Hello world!
We would like to start by saying thank you ❤, no really 🙏 THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!
Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard 📣 loud and clear📣.
So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We’ve added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.
We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that’s no fun!
Sooo…
The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.
Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.
Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.
We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!
=Sincerely,
Fedihosting Foundation
PS … also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘
EAT IT, CORPO
;)
edit: this is where you grumble “fkn punks”
There are definitely some federated servers that need to be removed from network
Lemmy.ml in particular is being used to push specific voices and banning anyone else
Banned apparently from asklemmy on there because one asshole interpreted me supporting Israel. When my comment exclusively was pointing out that the past the use made was low effort trolling meme in a thread complaining about trolling
So thank you [email protected] for directly evidencing that you, and your node are hateful little agenda pushing shits.
I want to love lemmy
But the federated model will fail if nodes like the .ml continue to online and assholes like this mod have zero accountability
I honestly don’t feel like because I’d these problems this site is any better than Reddit.
We also need the power to block a node completely from our feeds.(found it in filters)Also to block and ban entire nodes from our own communities as i don’t want any lemmy.ml users in my subKeep being salty little shits ml users. Your proving the point to the rest of the lemmy world
The biggest mod tool: manual ban entry for preventing certain users. Looking for a way to ban from a community an individual before they show up.
it would be nice to have the mod tools be easier to use and access
Comments like this are why that survey was created in the first place. Needing info on how to do things better.
The survey form eats more RAM the longer it’s open until it becomes unusable.
This is very sad to see… Instead of improving things from within, you are trying to split the community.
?
Is there an alternate survey site that could be used other than Microsoft? The site is pretty much impossible to see in dark browser mode as well (light grey text on white background).
Aside from that though, what is the difference between Lemmy and sublinks?
I’d like to know this as well. Perhaps better mod tools?
They say they plan for better mod tooling, but so far it’s still not released so it’s difficult to know how it will be different or better (and whether Lemmy will get better tooling by that point also).
Better mod tools, a non toxic development environment and a more common and well known programming language. A seperate team for UI/Design and API, so that the development goes faster and goes to multiple checks before it gets released. It is lemmy api compatible, so your iphone or android app will still work.
Sublinks has a roadmap too, to give everyone a glimpse where everything is and what is planned. And Sublinks developers welcome everyone that want to support the project, even non developers that want to input their ideas or personal experience.
Sublinks will add some moderation tools for mods and instance admins, to have a better control over their instance and to reduce spam, trolls or illegal content ( not pirated but that BAD porn stuff )
I want to start by saying I am extremely thankful for Ruud and the team and think that you did an amazing job with lemmy.world and I wish you success in the future.
That said, I am a monthly 30 dollar donator to Lemmy and I am not interested in Sublinks. I read through the threads and my take is that I think the motivation for the development of it goes against my personal politics and mischaracterizes nutomic and dessalines. While I appreciate the nature of open source to open up avenues for people to act as they think is best, I do not want to leave the Lemmy.
Ahead of a migration to Sublinks I hope there comes a cleaner way to move communities off lemmy.world. If I had known how the Fediverse worked 11 months ago I would have self hosted an instance and shared my communities that way as to not be defederated from people I want to be federated with. Additionally I think that having a single huge lemmy instance is not great for the architecture of the fediverse as a whole and even if there were no changes planned or being considered. I think that many instances hosting communities is preferable to having large ones like lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.
Again I totally get that this is provided free and as is and as such you are free to make the decision you think is best. Even though I am a difficult person, I very much appreciate you, your team and what you are trying to accomplish. Thank you.
Additionally I think that having a single huge lemmy instance is not great for the architecture of the fediverse as a whole and even if there were no changes planned or being considered. I think that many instances hosting communities is preferable to having large ones like lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.
