It’ll likely continue to happen organically: niche communities on reddit will keep getting fed up with the changes, and migrate to lemmy.

I don’t know if we’ll ever reach a tipping point, because redditors have shown that there’s almost nothing they won’t tolerate, but its also likely they still don’t know that alternatives exist. There’s a general conspiracy of silence about most fediverse software. Even with all this recent reddit drama, not a single article bothered to mention lemmy or other alternatives. The info is out there, but interested people have to go out of their way to find it.

We’ve also added a scaled sort to boost posts from smaller / less active communities, so that should help some with discovery. It’d also be nice for instances to use the sidebar, pinned posts, or site taglines to highlight smaller communities to help them grow.

This is the huge disconnect between what the fediverse is and what the users actually want.

Users want the convenience of a single entity that floats around the different instances. They want to interact with community A on instance B and also commini X on instance Y.

But most clients deal with it by letting you log in with multiple users on multiple instances

I would reply directly to that post, but it looks like the admin (who is also the Tesseract dev) has completely blocked federation with lemmy.ml by IP block or useragent block. So Im going to respond here to his complaints:

Lemmy didnt have a single breaking change since version 0.19 which was released 1 year and 4 months ago. And the breaking changes in that version were quite minor. Before that was 0.18, 1 year and 6 months earlier. That version only removed websockets, so most third-party app devs who used the HTTP API didnt notice any difference. Meaning the API has been almost unchanged for over three years which is quite long for a project that hasnt reached a stable version yet. 1.0 includes all the breaking changes that were held back over the years, so that we dont need any more breaking changes for a long time.

That said it would be great if we could keep backwards compatibility with the existing API in Lemmy 1.0. Problem is with all the major changes we are doing now, it would take a huge amount of work to implement this kind of backwards compatibility. If we had twice as many fulltime developers working on Lemmy this would be doable, but our resources are very limited so we have to make some compromises.

Afaik Bluesky is a for-profit company with millions in budget and probably a dozen or more fulltime employees. Of course they have much more resources to polish the new user experience, and also have an actual marketing budget. Plus in practice its completely centralized, they dont need to worry about all the difficulties that federation brings. Its only natural that they are more successful than Mastodon in the short term. But sooner or later they will also have problems when the Bluesky admins make decisions that the community doesnt like, and then there may be another migration wave to the Fediverse.

For the same reasons mentioned above, Lemmy cant become as easy as Bluesky. But the more contributors and donors we have, the closer we can get.

Anyone that wants to scrape Lemmy would have an easier time setting up their own server, federating with everyone, and reading straight from their DB. No web scraping required. Though, web scraping defenses would be useful against general web scrapers/crawlers.

A bit tired because my whole family is half sick. Luckily the kids are still okay to go to school.

Otherwise Im excited for this AMA, because I rarely have such direct conversations with users about Lemmy. The discussions on Github are usually quite technical.

Not bad, the swiss chard and spinach I planted recently are sprouting, so that’s got me excited.

Which tools specifically? I ask because this is a common complaint, but 99% of the time its something we already have, that most ppl are unaware of.

The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities.

Lemmy like all federated services, can’t rewrite history, but you can already cross-post (although it would be the mod cross-posting, as we don’t let mods alter user data except to remove it). It would just take someone adding that as an issue to lemmy-ui and working on it.

2nding @nutomic, that I’m really happy with the stack.

The one that seems really magical to me, is diesel. With it we get a compile-time-checked database, that’s tightly integrated to the rust objects / code.

Every single join, select, insert, etc is checked before lemmy is even run, and it eliminates a whole category of errors resulting from mismaps.

Its made adding columns, and changing our data structures so much less error-prone than when I lived in the java-world.

Whenever we find that we’d want to do things differently, we usually do a refactor ASAP so as not to keep rolling spaghetti code. We’ve had to do this many times for the federation and DB code, and even have 2 major refactors that also add features ongoing. But luckily we’ve been able to stay in the rust eco-system for that.

As for UI, leptos didn’t exist when I built lemmy-ui, so I went with a fast react-like alternative, inferno. Its showing its age now, so @sleepless1917 is working on lemmy-ui-leptos, which hopefully will supercede lemmy-ui.

The stack is great, I wouldnt want to change anything. Postgres is very mature and performant, with a high focus on correctness. It can sometimes be difficult to optimize queries, but there are wizards like @[email protected] who know how to do that. Anyway there is no better alternative that I know of. Rust is also great, just like Postgres it is very performant and has a focus on correctness. Unlike most programming languages it is almost impossible to get any runtime crashes, which is very valuable for a webservice.

The high performance means that less hardware is required to host a given number of users, compared to something like NodeJS or PHP. For example when kbin.social was popular, I remember it had to run on multiple beefy servers. Meanwhile lemmy.ml is still running on a single dedicated server, with much more active users. Or Mastodon having to handle incoming federation activities in background tasks which makes the code more complicated, while Lemmy can process them directly in the HTTP handler.

Nevertheless, scaling for more users always has its surprises. I remember very early in development, Lemmy wasnt able to handle more than a dozen requests per second. Turns out we only used a single database connection instead of a connection pool, so each db query was running after that last one was finished, which of course is very slow. It seems obvious in retrospect, but you never notice this problem until there are a dozen or so users active at the same time.

With the Reddit migration two years ago a lot of performance problems came up, as active users on Lemmy suddenly grew around 70 times. You can see some of that in the 0.18.x release announcements. One part of the solution was to add missing database indexes. Another was to remove websocket support, which was keeping a connection open for each user. That works fine with 100 users, but completely breaks down with 1000 or more.

After all there is nothing I would do different really. It would have been good to know about these scaling problems earlier, but thats impossible. In fact for my project Ibis (federated wiki) Im using the exact same architecture as Lemmy.

[email protected]

There’s a KDE one, if I’m not mistaken

• Tags are work in progress
• Not exactly sure what you mean by “direct messages outside Lemmy”, but in version 1.0 they will be compatible with Mastodon and other platforms
• Its a known problem with Mastodon because it only renders Note objects properly, which are meant for short texts less than a paragraph. Lemmy uses Page which is meant for longer text. Some platforms like Wordpress (iirc) have an option to federate even long posts as Note so that it gets rendered fully in Mastodon, but that seems like a bad idea to me. In the end its up to Mastodon how to render different types of federated content on their frontend, so it needs to be fixed by them. Here is an entire discussion about this by developers of different Fediverse platforms (including a Mastodon dev).

Lemmy is not for microblogging, so I dont think hashtags make sense.