Announcements

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.

!reddit@lemmy.world started to ban people based on upvotes

!buyeuropean@feddit.uk movement has motivated people to look around for European alternatives to Reddit

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 @dullbananas@lemmy.ca 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.

Unified Push support would be great.

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.

You can load a different robots.txt in your nginx config, something like this:

location /robotx.txt {
    index /path/to/my/robots.txt;
}

Additionally 1.0 will change the "private instance" to work with federation enabled (see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5530). Then only logged-in users will see content, while AI scrapers wont see anything except the login page.

1. There is no specific maximum capacity, in theory it can scale indefinitely with horizontal scaling. Also see my reply here regarding scaling.
2. 0.19.10 already includes a fix to remove private messages when a user gets banned which should help a lot. There is an issue about disabling private messages by default, but Im not sure if that will be necessary. Also 1.0 will include a plugin system, so other devs and instance admins can write their own checks. That way spam waves can be fought in a more flexible way, without having to get a change merged into Lemmy and then waiting for a new release.

the apps! the app support is really great for Lemmy

Yes this is a major benefit of an open network. Lemmy is a very large project already, so it takes a lot of effort to implement new features, because they have to meet high standards for quality and performance and also work together with all the existing features. A project like Piefed is much smaller and can implement new features more quickly. This allows for more experimentation, and successful features can later be added to Lemmy.

Also users who are not happy with Lemmy for any reason can switch to a different platform while still interacting with those on Lemmy. So if Piefed and Mbin grow that is also a benefit for Lemmy.

• 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).

Communities that go against hegemonic capitalist/imperialist discourse will always get marginalised. Not being able to take down those communities easily like on Reddit is a huge win by itself for Lemmy. The software offers a valuable savehaven for e.g ex r/chapotraphouse, r/genzedong etc.

I get a chuckle out of the "Tankie Triad" talking point some people keep using. It sounds like a villain organization from a Saturday morning cartoon.

The anti-communist witch-hunters are extremely peeved that they can't remove our communities like they can on reddit. Overall it doesn't bother me because I don't work for them, and they can always go back to reddit where their views are already dominant.

Anyone trying to make the world a better place, will always be hated and hunted by some people; it's a fact of life, and the sooner we accept it, the better.

It seems some people simply need some target to hate on. Hopefully they will learn to accept different opinions when they arent being manipulated by for-profit social media anymore.

!librewolf@lemmy.ml

The best data we have on that is probably https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Not sure how to get the user retention from that, though

Having distinct communities is a feature, not a bug. If two cities set up their own lemmy instances, say lemmy.sao_luis.br, and lemmy.lagos.ng, they can each have a news community, without them overlapping.

Do a search for metroid, and subscribe to whichever ones you like.