May I ask why you didn’t move to another generalist instance? It’s a two clicks operation now to export and import settings from the settings menu
Because 10 months ago I chose to host c/veganhomecooks here. I do now use my own instance that I run out of Azure and plan to figure out a way to move my comm there but that is not easy to two click and move, I would lose all the subscribers and posts and it would not be cached on any other federated server. It is currently the largest and most active vegan focused community on the fediverse and do not want to leave it behind.
I see. Well, good luck with this. If that helps, I noticed that if you communicate openly with your community, explain a progressive plan, the transition can go quite smoothly (I moved communities from LW in the past).
Losing the posts sucks indeed, maybe we should bring this topic as its own thread to see if someone wants to work on a tool to allow export and import of posts.
I would have asked the same question, just do it earlier than later or then add a note, on where to find your new community if you want to move your community too. That is sadly a software limitation and would be irritating if a whole community can just swap instances.
Because I don’t want to make a lateral move to another instance hosted by someone like you and would prefer to do it myself. I work full time and it took me a few months to figure out how to deploy and maintain my instance before I put it to production.
edit: English is not my first language, I didn’t mean this to sound attacking. When I said someone like you I meant in general someone that I do not personally know and sometimes the way English speakers cloak language is not clear
Ahhh ok, i wish you good luck with your instance! If you need some tips or help i know a good guy on the LW team ;D .
I really hope there will be an option in Lemmy and Sublinks (and bin,mbin etc) to move communities between instances. But I think that’s not very easy. I agree that having a few large instances isn’t how the fediverse is meant to be. Ideally there would be a separate instance for each community.
It does sound very complicated. You’d probably need both instances to agree to the transfer somehow and then you’d need to transfer all the data (old posts from before the two servers federated for instance).
It would probably need to be built into ActivityPub if it should really work between different Fediverse services too.
It’s probably not worthwhile to transfer the data. I would say the subscriber base alone get’s you pretty fare.
Are you planning on sharing the results of the survey? I think the Lemmy folks would be interested in it too.
After mulling this post over for awhile:
- .world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other. This difference in approach implies intentions, if not outright actions with the illusion of user input.
- The prevalence of Linux users on this platform is common knowledge. So much so, it is a common complaint from users that feel excluded or uninterested in Linux. The use of Linux implies a distrust for Microsoft, and for the most part megacorporations. While the survey creator (sublinks) may receive anonymous data, Microsoft is absolutely correlating information that comes across their server and selling that data. In my opinion, this should have been an obvious thing most of the Linux community will not participate in, (myself included as one of the most active users and a mod). And it reflects poorly on the FOSS nature of sublinks. A FOSS survey system is needed badly for effective engagement.
As many of us in the social sciences background know...Please explain the intention of this statement. I don’t mean to be cynical, but to me, this implies I have been part of some science experiment of unknown intentions and implications; at the extreme end of possible meanings. I thought we were a FOSS community, many with a self hosting interest. A social sciences interest and background has entirely different motivations and raises concern for me.
Please, if you dont want to participate in the forms, be so kind and DONT participate in it. And dont bash others for beeing not an linux elitist that only touches FOSS stuff.
The last point is a “pun” a “joke” or in german a “witz”. If you dont understand it and only search tinfoil conspiracy theories than please not here.
If you are really that deep invested into alliens that want to learn about your species by spying onto you through non FOSS software, then please dont use the internet, go out, have friends and put your tinfoil where it belongs, as a wrapper for some cooking.
You answered none of that user’s questions at all and used your post to tear them down.
You know that in the FOSS space Microsoft does not have a good standing. Asking people on a FOSS based social media to give anonymous answers about another FOSS project through a Microsoft service is a bit of an oversight.
Sadly, we dont want to invest the ressources and money to have a platform that is secure, resistant to ddos or bot attacks and beeing really annonymous. Microsoft forms is possible the best choice, as otherwise we could relate your ip, ( in the web logs ) from lemmy and the ip that you have used for accessing the formular website we would have hosted. So that would be even less anonymous than with microsoft forms.
