Hello!
I am sunaurus, the head admin of lemm.ee. Ever since I created my instance, I have been following a lot of public and private discussion channels between different parties involved with Lemmy. As I’m sure many others have also noticed, the discussions in such channels sometimes get heated, and in fact recently, I feel like there has been a constant trend in these discussions towards a lot of demands, hostility, negativity, and a general lack of empathy between different participants in the Lemmy network.
I am writing this post for a few reasons:
- I would like add a bit of positivity by expressing my gratitude towards every single person who has helped improve Lemmy.
- I want to speak up in defense of different people who have been receiving negativity lately.
- There are a few false rumors spreading on Lemmy, which I would like to try and counteract with very simple evidence.
- I want to remind everybody that at the end of the day, all of us care about building and improving Lemmy. We all have the same goal, and it’s too easy to lose sight of that.
I will split up what I want to say in this post by different user groups - users, mods, admins and developers. I understand that many people belong to several (or even all) of these groups, but I just want to highlight the value of, and express my gratitude to each group separately.
Users
At the end of the day, Lemmy would not be worth anything without the users. Users bring Lemmy to life by posting great content, getting involved in discussions in comments, helping surface interesting content for others through voting and even keeping the platform clean through reports. I am extremely thankful for all the users who have given me so much enjoyment on this platform.
I believe that users often get treated unfairly on Lemmy based on what instance they are participating from. I’m sure so many of you have noticed comments around Lemmy along the lines of “Oh, another user from <instance>, I’m going to completely ignore your stupid takes”. I’ve also many cases of people treating users as second-class citizen if they are not on the same instance - for example, I’ve seen users who are active and valuable participants in communities on another instance receive comments like “why are you participating in our discussions, go back to your own instance”. In my opinion this is completely counterproductive to the whole idea of federation. On a human level, I can understand it - you’re far more likely to notice or remember what instance somebody is posting from if you have a negative experience. As a result, as time goes by, people tend to develop negative views of each instance, despite potentially having had many positive interactions with other users of those same instances. The message I want to put out here is that instances, especially bigger ones, are not monoliths - do not judge users based on what instance they are browsing Lemmy from, judge them by their actual words and actions.
Mods
There are some excellent communities already on Lemmy, and these communities are all continuously being built up and maintained by mods. Mods put in huge amounts of their free time and energy in order to provide spaces for all Lemmy users. They form the first line of defense against bad actors, they keep communities alive and often receive no praise, only criticism. I am very grateful to everybody who has dedicated time to building communities on Lemmy.
Users rarely notice the lengths mods go to in order to keep communities running smoothly - mods more often than not only get noticed when users disagree with some mod actions. I believe mods deserve a lot better than this. Constructive criticism can of course be useful to improve communities, but it must be balanced with empathy and kindness towards people who have been putting in effort to provide something for users. Remember that there is another human being reading your words when you start writing about the mods of any particular community. Users who are not happy with mods of a certain community always have the opportunity to start their own community and run it as they like.
Admins
Admins provide two main key functions for the network:
- Taking care of the actual infrastructure of Lemmy
- Working as a higher level defense against bad actors, in cases where mods are not enough
I can tell from my own experience that being an admin of a bigger instance requires constant energy and attention. I don’t believe that there is a single medium-to-big instance where the admins have not put in hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of their free time, as well as in many cases, probably their own money. This is a service which admins provide for free, and it is necessary in order to keep the Lemmy network healthy. I have endless respect for anybody who is willing to put themselves in the position of a Lemmy admin.
I have seen awful messages towards admins from all the other groups listed here, including other admins. These messages range from condescending and rude, to downright hateful. I have seen admins treated as useless and their work taken for granted. I have seen people getting frustrated with admins for not spending every waking minute on Lemmy. I have seen some users consistently spreading provably false rumors about particular admins in an effort to tarnish their reputation on Lemmy.
Before you take out frustration on admins, please remember that they are also humans who have been working tirelessly to improve Lemmy in their own way.
Also, a reminder: the absolute best feature of Lemmy is that users are free to pick their instance - and as a result, users are also free to pick their admins. Even more than that, users can always become their own admins by spinning up their own instance. Yes, this requires dedication, effort, and research, but that’s exactly my point. It’s not easy running an instance, and mistreating people who do this as a free service is completely unacceptable.
