Lemmy's Image Problem (Updated 02-06-2024)
Lemmy's Image Problem (Updated 02-06-2024)
The popular Reddit alternative's user count has grown a lot over the past year. One problem, though: users and admins can't delete images.
Highlighting the recent report of users and admins being unable to delete images, and how Trust & Safety tooling is currently lacking.
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Hey everyone, I just wanted to thank you for the lively conversation and thought-provoking insights. We don't have to agree on every point (or at all), but I've decided to synthesize a lot of thoughts and ideas from these conversations into a blog post: https://deadsuperhero.com/2024/03/economic-musings-on-federated-networks/
I know you said it is a brain dump, but your follow up still seems mostly an emotional reaction to how the devs responded rather than a reasoning synthesis process.
E.g, your "Where Fediverse Software Differs", it seems like you want to pay off the set up you've placed in the previous paragraph (about the difficulty of being an open source developer), but this payoff never comes and instead you end up the argument with "The feature requests valid, and the devs responded like dicks".
Even if we take "the feature request was valid" for granted, it does not follow that the devs must act on it right away. If the Lemmy devs acknowledged the issue and said "You are absolutely right and we strongly advise anyone hosting an instance in the EU if they are worried about GDPR", then what? Do you think that whoever wrote the "perfectly valid feature request" should still be pushing for making it a higher priority? On what grounds?
Also:
The operators, who to some degree help the project gain visibility, support, and money, are themselves doing unpaid labor: community building, moderation (...)
shouldn't ever be used as an excuse to justify free labor from developers. This is not Self-Loathing and Display of Low Self-Steem Olympics. Anyone that comes to me with a "I'm not gaining anything from my work" argument will promptly receive "The fact that you can not establish boundaries and are martyring yourself is not my problem" as a response.
The fact that developers of FOSS software project are able to tell users "If you want something done, you need to give us the resources or do it yourself" should be lauded, not criticized or be seen as "dicks".
If instance owners are dealing with bad users "and not getting paid for it", they can do two things: close down the instance, or put proper boundaries and tell what they are willing and not willing to do for free. Alternatively, they can do what I do and make the relationship explicitly transactional: I'm more than willing to work a lot to solve my customer's problems, but this is only after they actually paid me for it. The fact that I only accept paying customers makes my instance noticeably easier to manage. Even if I'm charging way less than what some people would donate to their favorite instance, the fact that all the users from the instances are paying make for an excellent filter.
The common denominator is relatively simple to understand: good optics of a project leads to more users, leads to more communities, leads to people building all kinds of apps and tools for those communities, leads to more people being willing to donate to a project.
This "donation-based" approach needs to change. Mastodon has no problems with "optics", and its "Founder and CEO" is reportedly making 30000€ as yearly salary. This is ridiculously low. This is less than what an intern makes at Facebook. The three Lemmy devs are sharing less than 4k€/month. You can make more money by working part-time on Uber Eats. To think that this is enough to claim "they are making some money" is frankly absurd.
If society in general is so tired of exploitative Big Tech, society needs to give a strong signal that it's willing to pay for the alternative. If we don't want to have the most brilliant minds of our generation working on how to optimize the amount of ads that you get to see online, then we need to show that those building better solutions can be properly rewarded. It's not up to the developers to try to build out everything perfectly and then go around begging for people for breadcrumbs and their seal of approval.
To sum up: I'm not saying that developers need to be worshipped because they can do what others can't. I'm also not saying that the Lemmy devs were right in how they communicate with its users, but I am saying that they are absolutely right in establishing their priorities and not let their work be dictated by someone that is not putting any Skin on The Game.
The problem sort of is capitalism right? These public good projects should have public funding. Imagine if the public funding for open source software projects was like that of the Apollo program in the 60s (2.5% of gdp).
I am not sure I'd be using any mass communication platform that is primarily developed and/or funded by any government.
But anyway, I really don't like to use hypotheticals as an excuse to not take action. Yes, it would be better if there was more public support for open source. But it doesn't. Should we just shrug our shoulders and do nothing on our own? Why give away our agency?
I am not sure I’d be using any mass communication platform that is primarily developed and/or funded by any government.
One could argue you're using one now.
No, not really. We've come a long way from ARPANET. Pretty much every large data network is privatized. The foundations working on funding FOSS might even get some of their money from Governments, but they are reasonably independent.
Anyway, my point is less about radical pro- or anti- government and more about asking "Cui bono?" if I suddenly heard about increased interest from any State Government to get more involved into specific FOSS projects.
Personally I believe that yes open source should be created by governments for the global good, that open source should be created by people studying PhDs and that community commons projects should be part of schooling with students learning how to use and contribute to them.
However the main brunt of open source should be created by people who simply want it to exist because we will always outnumber and outperform government workers and students.
Personally I would love to see a world where contributing to community projects is something everyone does as part of their life, not only because it'll create more open source but because I think it'll be a much healthier community if we stop seeing everyone else around us as competition and start seeing them as fellow workers in the project to improve life for all.
I generally think these guys are being a bunch of assholes.
However, some people in the comment threads challenged my point of view, and stated that users have no rights to demand anything from developers who give away their work for free.
I can't imagine why the devs or others wouldn't be receptive when that's how you start off