Yeah fine power tripping here nothing else to see folks . also they aren’t “foss elitist” you said the survey was “anonymous” and they explained how its not.
Huh, when do i see that i have banned him? is it again lemmy federation issue here? Like always?
It is anonymous for our POV, the other way around if we / sublinks hosted that form, we would have more data than with microsoft, for example we could corelate the ip you accessed lemmy.world and the form website we hosted, so we can identify directly what user voted that.
In that perspective it was a better choice to use microsoft forms, for ddos protection and anonymous from our side, as we dont get any personal information, not even the ip from your submited form.
.world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other.
Seems to me that’s because (with the possible exception of Lemmy vs. Kbin) this is the first time there have been two Fediverse services of the same type. (After writing that I fact-checked myself: it turns out there are two Twitter-equivalents in addition to Mastodon, Misskey and Pleroma, but they’re not noteworthy enough to have their own Wikipedia pages, so…)
Anyway, it seems to me (given that Sublinks is intended to be API-compatible with Lemmy) this is less of a “position them against each other” (as in competing for users in a walled-garden sort of way) issue and more of a “choose among several equivalent implementations the one you like best” issue.
.world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other. This difference in approach implies intentions, if not outright actions with the illusion of user input.
I see my name mentioned here, but I don’t understand the remark. Positioning fediverse services against each other? The team has posted this to get input to assist the Sublinks development team in getting moderation tools in their software. I think it’s good there’s many options in software to choose from. Lemmy, Kbin, Main, Piefed, Sublinks. I also run mastodon, but also similar platforms like firefish, sharkey, akkoma etc. Users can choose. Nothing is positioned against each other. They all work together as 1 large Fediverse. And, the more instances, the better. The fediverse ideally should exist of many instances instead of a few large ones. (Yes, I agree that having 1 big Lemmy server isn’t ideal. But that’s another discussion.)
Aaah, so the plan is to run sublinks on, say, sublinks.world and keep lemmy.world running with lemmy? Like you do with the mastodon alternatives?
I don’t know yet. I think that’s something we need to discuss with the team and get input from the users. (Yes, I did register sublinks.world :-) )
Hey Ruud. Overall the post comes across as if it has odd intentions. It does not clearly state the purpose of the post but it explains a bunch of what it is not. In corporate America and American politics we are constantly getting these kinds of messages. It almost always means everything that is addressed in the message is about to happen. The person that wrote the information is trying to tell the reader how to think instead of providing information and allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.
You have mentioned your other servers in the fediverse in the past, and it was always in this type of informative, “draw your own conclusions” type of post. I appreciate that, and can respect it.
The proper way to introduce sublinks would be in a similar vain, to simply state that it exists and what its merits are versus Lemmy. If change may be coming to Lemmy.world, simply explain the reasoning behind those decisions. It is great if you can involve the community, but the involvement should be following the principals and alignment of the community to engage with them. Microsoft as a service for providing my personal details is not aligned with my values. Perhaps if I lived in the EU I would feel differently, but in the USA I have little choice but to avoid these companies entirely.
A survey is often a tool used to gauge how to administer a change that will be unpopular, and this usually means the change in direction addressed in the survey has already been decided.
My concern could be completely misplaced. I have not punched a hole in my firewall for Microsoft or agreed to their terms of service to see the content of the survey. The only information I have is what is posted here.
My concern has nothing to do with the obvious joke. I am concerned that this post does not describe its purpose clearly, it implies major changes are coming, and it promotes feedback in a way that does not align with my principals as a very active user here. On a separate note, the comment about sociology is curious for its unsolicited randomness. Do you run any scientific experiments in the background or allow other to do so?
I default to a skeptical line of questioning , but I am not trying to be negative or accusatory. It is mostly a desire to learn and understand what is happening under the surface.