Developers
Lemmy development has been lead by a few key maintainers, with a massive amount of smaller contributors. The software is constantly being improved at a very good pace, and everybody is able to benefit from this effort at no cost whatsoever. I am extremely grateful to everybody who has participated in the development of the Lemmy software, and other related software, as without you folks, none of us would even be here now.
There seems to be a huge amount of people with very little appreciation of the work that has gone into the software. I’m sure many of you have seen countless messages where people express that the devs should be doing more in one way or another. “They should work faster”, “they should prioritize this obviously most important feature”, “they should be available 24/7 to offer support”, etc. I just want to take a moment here and acknowledge what core maintainers have already done for Lemmy:
- Years worth of work on the code itself
- Offering support to the community and other admins
- Reviewing literally thousands of pull requests on GitHub
- Acting fast in stressful situations where the Lemmy network has been overloaded
- Not abandoning the project in the face of constant hateful users
- Sacrificing literally hundreds of thousands of euros in missed salaries which they could have been getting if they were working for a tech company instead of working on Lemmy
I also want to take this moment to discredit some rumors which I have seen repeated too many times:
- Rumor: Lemmy devs do not accept outside code contributions
This is completely false - the maintainers are completely open to (and even constantly asking for) contributions. When somebody starts contributing, they will receive support and code reviews very quickly. I can tell you that I have experienced this myself several times, but that’s anecdotal, so let me also provide evidence:
a. Contributors list for the Lemmy backend: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors
b. Contributors list for Lemmy UI: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/graphs/contributors
Both of these lists include 100 different names, and that’s only because GitHub literally caps these pages to 100 users. Actually, the amount of different contributors is even bigger. If Lemmy devs did not accept and encourage outside contributions, then there would be no way for these lists to be so big.
- Rumor: Lemmy devs work too slowly
This is an extremely entitled and frankly stupid claim. I try to keep on top of the changes made in the Lemmy repo, and let me tell you, the pace of improvement is very good.
I very firmly believe that if the network started downgrading to Lemmy versions from ~8 months ago, the whole network would just collapse, as none of the instances could keep up with the current volume. That is to say, we have come an extremely long way since last summer alone.
Let me provide some more evidence. Take a look at the Pulse page for the Lemmy backend on GitHub: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pulse. As of writing this, Lemmy devs have merged 18 pull requests in the week leading up to this post - that’s an average of 2.5 merged PRs per day. This is extremely good for a project with a small underfunded team.
- Rumor: Lemmy devs do not prioritize the important issues
There are two sides to this. First of all, there are endless users who turn to the Lemmy devs with what they believe is the most important issue and should immediately be prioritized - the problem is that almost none of these endless users have the same view of what the most important issue actually is! In that sense, it’s literally impossible to please everybody, because everybody wants different things.
On the other hand, even when Lemmy devs do prioritize things which some users have been desperately asking for, I have on several occasions seen a dismissive response along the lines of “too little too late”. Basically, the demands made are often unrealistic and impossible to meet.
If you are somebody who feels like Lemmy devs are not doing enough, I would ask you to please take a step back, look at the actual contributions which they have made, and consider how you yourself would feel if after making such a massive contribution, you would still need to listen to countless strangers on the internet tell you how you’re not good enough in their opinion.
Conclusion
Lastly, I am very thankful to anybody who took the time to read to the end of this post. Again, my goal is to try and defuse some of the hostility, as well as to put out a message of gratitude and positivity. I am very interested in the success of Lemmy as a whole, and that is much easier to achieve and maintain if we all work together. Thank you, I hope you’re doing well, and have a nice weekend!
you’re welcome
Thanks OP, good job. Upvoted and bookmarked.
Even me?
Yo! Lemmy wouldn’t be the same without you!
❤️
offtopic but do you know who owns lemmy.com? It points to your instance and im confused why an instance isnt run using that domain instead of pointing it to yours
Just checked the whois history on that and wow… purchased for $6000. That is a lot of money for a domain!
