Lemmy Project Priorities Observations

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I've raised my voice loudly on meta communities, github, and created new [email protected] and [email protected] communities.

I feel like the performance problems are being ignored for over 30 days when there are a half-dozen solutions that could be coded in 5 to 10 hours of labor by one person.

I've been developing client/server messaging apps professionally since 1984, and I firmly believe that Lemmy is currently suffering from a lack of testing by the developers and lack of concern for data loss. A basic e-mail MTA in 1993 would send a "did not deliver" message back to message sender, but Lemmy just drops delivery and there is no mention of this in the release notes//introduction on GitHub. I also find that the Lemmy developers do not like to "eat their own dog food" and actually use Lemmy's communities to discuss the ongoing development and priorities of Lemmy coding. They are not testing the code and sampling the data very much, and I am posting here, using Lemmy code, as part of my personal testing! I spent over 100 hours in June 2023 testing Lemmy technical problems, especially with performance and lost data delivery.

I'll toss it into this echo chamber.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Beehaw leadership is most articulate, especially moderation tools, but there is foundation of cross-instance community shock built in when June 2023 Reddit influx came along (bulletintree.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Lemmy instance Beehaw staff on Monday, August 21 2023....
https://beehaw.org/comment/1018508

"From where I’m standing, I can’t really much has changed unfortunately… which really sucks…

Lemmy.world has grown substantially meanwhile the moderation tools have not improved at all. All I can say about the moderation tools is that we now know that the tools suck more than they used to.

Here’s a list of moderation problems that we have discovered since then:

If a Berson is reported on another instance, we never get the report.
If a mod is banned from the community they mod, they can still take mod actions
If you get site-banned from Beehaw while you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from that instance and kbin can see your posts
People from other instances can’t know who if someone is an admin on the instance they’re interacting with
People from other instances can’t see when we use the shield function to signal we’re talking “officially / as a mod”
The modlog is not chronological
The modlog breaks if you ban someone for more than 4 digit days.

A banned user’s description is still visible so if they link to a scat image in their description, it is still visible to moderators. Despite these newly known problems, there have been exactly no improvement whatsoever to the moderation tools. It is honestly unsettling and terrifying."

Context: Lemmyy has been on GitHub and in production at Lemmy.ml for over 4 years for the purposes of running and moderating a message forum / link aggregator. Beehaw has been online for over a year before the May 2023 Reddit influx.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'll point this out: the people who develop Lemmy, the two programmers for 4 years, do not in 2023 seem active on Lemmy to discuss moderation problems or PosgreSQL problems or anything about how to run a Lemmy server or the errors and problems the site is reporting.. I begged them to use [email protected] right on their own server in early June 2023. I created [email protected] community right on the developer home server - and I created this post on June 7, 2023 in particular to raise alarms about the countdown to June 30 Redit API change and how badly Lemmy code was performing and the data loss from crashes: https://lemmy.ml/post/1166882

I don't think they even bother to create a login on any other Lemmy server and see if the code works in production. I shared issues of missing data form federation not properly sending to remote servers - and they got annoyed. I see no evidence they actually care about data integrity and database crashes in production causing real comments, posts to get lost. The 4 year old code doesn't have admin screens to show errors in saving posts to the database, errors with federation delivery failure, etc. For a 4 year old ode, they just let errors happen and sites like Beehaw find out things aren't working "the hard way". There was no tool to know if federation was working or failing, the queue was backing up like an overflowing toilet, or even a warning about queue lost data if you stopped a server (even for an upgrade).

Data and databases - and using Lemmy itself to test and discuss Lemmy data issues - seems to be avoided and annoying to them.