This generally goes against security best practices as it can be used for attempted user enumeration. A better version would be “we’ll send you an email with your account status if this user exists” but obviously that results in a fair amount more complexity (and cost) to implement

Youre right, I also noticed some other problems while testing registrations:

• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5547
• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5548#issue-2949361836

For the email validation it could also make sense to send out another email saying “your email has been validated”, so its not only shown on the website.

I’d need more detail here. If registration emails aren’t being sent out correctly, we need to handle that.

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.

Chilling in the morning before I start my day job.

We have gone back and forth a few times on how deleted content is returned by the API, its very tricky to get right.

!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

Thought you meant pre-2023 by old user

Thx! Really appreciate it, and I’m glad someone thinks its worthwhile work we’re doing.

Thanks so much for doing your part to make Lemmy an active place. That’s the main thing that sets us free.

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.

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 overall amazing, but not perfect. Waiting for the Rust code to compile is sometimes very annoying, but I wouldn’t want to use a different language. And we had to implement somewhat complicated things that existing Rust libraries did not do. For example, I made the “i_love_jesus” library so Lemmy could have cursor pagination that uses indexes well and allows bringing back the “back” button, we have a few custom QueryFragment impls because of diesel’s limitations, and we have a custom migration runner to do fancy stuff (see crates/db_schema/src/schema_setup.rs).

Multispam is one of the things that is genuinely a threat to Lemmy’s usability. If you follow certain topics, you start seeing 2-5 copies of every post. It’s a genuine spam problem and “just block” or “just scroll” is as much of a non solution as it is with other spam.

it’s still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the “proper” path.

https://phtn.app/signup gives a prepopulated list

show up in people’s “all” feeds multiple times.

Which interface do you use? Crossposts only show up once on the default UI

A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

You can already export and import your subscriptions between instances (account settings - import/export)

Posts and comments can’t be migrated, but Mastodon doesn’t allow it either.

Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export

Yeah, it’s not hard to select a server and it’s a “good thing to do”, but it’s still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the “proper” path.

We could add a “fast join” button to the signup dialog on join-lemmy.org , where it takes you to a random instance’s signup page.

Overall though, we should ignore the “advice” from reddit that tells us that people are too stupid to sign up for anything now. People did this for every forum and every other site all until ~2005 when US tech gobbled up most services, and ppl continue to show us that yes, they do know how to type in a username, password, and email to sign up for something.

Duplicate post aggregation. The nature of federation will always make it make sense to have duplicate communities, but this will also make posts with the same links, same images, same videos, etc show up in people’s “all” feeds multiple times.

In lemmy-ui we have a post-deduplicator for feeds, but unfortunately not a lot of other apps (including jerboa, that’s my bad) have added something similar.

A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

Settings export already exists. Copying historical content and rewriting history isn’t possible in a federated system, but we do have an open issue for data export.

3. A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

This would be great… also even if the “restore” part were not possible (yet?) I feel offering a way to extract your data might even be a requirement for a server to be fully GDPR compliant (though I could be wrong on that, IANAL), reddit does allow you to download your data after all.

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.

• 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).

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.

I’ve previously worked in anti-scraping. There is a negative 0% chance the Lemmy devs have the resources to effectively do this without tanking the server for everyone else.

Its hard to say because these things always take longer than expected. Now we are finally getting to the point where all the breaking database and api changes are almost finished. After that it will take some months to update lemmy-ui for all the backend changes and new features, and the same for all other apps. Then a testing period to fix all the problems that come up. So maybe around autumn for the final release, although lemmy.ml and some other instances may upgrade some months before already.

With the rate ppl are adding issues (and we’re finding more), is sometimes feels like it keeps getting farther away than nearer, but we’ll get there in some months.

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

I believe they are still active. User numbers have been stable for a long time, and there are some names that I recognize from the very early days 5 years ago.

Every server and community has monthly active users stats. Best way to see them would be a tool like this that keeps track of history: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

We don’t do any tracking of user retention, but overall lemmy has been fairly steady at ~50k users for a year now.

but what’s happening to older users? Are they still active?

There are certainly names still around who I remember from my first year on the site. Like Blaze said, I’m also not sure how to get some concrete numbers.

I’ve been here for almost two years and don’t think I can go back to anything else. I like the freedom of information that this idea brought to us.

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.

Consolidation isn’t always a good thing, communities on different instances will have different styles and trends, and that’s a good thing. The benefit of federated social media is just as much in local instances as it is in federation, unique niches are going to have unique comments even if the post is the exact same.

Being able to view “all” communities with the same name across all instances would be so nice.

!fedigrow@lemm.ee has several examples of consolidation

this post provides a good overview of this issue and possible solution. https://popcar.bearblog.dev/lemmy-needs-to-fix-its-community-separation-problem/

This should be among the first priorities. It would really help kick things off. Not only niche communities, but bigger ones as well. They represent topics of interest. I think I’ve seen a thing like macro community in one of the clients?! Could that be it?

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.

What is your opinion on Bluesky being more popular than Mastodone because it is easier for most?

It shows only that like most open source tools, US media institutes a general conspiracy of silence about platforms like the fediverse, and mastodon (or lemmy). Not because they’re not user-friendly enough, but because ultimately it’s not something the US can control. Bluesky is really just a rebranded twitter, founded by the same people, but with owners more friendly to the US democratic party, as opposed to musk who is more friendly to republicans. Both are US corporations subject to its laws and beholden to push pro-US foreign policy lines.

I hope most of the world will choose to escape all these monopolistic US-controlled platforms, and for countries to fund open source, and encourage their own citizens to use community-run alternatives.

Lemmy won’t become bluesky, because we’re a community/topic-focused link aggregator, not a person-focused microblogging platform.