It was $500 prior to Reddit’s API changes, looks like another domain parking company purchased it around that time and hiked it up to $6000. Greed is one hell of a drug.
Quite curious about the current owner though, since it’s been registered privately via a proxy company.
Interesting, somebody had enough money to purchase lemmy.org.
Edit:
That’s weird, I thought Europeans used . and , the other way around in numbers
Some of them do, some of them don’t. I think in UK it is swaped in reference to US.
It’s, uh, not that simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Examples_of_use
Wow, thanks for sharing!
I’m only a user, but you’re right, that needs to be said. I hope all the other more important players see this, as it is a comparatively small amount of positive feedback buried in a mountain of negative feedback.
Users are the most valuable stakeholders, collectively.
This ia what reddit didn’t understand.
Thank you for creating and maintaining this space for us, I’m grateful for you and all of the other people working to keep things running and improving on lemmy. It is becoming harder and harder to find spaces for discussions that aren’t corporate owned.
Great post. It seems like a lot of people aren’t used to using the product of community efforts over commercial efforts and their expectations and feeling of entitlement match that experience. Like they’ve bought a product and want to complain to the manager when they experience a problem.
I’ve heard it referred to as ‘customer culture’. It’s present everywhere but I first heard about it regarding modern attitudes towards relationships/dating. Most things in our lives have been so commodified that we assume we’re in a transaction with everyone over everything all the time. OP is benefitting from from is at stake here, which is gratitude, generosity and freedom. It’s a wonderful thing for us all to be part of.
As if telling Reddit, Facebook, or Google what to put on their roadmap as an ordinary consumer would actually work.
At least with FLOSS if you want something, and if it is a good thing the developers like, you can likely get it merged. If not, you can fork and still have the feature locally. Good luck getting that freedom with a closed-source product.
For software I develop, I do find it is helpful if people making feature suggestions tell developers what is useful for them and why, but that doesn’t entitle them any of my time to demand what features I prioritise. The alternative is “I gave you something you like for free, so now I owe you to make it even better for you”, which is obviously nonsense.
We are grateful for you fellow internet human.
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.
Thank you for all the work you do!
I heard you guys have recently told Beehaw to quit using Lemmy, is that not correct, or how does this square with what you are saying here?
Heard where? I heard that Beehaw is considering not using Lemmy, but they’ve said that for a long time without changing still. But maybe they will. But it’s all up to them and they can control their instance how they like :)
Beehaw has just published a thing explaining their current situation and it includes some conversations with Lemmy devs where it looks like they are being told to fuck off and stop being a part of Lemmy: https://docs.beehaw.org/docs/important-questions-decisions-and-reflections/beehaw-lemmy-and-a-vision-of-the-fediverse/
One thing I have never understood and keep repeating in this context: Beehaw has >7k$ balance. If they really have a few issues that would solve 90% of the problems, why not putting a 500/1000/2000$ bounty of that feature.
I believe they mentioned that in their essay I linked to in this thread yesterday, they looked into starting a bounty system for new features but the Lemmy devs told them not to do it so the idea was abandoned.
I am curious about the details of that conversation, because I remember reading Dev’s comments in some post on Lemmy where they mentioned this option.
Both side seems to be frustrated at each other there. Beehaw admins accused lemmy devs of not listening to their requests for better moderation tools, while lemmy devs accused beehaw admins of demanding more work without contributing anything or gave them appreciation. I hope the conflict is just temporary and they can reconcile later when things have cooled off.
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.
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 for lack of shared goals. For example showing voting totals.
I keep saying that the most elegant solution here is to develop a plugin framework, to allow admins to customize their instance experience even when it diverges from the lemmy dev vision. If it’s made software agnostic it would allow people like me scratch our own itches. Ironic I know but it’s for this reason I think this should be one of the main priorities, as it will unleash a lot more Foss power on the project. It’s a big reason why projects like WordPress and godot are having great success
a problem is they they feel like their code contributions will not even be accepted for lack of shared goals. For example showing voting totals.
They’re free to not run the upstream version but their own patched one. Not being willing to write code will certainly not make that feature landing any more likely.
