This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they'd like to myself, @[email protected] , SleeplessOne , or @[email protected] about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
NLNet Funding
First of all some good news: We are currently applying for new funding from NLnet and have reached the second round. If it gets approved then @[email protected] and SleeplessOne will work on the paid milestones, while @dessalines and @nutomic will keep being funded by direct user donations. This will increase the number of paid Lemmy developers to four and allow for faster development.
You can see a preliminary draft for the milestones. This can give you a general idea what the development priorities will be over the next year or so. However the exact details will almost certainly change until the application process is finalized.
Development Update
@ismailkarsli added a community statistic for number of local subscribers.
@jmcharter added a view for denied Registration Applications.
@dullbananas made various improvements to database code, like batching insertions for better performance, SQL comments and support for backwards pagination.
@SleeplessOne1917 made a change that besides admins also allows community moderators to see who voted on posts. Additionally he made improvements to the 2FA modal and made it more obvious when a community is locked.
@nutomic completed the implementation of local only communities, which don't federate and can only be seen by authenticated users. Additionally he finished the image proxy feature, which user IPs being exposed to external servers via embedded images. Admin purges of content are now federated. He also made a change which reduces the problem of instances being marked as dead.
@dessalines has been adding moderation abilities to Jerboa, including bans, locks, removes, featured posts, and vote viewing.
In other news there will soon be a security audit of the Lemmy federation code, thanks to Radically Open Security and NLnet.
Support development
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
- Liberapay (preferred option)
- Open Collective
- Patreon
- Cryptocurrency
Will Lemmy ever become more of an organization? I'm slightly concerned about hostile take overs and or major changes that could be driven by personal views or bias.
Also a organization could facilitate cooperation and organize events.
If Lemmy does become more of an organization, it would be nice to have a level of public assurance over any control exerted by the organization. A lot of people see that the lead developers of Lemmy are communist and shy away from it based merely on that. I have one of the oldest accounts on Lemmy, I've seen plenty of them, and my impression is that they have conducted themselves with only the utmost ethics. However, it can still help newcomers who don't want to feel like someone might be breathing down their neck.
Lemmy is somewhat protected by being an AGPL-licensed project, preventing proprietarization. If there's ever a relicensing effort, ba fearful.
I'm not sure what exactly becoming a organization would entail, but so far I'd say the development part is not really large enough? For me I would start being suspicious when a significant amount of dev power came from compan(ies), but so far no company has shown any interest afaik.
There's already been a few forks, for example lemmynsfw has made some changes on their side, which nutomic is now looking to integrate back into lemmy.
As a multi-national open source dev team, it would only complicate our lives to try to set up a more formal legal structure.
I wouldn't be too afraid of hostile takeovers: this is a dev-run-and-controlled project. People will go where the development is, and the federated nature of lemmy protects against the kind of attacks its possible to make against centralized entities.