Half the comments in this thread are the exact same as when we started working on a reddit alternative lol. “I don’t see why you’re doing this, reddit works fine for me.”
Also I’m pretty stunned that more people aren’t aware of wikipedia’s many scandals and issues. I suppose if you use a site every day and don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes, you don’t seek these things out.
Everyone should see how incredibly important this project is, and its potential. Wikipedia is yet another US-controlled and domiciled site, with a history of bribery, scandals, and links to the US state department. It has a near-monopoly on information in many languages, and its reach extends far outside US borders. Federation allows the possibility of connecting to other servers, collaborating on articles, forking articles, and maintaining your own versions, in a way that wikipedia or even a self-hosted mediawiki doesn’t.
Also ibis allows limited / niche wikis, devoted to specific fields, which is probably the biggest use-case I can see for Ibis early on.
Congrats on a first release!
From my discussion with some beehaw admins and sublinks devs, a problem is they they feel like their code contributions will not even be accepted
They’ve never opened a single PR, whilst the github shows us merging tons of PRs from third parties, so that seems like negative speculation on their part.
For example showing voting totals.
The lemmy API already has open vote totals on everything (score, upvote, downvote), and I also made a PR adding a user preference setting for how to display scores for your user.
I believe there’s an open issue for a plugin framework, but that would need to be fully worked out. If it’s just simple preferences, there are tons of sample PRs to learn from.
I’m quite confused about some people’s adverseness to learning Rust; it’s been the voted the most favorite developer language for many years in a row now (for good reason), rust frameworks frequently top the fastest web server benchmarks now, and every real developer has to learn new languages and frameworks every few months to keep up to speed anyway. Just as an example, I was waiting for a messageease(an android keyboard) replacement, and nothing came close. I taught myself kotlin, and android programming, and made one, and I’m an incredibly slow learner and middling programmer.
The difference between open source vs paid-for software, and the lack of articulation of what entitlement is (and the harm it causes contributors to open source projects), is one of the root reasons for a lot of frustrations this past week. We’ve even added a specific no entitlement clause to our code of conduct a few days ago to try to avoid this in the future.
In short, entitlement is insulting or demanding behavior towards anyone for not doing what you want them to do, or not doing it fast enough.
Lemmy is developed by 2-4 devs, but used by >40k ppl. This massive disparity means it is absolutely impossible for us to solve every issue, and please everyone.
We make no demands on anyone, and don’t force anyone to use lemmy, and encourage ppl to do the open source thing, and improve / work on issues we don’t have time for. We gladly review PRs, as anyone can transparently see on the github.
Some of the beehaw admins on the other hand, are making demands, whilst refusing to do the open source thing and help add the features they’d like added. At this stage we’ve come to an impasse, where they’ll likely just move to another platform, where the developers of that new platform will experience the exact same entitlement timeline: request for features, frustration that they’re not getting completed fast enough, lashing out at developers, a similar developer response, then burnout for all parties.
The only way forward is for people to realize that entitlement has no place in open source, and that making demands on other people is not acceptable for any party.
Thank you so much for writing this, it articulated a lot of things I’ve been thinking about this past week. So many of us are all spending our most valuable resource, time, trying make this a better place, in whatever way we can, and none of these 4 groups (some of us are members of more than one) deserve any vitriol or negativity for their efforts. We all need to think about ways we can reduce that negativity, and not all of them can be fixed with computer code, or at the admin level. We all need to improve how we interact with people, and treat them the way we’d like to be treated, with a view towards their well-being.
I’d like to follow your good example, and send out my genuine thanks to all the users, admins, developers, those doing server support, and contributors in any form to lemmy, and it’s ecosystem of apps and tools. Members of all of these groups are absolutely vital, and this place is only possible because of our cooperation.
I appreciate it, Thank you. It can seem pretty thankless to put so much time into something that you hope is making the world a (slightly) better place, only to have a few people get angry that this free public good you’re providing, isn’t up to their high standards (and they’re not willing to help fix it).
We will never block third party tools, and will always have an open API.
One of the PRs I’ve been working on, is an interface to view your image uploads and delete them. This is not trivial, but will probably be in the next release.
The thing that really gets me with these, is that we are 2-4 devs working on software used by over 40k ppl. It is absolutely impossible to please everyone, and fix every issue, there just isn’t enough of us.
Oftentimes we ask for ppl to do the open source thing, and contribute a PR, and many of them do.
Anyone can look at our github profiles and see how busy we’ve been, and how many moderation related issues we’ve been working on, this is all out in the open. Yet writers of these articles somehow never bother to look, or reach out to us for questions. The amount of entitlement and second-hand rumors is really dissapointing.
It is absolutely impossible for 2-4 devs to please everyone in a codebase used by >40k people. If you ran a codebase used by this many people, you’d understand our pain. You cannot make everyone happy.
You want free work, but you don’t want to give your work for free
Check out our github profiles if you think we aren’t doing work. This is easily verifiable.
How can you think that this tiny group of people, fielding the requests of thousands, is entitled? We’re simply requesting that people do the open source thing, and contribute a PR, when we don’t have time to work on an issue. Would you like it if I made you change your priorities and work on what I wanted you to work on?
I appreciate your work in organizing issues and helping to label them, and I’m sorry if I did not give some things proper weight. But are my priorities not my own? Why is this such an affront that I choose what I think is important? Would you like it if I did the same to you, demanded that you change your priorities to do what I want you to do? What if there are thousands of other people asking you the same thing?
Scale is also left out of the equation here. Thousands people are asking 2-4 devs for features. It is simply impossible to please everyone, unless some people do the open source thing, and work on a feature they’d like to have. Many people have and continue to do this, rather than dismissing the project because the small number of developers can’t keep pace with issues.
Responding to false criticism is important. For example you were under the mistaken impression that we reject pull requests or issues, or don’t care about moderation? All of those are provably false. Look at all the moderation PRs I’ve closed in the past MONTH alone. This is all easily verifiable if you go to our github accounts and see what we’re working on.
You also heard second hand that the sublinks developer is making sublinks because they got a bad reception from us, or were told that we’d reject features? They’ve never opened a single issue or PR.
Your post seems to mostly be 2nd-hand rumors from people who already don’t like us, and not from any people that are actually working on Lemmy. That’s perfectly fine, but it’d be wrong to not address these false criticisms.
Entitlement in open source is a real thing, and you would know our pain if you ran a codebase currently in use by > 40k people monthly. To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person. It’d be like if I criticized my grandmother’s free meal for it not being to my liking, and demanded she make it my way.
I created the software you’re using right now, and I’m fully aware of how fragile this entire experiment is. We’re going up against a system that can throw nearly unlimited resources in brainpower and money to subvert a system. It takes an astounding level of technocratic arrogance to think that you’re immune to EEE, and that you can outsmart that amount of power.
Excellent post. I’m convinced everyone arguing in favor of letting facebook or twitter into the fediverse, are just ignorant of the these company’s history, and what they’re capable of.
There is exactly zero reason to let a rabid wolf into your house, or say things like, “but what harm can this wolf do???”
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With a few more additions, lemmy could serve as a good replacement. We already have a
Forum/NewCommentssort which is perfect for question / answer type communities. We could add a feature to make default sorts for specific communities, so they would feel less fast, or possibly a sort that brings zero comment posts (IE meaning unanswered), to the top.The reputation and “accepted answer” features from SO are a lot less important than threaded comments can be, especially since questions often need new answers every year, making the “accepted answer” pointless.