I think this would be immensely helpful for niche topics
This.
I dont know how many people here are aware of Fandom, formerly known as Wikia. Basically what they are trying to do is collecting niche topic wikis in order to profit as much as possible. Very much criticized over the years by contributors for their practices.
Ibis could be the answer for niche wikis who dont want to be associated with Fandom/Wikia.
You completely missed the point, the emphasis is at the end of the sentence:
in a way that people think to be very intransparent, undemocratic.
Of course they call the shots. But you can do that in various ways. You can engage with people and include people in those decisions in various ways. Wikipedia for example does a technical survey every year, asking: “should we focus our technical work on area A, B or C? What do you guys think should be prioritized?”
That does not mean that some specific task needs to be prioritized just because one person wants that. But I heavily doubt that the devs have an idea how popular or unpopular certain ideas/wishes are with Lemmy’s users.
I think it’s a question of philosophy. If I take donations for something, is it really still my hobby projects I build in my free time?
Not really IMO. The moment I make money off it, it’s more than that.
And if I have a community of people who use that project, I should be transparent with them and engage with them. Maybe the Lemmy devs are doing this in some place where I’m not (like on their matrix), but I have never seen them explain why they are working on certain features and not on others. Their development updates are awesome and I appreciate them, but it’s very much a communication of “we are doing this, see you next time”. The recent AMA was a good example of engagement that gives the possibility to explain things better and get into contact. My advice would be to work on communication and feedback channels.
But everyone is free to see that differently.
To chime in: Yes, people are positive about Lemmy. I like Lemmy, people like Lemmy. And Lemmy users in general want to see activity at Lemmy. Who wouldnt? That’s kind of a given… but still I want Lemmy to continue to evolve in functionality. That doesnt contradict itself?
And if someone points out that certain things arent technically possible at the moment, I as a user would expect that this isnt considered a “complaint” or a “negative sentiment”.
Especially when it’s a functionality that might have legal implications. Does “no one care” about that because people think it’s unnecessary? Or because they have never noticed before that this isnt possible? The GDPR is not a joke, and foss does not have an exemption clause for adhering to it. Additionally a lot of people on Lemmy are very privacy-conscious.
Therefore I think it’s great that this issue has been brought up now and you guys are working on a fix for that. Thanks for all of your work on this project, it’s really appreciated.
The current criticism is that dessalines and nutomic are choosing which features they are working on and which ones they incorporate into Lemmy in a way that people think to be very intransparent, undemocratic. That’s not unsimilar to Mastodon, but there even Gagron has to bow to pressure from the community if something has a lot of support.
He was on the board, it’s not like it was his project or anything. Imo he wanted to create a protocol, not a platform. “Improve Activitypub” like they always claimed. But then Bluesky realized that they can simply build their own platform and be Twitter 2.0