The title and starting was so unlike .world that i for a sec doubted if i was reading instances wrong but oh well seems like a heading to lure you in and bam you with a completely different things.
Lol says they are not corpo and anonymously collecting and then shows microsoft forum down your throat . Also the hello fellow kids type of PS was icing on the cake for me . Thanks for the laugh cheers.
Now be a good little powertrippy mode and remove it as we all know you like to show how strong and big you are by using the mod tools lemmy doesn’t 'have" . Also how’s suckin up to threads going nowadays ? Lololol
I think you have lost few braincells by writing those sentences.
From our perspective it is more anonymous than having it self hosted. As we could corelate users IPs of lemmy and visitors of the form.
We dont want to get ddosed by some script kiddies too. Because they just dont like LW or so.
And yes, the mod tools are really lacking in many places.
Your reply style here really makes me question how “non-toxic” the development environment will really be.
I am just return the favor. If you give a non toxic/troll comment i would have responded otherwise.
I am sorry if you are feeling attacked.
I’m not the person you replied to.
But your comments are frequently not constructive. At all. That concerns me.
The person i replied to wasnt constructive too? So what is your point?
If it is a point that “microsoft bad!!!”, then yeah thats a valid point. But WHAT is an alternative to that? That is secure, ddos protected and doesnt cost us more than 0$. Additionally who will set it up for one survey? And again, self hosted != more privacy. We see your ip there and on lemmy, so we could theoretically correlate your ip and boom we have your lemmy account, on microsoft forms we dont that.
If you are really concerned that microsoft is doing shady stuff with your correlated answer, then dont use it as simple as that and dont blame someone that is doing this in their free time and for no money.
But WHAT is an alternative to that?
Cryptpad has forms. There’s also Framaforms though I can’t say how well it works or whether it would suit your needs.
Ok i will give those alternatives to the sublinks team.
A lot of people here seem to think that Java code is awful and disgusting and no projects should ever use it. The thing about popular languages is that more code existing in a language inevitably means a lot of it ends up being bad. The same thing will likely happen to rust as it gets popular, but that isn’t exactly a problem. It’s possible to have a well-maintained Java codebase.
Debate between functionality of the actual programming languages at this point is pretty meaningless, if they have good development standards then a Java program could end up just as well maintained as rust. Any time saved by compiler enforcement of specific standards (like no using null) would be lost by the fact that the devs don’t know rust tooling. You could just have a requirement in PRs that null isn’t used. Both Java and Rust have usable frameworks for REST API development, so using one or the other comes down to familiarity.
The idea that programming languages make code suddenly good or bad is pretty silly. Different languages have different language-level guarantees which can help produce good or working code. That being said, it’s not like it’s impossible to write good Java code, just like it’s not impossible to write bad rust code. Most people seem to be conflating guaranteed functionality and safety with maintainability, stability, and readability. Rust is still a new language, so although it’s great, Java will probably be the better choice for the latter 3 qualities.
That being said, something like Kotlin would probably have been a better starting point since it can interact with Java (and works like Java in most cases) but also has some nice improvements like stricter null checking (Kotlin nulls are treated similarly to rust’s
Option<T>, it’s just described asT?instead and the syntax is generally a lot more concise). There’s also the benefit of being able to write some code in Kotlin and some in Java since they are mostly cross-compatible.The idea that programming languages make code suddenly good or bad is pretty silly.
I generally agree, you can write good and bad code in any language.
However, I also think it is equally naive to think that the tool you use has no influence on the end result. It does have an influence. In my experience, exception-based error handling like that used by Java and many other older languages just doesn’t work that well. It’s too easy to forget to catch them and make mistakes. And there’s a host of other stuff that Rust improves on.
This really shouldn’t be surprising. Rust is a newer language, of course it would try to improve the status quo with the experience we’ve gained from previous languages like Java. It even went and invented whole new concepts like ownership and the borrow checker to make it work. I imagine that future languages will have similar concepts, just like many languages today have garbage collectors or other common functionality.
