Mmh, everyone is allowed to make stupid choices. I've told multiple people that drawers in the kitchen and in your wardrobe are awesome. That you don't need the Adobe suite to cut your 1.5 travel videos a year, let alone a $1200 phone... Stop using software when we have way better alternatives that are also easier to use. Many people don't listen. And they're entitled not to listen to me, it's their money, life and choices.
hendrik
joined 3 years ago
If I might ask: Who is leaving and what for? Mac? I've seen some developers buy the newer M2/M3 Macbooks. I think they're nice. But not nice enough to pay the price for one with a decent amount of RAM and storage myself.
No it doesn't. If you don't care and just want anything that runs Steam, don't bother. Just pick anything, it runs fine on most Linux distributions, Windows and probably Mac. You're fine with tossing a coin. I'd choose Linux in that case since it's cheaper.
A proper conversation would be like this:
What shall I use?
Depends... What do you want to do with your computer?
Play games with Steam.
Alright, then use XY. Wanna know more?
No.
Fine.
And I think there isn't a good solution to this. Ideally you would enable people to make good choices for themselves, know how to handle the tools they use...
Interesingly enough they come to me to fix their printer and antivirus anyways, and I have no idea of what I'm doing since I haven't used Windows in like 15 years, except for updating my GPS and filling out time-sheets for work and stuff like that. And in the meantime Microsoft switches things around every few years and bolts on a new interface onto their office suite and then moves it to the cloud. I don't think it would make any difference if my relatives were using Linux in the first place. They would still need to ask someone to fix their printer drivers and handle big version upgrades. And if it was me at the other end, it would be way more convenient to me to help them.
I stopped advertising Linux to people who didn't ask me to... I'll tell them I use different things on my computer and why this software is way better. If they pick up on that and want to try out of their own motivation, I'll gladly help.
Hehe, I think it's more the Windows people who spread that urban legend. While I completely agree with you, I didn't learn anything new here 😉
Is there a client that does that? Sorry I lost track of the different clients. But I'd like to try. I know Eternity (which I use on my Android phone) and the default webui can't do that. But I haven't tried all the options.
I don't quite get your wording. If you mean similar communities should be merged in all cases, I think I'd disagree. People might want to subscribe to a specific community. And it'd be complex to figure out moderation etc, since the root of the platform is a federated architecture and this somewhat goes against that. I think it'd be more a UI / client feature, tied into a cross-posting mechanism.
Thank you very much for explaining, and the whole AMA.
Concerning the "providing the project for free"... I think that's too simplistic. I mean users have expectations anyways. And you must have some motivation to maintain an open source project. Otherwise you wouldn't put it out there, engage with your users, fix their issues and incorporate their requests. Or you'd make that clear in the first line of the Readme as some people do.
I think open source is giving and taking. It's not about legal obligations (we usually waive every responsibility in every open source license.) But perhaps ethically. I as a user feel obligated to honor and respect your work and the time you've put in. And I shouldn't expect anything except for everyone abides by the license. But the devs aren't the only one putting in time and effort. Downstream are admins who run the actual instances. There might be an ethical obligation to not waste their time either. And there are moderators and users who make the platform become alive. They also offer their time for free and are part of the ecosystem, like the developers are. And ethically it is correct to treat people nice who put in a few hours to prepare a proper pull request and work towards the same goal as core developers.
And there are a few unique circumstances. This is a social network/link aggregator. And as such it relies to some degree on the network effect. It won't work without a certain amount of users and them being happy here. Lemmy devs seem (to me) invested in the project and not just coding something for money. So you want it to be successful and catering for users is part of the equation. Additionally the users of a social network trust the platform with their private data. You can't take legal responsibility for that. But if you accept users doing that, it's at least an ethical obligation to make good choices.
And the situation is: Since you have a few full-time developers... It's not a hobby project anymore. So it's a bit more complicated. And money might come with expectations. I personally differentiate between donations that are meant as a bounty, this money comes with obligations. And donations for the great work you've done so far. These come without.
I think you're doing a good job. I especially like that Lemmy development doesn't seem to be focused on growth above all. You could implement things differently and completely focus on not showing user-facing issues, in order to assure fast growth. Or write a Reddit clone like some people would like, including gamification, awards and stuff. But you don't seem to be interested in that. And that aligns well with what I like. I want a nice place to engage with people. I don't need another platform that is commercial and does things in order to be successful at the market.
I'm grateful. There are still bugs and a few more complicated annoyances I'd like to see being addressed. But I really enjoy spending some of my time here.
I hope those wants and needs aren't mutually exclusive. I think most open source projects do a good job in catering for both. I'm not involved in Lemmy development so I don't really know what's going on here. But I've sent one-off contribution to various projects, sometimes contributed single features or helped to sort something out. It always felt appreciated.
Sure, a drive-by commit every now and then and no responsibility is a completely different level than maintaining a (large) project and putting in that effort and dedication. I think a healthy open source project has both. Maintenance and the responsibility/decisions by a core team. And the community contributions make up by adding diversity, being close to what the user needs and adding manpower by a larger group of people, meaning the individual contributions might be smaller, but by many more people. Good communication between the devs and the community usually helps to get quality contributions.
Since I read a few comments here... What is your oppinion on more democratic platforms? I mean something like electing moderators. (Or dropping them in a democratic process.) Or voting for other things in a community.
(This is more a hypothetical question. I guess with the architecture as is, it can easily be exploited. And there is no way to implement this properly without severe changes and consequences.)
developers are notoriously bad at testing their own code, so I dont see what we can improve in this regard.
Sounds like software development... I mean automated tests help. But you're developing a distributed/federated platform. Unit tests won't do it. Maybe infrastructure that spins up a small fleet of instances and checks their ability to federate posts, delete comments and simulates interaction. That'd assure the most important aspects keep working. And I think there are tools for that available. But I get it. It's complicated, there are real-world instances with special (niche) setups, you're constrained, it has to be worth the effort and there are other important things to do.
Maybe just do your best not to break too many things and we (users) can complain and have another discussion only if it's a reoccurring problem. 😉
Sure, that's not the point at all. But wouldn't it be great if the knitting community (for example) on beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and feddit.de would be merged for me into one entity for a better browsing experience? And people wouldn't post the same breaking news 3 times and the cross-posts always showed up 3 times in my timeline? (And sometimes it's the same 30 people anyways that are subscribed to all of them so the cross-posting doesn't add anything?)
I currently don't have a good idea for a UI design for that. But I think a feature like that would add to federated platforms (if done right.) But nobody said you're not allowed or it's bad to open a dozen communities with the same name and topic on different servers. That's perfectly alright. In the real world we also sometimes discuss the same topic with different people at different locations.
and RMS. And we need a third person to get to the holy trinity. Greg Kroah-Hartman? Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie? Bjarne Stroustrup? We could choose Lennart Poettering, that'd certainly annoy a few people. Maybe we need some more apostles and additional people since all of that is based on the work of so many different people.