contributed on the Fediverse using ads.
I just find it weird that we never had this discussion around what use of our content is allowed and what is not allowed, and that without my consent someone is going to make money from ads displayed alongside my threads/comments. For big tech you at least have to agree to their terms of service where you give them that consent.
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I'm gonna ask some tough questions, but I am hopeful to get a response. Thank you for all that you do.
- Do you envision NSFW content having a place in the federation safely? And if so, would lemmy.ml ever refederate with NSFW instances? What would it take for that to happen?
- How do you feel about lemmy.world being the proto "default" lemmy instance right now, especially on Sync app. Some have expressed concern about it causing centralization on the platform, others are hoping that people will spread out.
- Do you anticipate making a distinction between NSFW and pornographic content at all? And taking that a step further potentially, is implementing activitypubs content warnings on the road map?
Thanks!
- There isn't a good way to do it: your
Alltab will be full of potentially illegal content if you federate with NSFW instances. We want to focus on dev, and not on legal issues, so for that reason we won't federate with NSFW ones. - I'm guilty of this also w/ jerboa, showing lemmy.ml content before you log in. We obvi don't want single points of failure, and want lemmy to be as distributed / spread out as possible. If some of the bigger instances go down, I'm sure people will write premature articles about "the death of lemmy". We're still in the early stages, and I think we'll have to see how things evolve, and what promotes decentralization the best. We've tried to rotate the signup sites at the top of join-lemmy.org , but there are likely other things we could do.
- Creating multiple types of NSFW would be possible, its just not something we've implemented yet, and there are also issues with how that would be handled with activitypub, which only has one type of sensitive field.
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Thanks for both of your work on Lemmy, join-lemmy, lemmy-ui and Jerboa.
- Can you tell us about any upcoming major features/issue resolutions in development currently, if there are any?
- Will Lemmy have any form of cross-instance community/post grouping, similar to multi-reddits, hashtags, "alliances" or categories? Although some Lemmy apps have implemented something along those lines, it could be more fully-implemented in the official backend/frontend. I've been thinking Lemmy has desparately needed it to help solve some of the fragmentation problems across instances. It would also help avoid one instance necessarily having all the content, ballooning in both running costs and control.
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- Are you proud/happy/satisfied how Lemmy progresses and its current status?
- Does it make sense to spend your time to develop client apps when there are so many other already (including open source)
- What are your ambitions/goals/hopes for Lemmy in one year from now?
- What do you see as the biggest issue for Lemmy (as a platform) which must be addressed?
Ps: thank you for your work!
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With so many growing instances, were finding a lot of duplicate communities within each one, wich results in a lot of duplicate posts by cross posters.
Do you think it will be possible to aggregate similar communities together in some way?
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