In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.
We'd also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What's something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?
Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @dessalines and @nutomic, turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We'd like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.
We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides @dessalines and @nutomic, other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:
Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.
From my perspective we need better Mod and Admin tools. Forum software has a lot of them but Lemmy is lacking in this department.
The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities. You'll often get reports of posts not being appropriate for a community but there is no way to actually move it.
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.
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.
The upcoming combined modlog has this, as well as other more detailed filters.
You can read through these issues related to modmail, but the short version is that it's way out of scope for us, and not something we have time to do. Replicating private group chats is better done by other services like matrix, or using a shared email inbox.
I see, thank you for the links
Standard Web forum tools include:
This post makes some good points about reports federating (being worked on, I believe) but also about the lack of what we'll call a "moderation panel" where you can access tools for the community, like seeing a list of banned users and being able to add to it there or unban someone.
There are other "nice to have" tools like post approval
I am curious to see what moderation tools PieFed, has and NodeBB now they are federated, but the documentation is skimpy on that front.
You can read over the discussion here, but we will never allow mods or admins to act as / impersonate users, or edit their content.
We also can't rewrite history in the fediverse (unlike a forum) so "moving" a post would also entail deleting and recreating content other people made.
These ones sound really strange, but its similar, I don't want mods to be able to rewrite user history or move it.
We don't store IPs so that'd be impossible.
I really don't get this. Why is editing user content with slur_filter or modifying URLs accepted but allowing mods/admins to change the NSFW toggle isn't? It also ignores that savvy-enough admins can edit user content with SQL queries.
I think slur filters, tracking param removals, and local link rewriting are acceptable, because (with the exception of the slur filter) they're non-moderation actions, and also applied uniformly regardless of who made them.
That's unavoidable of course, anyone with DB access ultimately can edit things. But if people catch on, I doubt your server would gain many users or last that long. Most importantly, we shouldn't allow that to happen via the API.
You're free to start a "Should mods be able to edit user's data?" discussion, but I doubt it would get much support, especially from reddit allowing this and it souring everyone to it.
My view is that not adding this to the API will only encourage admins who want this to do it through less transparent means, like injecting fake activities into the
sent_activitytable. Most admins are reasonable people, and have good relations with their users, so if admins explained themselves then I think most users would be pretty accepting.I mean there's been like 3 or 4 GitHub issues opened about this, so there's clearly some demand for it. Should I make a post in !lemmy@lemmy.ml? So users not on GitHub can chime in.
Sure, and be sure to link that closed github issue.
There was some discussion of this not long ago: https://feddit.uk/post/24412286
@nutomic@lemmy.ml linked this GitHub issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2345
It shouldn't be too difficult. A move is essentially a cross-post but it keeps the OP as the poster (rather than the cross-poster). You'd then want to lock the original post, and either hide it or add a message directing people to the new post. That's all current forum software does.
The main question is how this can work in terms of federation. When creating a new post it directly references the community url. If the user and community are on different instances then the community instance cannot rewrite the post to reference a different community. So it would have to tell the post creator to (automatically) resubmit the post to the new community. Same for all comments, they would have to be recreated by the respective author's instance in the new post. Seems quite complex to implement.