So yes, programming language choice is a tenuous thing… But I don’t think it’s correct to say it doesn’t matter.
Also if we do entertain the notion that it doesn’t matter, the reasoning for Sublinks get even weirder, as the argument that Java is a better choice falls out the window.
Sorry for being unclear, I wasn’t trying to say language doesn’t make a difference (e.g. static vs. dynamic typing would make a big difference). I also personally like the error handling of rust a lot more, even if it does take a bit getting used to when my education has mostly been in languages with Java-style exception handling.
I mostly meant that the language-level performance and features aren’t necessarily holding the codebase back in a debate between Java and Rust for a lemmy-like REST API. As long as the developers are aware of the pitfalls of Java (null, mutation, error-handling, etc.), it’s possible to have good code.
I just think that from a maintainability standpoint, a Java-style codebase is much easier for most people to read, understand, and maintain because that’s what most people are familiar with. Especially when many of the developers are volunteer contributors, that type of thing could make a big difference.
The main problem with Rust is that it’s only starting to get adoption now, it isn’t taught in most education curriculums, and it’s industry use is pretty small at the moment. It’s kind of a catch-22, because rust adoption won’t increase unless large projects like lemmy exist. But that’s also why I think having more options is also fine. Sublinks might get more developers short term because of its language, but that also doesn’t mean it’ll completely replace Lemmy. Both projects can exist at the same time, and hopefully benefit from each other’s development.
That’s fair. I do think Rust has a lot more hype online and in the open source space these days though, so I don’t buy that Java would be easier to get more contributors for. We’ve yet to see that at least.
I’m excited to see more and more activity pub compatible software. These projects are created and maintained by just a few people and could stop being maintained at any point. Many of these platforms lack features that make moderation a reasonable task among other less desirable quirks. It’s one of the reasons I decided against hosting my own instance.
I think it is a shame that the creators of these projects lead with stating which programming language and methodology they’re using. IT DOES NOT MATTER. This is a major sticking point for the pedants. Just tell us what it does, leave the technical aspects of the project in the docs for the people that it actually matters to.
The mix of microblogging and threaded posts should be interesting. Kbin has both, but they are not intermingled. I personally don’t use microblogging, but I do see screenshots of posts on here, which is basically the same thing I suppose.
As far as complaining about fracturing of the userbase, well, this is an issue across the Internet. There’s Facebook groups, Reddit, message boards, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and too many other platforms to list, all fracturing topic enthusiasts and competing for users. I believe that more projects will allow the fediverse to contribute to grow and eventually mature into something a lot of people will use. More projects and forks means more ways to try new ideas and improvement without a single project owner preventing growth of the entire ecosystem.
That’s the whole thing. It’s not about the software per say, it’s about the users and the whole concept of a federated internet. We all really believe in bringing back the best of the old internet.
While I’d like to contribute to the survey, I’m not comfortable using a Microsoft form in addition to providing uniquely identifying info
I’m still willing to contribute in other ways tho🤗
I setup https://github.com/deck9/input on polls.sublinks.org. We’ll use this next time.
You can dm @[email protected] any of your thoughts and ideas. Or just put your ideas into [email protected] and create a public discussion or even if you techie enough just create an issue on github https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks-api and jgrim and the team will discuss about it.
Thanks for your help
Is there a better form service to be used? We used it because it comes free with our email.
searching online a couple I’ve found:
- NextCloud Forms
- AGPL-3.0
- OhMyForm
- AGPL-3.0
- LimeSurvey
- GPL-2.0
I was hoping not to have to host it myself. I won’t need it often. I was mostly curious about a Saas. Thanks though!
- NextCloud Forms
thanks to instance-wide mod efforts. take the drudgery out of chasing most spammy types. out here getting fat.
The mod team here works very hard to filter spam out, it’s actually really bad if you don’t have automation and a large team.
