I’ve spent a lot of time trying to evangelize Lemmy on reddit, and one of the most common criticisms is the possibility of defederation and getting cut off from major communities.

Frankly, if this is a concern to people and I believe it does concern some, they should not use federated platforms as this will always happen.

We know that Lemmy slowly bled tens of thousands of users in the months following the reddit API exodus as users drifted back to reddit. Although it’s impossible to know how many of those users were annoyed by the defederation drama, I think it’s safe to say that the number wasn’t zero.

The steep decline in active users on Beehaw in the months following the decision is probably the best source of hard evidence supporting my claim.

You're saying that the decline in active users on Beehaw is a result of these defederations while simultaneously acknowledging that Lemmy as a whole lost users. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not. I could not make such a claim with this information.

Do keep in mind that 11.6% of people chose to not answer that question so this 75% is not a very accurate metric. Not only that but ~35% of people declared to not come from the United States. I will also mention that our goal is not to reach an average that is close to a country's demographics - we expect a bigger than average amount of people to be from a minorised group.

We could, that was something I had personally looked at but it is quite a bit of effort for nothing if there is no big split.

It would be possible to keep up with Lemmy's API changes though it would certainly help if Lemmy's API was actually versioned.

My personal opinion on this is that we should probably take an allowlist approach to federation to be able to be more proactive about instances that could be threats for Beehaw.

I think we've managed to keep our culture to some degree through stronger moderation when it comes to out-of-instance users and making use of defederations.

That said, I wish we had more flexible federation options, such as for example, letting our users interact with certain instances without letting people from those instances interact in ours.

Yeah.. seems like a baserow bug. It renders fine on Firefox mobile. Not sure if it'd work in Desktop mode in Chromium browsers - worth a try for those with this issue.

The DMA (Digital Markets Act) has clauses that force big companies that are considered "gatekeepers" to allow interoperability with other services.

Images aren’t federated through ActivityPub so I don’t really see how deleting media is supposed to work.

Yes, they are. Every instance downloads everyone's images for a "cached" version that is currently never used. This is what makes this problem especially insidious and straight up dangerous in cases like CSAM.

It’s a basic curl command, that shouldn’t be “arcane” if you’re setting up a server.

This is the equivalent of saying that any instance admin needs to know how to use curl while most people have never used a commandline. Not only that but you need machine access to know the api key which I would wager instance admins do not necessarily have.

I think this is the result of not prioritising work that makes moderation possible by non-technically inclined people and it is genuinely a failure of the system.

The priorities of development on Lemmy are decided by developers and the people who are not are simply pushed away. Most community leaders and moderators are not developers. The mental gymnastics to justify this lack of tooling is tiring.

They can, if they read the manual. Mods can’t, but instance admins can.

Yes. If you use arcane commands using the docs that are in a pull request that is not yet merged. This is not accessible to many instance admins and it is only "technically supported" which is the worst kind of support from my point of view.

The ActivityPub plugin is very early and has many quirks at the moment. Can't edit, weird text limit things and I believe it is just a one-way federation?

Hope to see you more, silly bean!

I did not know about this Piefed feature, that's really cool!

In what way are those better? Don’t they still suffer from the privacy problems that come with federation?

Yes, the issue is that Lemmy does not even attempt to allow you to delete the image. There is no control for the user to do this. It's literally not possible.

Bad faith or not - Fascists are not accepted.

I mean, I essentially proposed to do this myself in private conversations with Dessalines but there was no willingness for a shared roadmap so it felt pretty pointless.

I think this is a pretty clear example of what I mean when I say that my work was never valued.

I did do work that was non-code - I labeled tons of issues, closed duplicates and those which had already been fixed.

I did try to write code contributions (here and here). One of which was rejected based on purely aesthetic preferences and whose follow-up PR was made dormant forever afterwards.

I tried to help and contribute in the ways I could - apparently this work is just "negativity and complaints".

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?

When you accept donations and grants for Lemmy's development and when you work with other people, I think it is normal and good to think about priorities in a more collaborative fashion. I cannot write rust code and many other people cannot do that. When their issues are left ignored, dismissed and repeatedly told that they have no input towards Lemmy's direction - people tend to not want to work with you because they feel that their work is pointless.

Why make an issue if developers admit to not reading them and not changing priorities? Why help towards a collective goal if everyone is just working on their own personal thing? As someone who is not good at writing code - it just feels like shit. My work felt entirely pointless because there was no way for my effort to amount to anything I wanted. Only people who can write code can actually influence the Lemmy project.

I understand feeling burned out but I tried contributing, I tried making things better and all I was met with was "I will not change my priorities" or "I do not think it is valuable to try to bring direction in the Lemmy project" or straight up dismissal or silence. If what you wanted all this time was for you to work on your own thing with no outside input, well, all I can say is you've done good work to make that happen.

I don't think there's anything left for me to tell you.

If you can point me to any comments like these, I'd love to remove them fwiw.

The codebase is remarkably not fun to work with according to everyone I've talked to. The language (rust) is also not common for web services so many have no experience with it. These things made people want to start from scratch.