Plugins in Rust are a whole can of worms, what with AOT compiling and static linking, you can’t just monkey patch everything like in PHP. Essentially a plugin system would be a way to organise patches, to dependency inject admin-provided libraries instead of default implementations. Having a collection of patches should help designing such a thing, Personally I wouldn’t even consider designing such a thing before it’s clear what it will need to do, where it needs to provide hooks, also, that it will be used.
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.
A plugin framework sounds great. I would be happy to see a PR for this from Beehaw, Sublinks or anyone else.
Where? I haven’t heard any of that.
Not the person you replied to BTW.
They say the developers told them not to used bounties, but i specifically remember one of the developers saying he will accept code requests made with bounties , although he did mentioned he thought they are not worth it and have disadvantages (which i disagree with it).
Also one of the problem he linked to is now resolved.
I think one of the big issues with bounties on features for an open Source project is that some people will see them paying into a bounty as them paying a developer to implement a feature, and that goes from “supporting” the developers to “I pay your salary” territory. These people want timelines, and a return on their investment. I can’t blame a dev for not wanting to go down that path.
Yeah that’s pretty much the point, but it’s a real world method to get work done , see the bounties here, it might be especially important if the developers make a mistake when prioritizing (which is expected because they are humans, if there are bugs in code there are bugs in priorities).
Yeah that’s pretty much the point, but it’s a real world method to get work done , see the bounties here, it might be especially important if the developers make a mistake when prioritizing (which is expected because they are humans, if there are bugs in code there are bugs in priorities).
It’s open source, feel free to contribute. Throwing money to support a dev doesn’t entitle you to anything, let alone to be the arbitrator of their priorities. And this is the thinking that leads to dev burnout, and likely why Lemmy devs are not interested.
What? Even if they wanted to, the devs can’t control who uses Lemmy. It’s FOSS
I don’t know about the devs specifically, but maybe advised is a better term. Beehaw themselves don’t really want ro be using Lemmy as it doesn’t have the moderation tools they want.
I’m not sure beehaw idea of what they want works in the federated space
I know the devs can’t control who uses the software but apparently they want Beehaw to quit using Lemmy. It seems strange to me, especially after reading this comment, that’s why I asked.
Nope it’s “start sending pull requests if you want that stuff so urgently, or use another software, but stop whining”.
Beehaw has quite a number of users and generally community goodwill, I bet they could find a dev or two with some free time on their hands to work on the features they desire so much. That would be a solution-oriented approach. Simply telling the existing lemmy devs “you need to do this now you need to prioritise this” isn’t, no matter how polite the language it’s still entitled AF, and just for double clarity “not solution oriented”, in the FOSS world, means “toxic”.
Characterizing the concerns they have expressed as “whining” seems uncharitable, and “code or shut up” really doesn’t sound like a good response.
What, exactly, do you think entitles beehaw to dictate what the lemmy devs should prioritise?
If I’m getting the neighbourhood together to build a playground for the kids, and you come along and says “You must now build an observation post for my bird watching club”, how would you expect me to respond? Especially while I’m holding up a heavy beam frantically looking for something to rest it on so the whole structure doesn’t collapse?
I think answering “I have no objections to you building that observation post” is a perfectly adequate response. I don’t owe your bird watching club jackshit, and neither do the lemmy devs owe beehaw jackshit.
I think a better analogy here would be someone pointing that this is is a really bad neighborhood and you really oughta have a playground fence in the schematic.
From what’s in their essay it doesn’t seem like they are dictating what the devs prioritize. Regardless, I don’t see how they could dictate anything since they lack power over the devs. You keep characterizing them in negative ways, what’s that about? I feel like I’m missing something here.
I don’t understand those who criticize Lemmy developers. They were developing it while you were not here, I don’t think they will stop just because you are leaving :)
They’re also not holding anyone hostage. I can see how people are tired of the whole “if you don’t like it, fork it” argument, but Kbin, mbin, and Piefed are all perfectly viable and interoperable alternatives that are available already.
I can see how people are tired of the whole “if you don’t like it, fork it” argument
This I didn’t get. It’s literally how FLOSS works and why we have so many distros of Linux, for example. If one doesn’t like the philosophy, they don’t have to use FLOSS platforms. Noone is entitled to exactly what they want from software that is designed and maintained by volunteers. The software is literally a gift; take it, fork it, or leave it.
The only criticism I really see is that they are tankies, which I guess is understandable considering what Lemmy is lol
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.
The current criticism is that dessalines and nutomic are choosing which features they are working on
That’s not criticism that’s entitlement. It’s like telling the volunteers at the local soup kitchen how dare they not plant trees, and how undemocratic it is of them to not bow to your, specific, will. If you want those trees planted go ahead, plant them, noone’s stopping you.
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.
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.
Go to github, look at the tickets, look at the PRs, look at the discussions. How is that intransparent. And, no, just like science FLOSS is not a democracy, and wikipedia is not a FLOSS project they’re a bunch of dictionary editors paying people to work on mediawiki, the software that runs the site.
Go on have a look at open tickets tagged “enhancement” and the same for the web interface. Go there and tell me again how it’s all intransparent, and how the devs don’t know what the users of the software (first and foremost admins btw) want.
Look at that massive list and then switch from “enhancement” to “bug” and possibly understand why some of that stuff might take some time before it gets addressed.
Look at the massive amount of pull requests that get merged, authored by a gazillion of different people. None of them from beehaw.
popular
Is generally not how software development works. If you always do the most popular thing first what you end up is with a lightyear of duct tape holding together an abomination of technical debt. Also, to paraphrase Henry Ford: “If I had asked what people wanted I’d have bred faster horses”.
Good post but won’t make a difference. Some users are immature and they are the ones lashing out.
They will always be part of the online experience.
I think its useful to remember that it’s simply logical to acknowledge that exaggeration and drama can draw more attention and engagement than more mature, nuanced, frequently longer-winded participation can. Particularly younger people are not going to be as interested in observing social mores when simply being more bombastic can seem to be more fun sometimes.
It’s mainly on us, in the userbase, to deal with these kinds of trollier styles of interaction in an appropriate way. Usually not feeding them is enough, though not always. Sometimes they need to be cleverly undermined or brusquely and efficiently slapped down, it just depends on the troll.
But either way, it is true that they will always be here, and so we do need to adapt ourselves around them in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, combatting trolling does not actually have any one-size-fits-all solution, and requires a diverse toolbox of approaches, from mods and admins through to users.
That said, positivity and gratitude has its place too, even if some find it distasteful. I think it does make a notable difference. Morale is not some immutable thing that can resist everything both real life and internet hobbies can throw at it, and showing appreciation is part of how societies maintain it more broadly. We are not robots, nor will we be any time soon. We are subject to morale, and it is helpful to maintain it in positive ways. It’s not combatting the bad thing, it’s buffing the good thing. Both can be necessary sometimes, and there’s nothing wrong with a person preferring one or the other. People do not all have to be the same, after all.
Agreed, and additional thanks to you, @sunaurus, for all your ongoing contributions to the project and for being such a good instance admin as well.
I’m grateful for all Lemmings, but at this particular moment, mostly you.
Even as we recognize that Lemmy is a collective effort where every user can play a part, there are some roles which are more important than others. You’ve been an excellent admin for your own users, but also a unifying force for the network as a whole, neutralizing and bridging the spaces between many other Lemmy servers.
This post is the clearest example of that to date, but your contributions have always exhibited a good sense of diplomatic tact along with strong internal values and principles.
Kudos to you @sunaurus@lemm.ee.
spoiler
That spoiler made me chuckle lol
I think we are all overdue for a shot of positivity so thank you for this write up. Yes, we have a long way to go on the community side, the moderation and the technical sides but I’m happy for what we have and the progress that’s since June and before.
I’ve done minor contributions (to the Jerboa app), some translations, posted stuff in 4 languages and donated some change where I can… we can always do better and although some are motivated by spite, I think also that a lot of people would enjoy it more if we can cultivate an atmosphere that’s less miserable and full of unnecessary drama.
Yay, I use the jerboa app and really like it. Good work buddy 😃
Great post, exactly my thoughts, people demanding features on Lemmy and even claiming devs work for them LMAO, go to Sublinks or somewhere else.
