- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@kbin.social
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@kbin.social
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
Highlighting the recent report of users and admins being unable to delete images, and how Trust & Safety tooling is currently lacking.
You’re being dense, the reason is devs get burned out and you’re asking them to do work for free.
The reason that an open source developer might experience burnout are myriad, but can include:
As someone who has done Community Management for an open source, decentralized communication platform (Diaspora), I am familiar with all of these things. This shit is hard, and I am not denying that Lemmy devs have done a lot of good work.
The problem is actually much simpler than you’re making it out to be. For a social platform, which depends on interconnected self-hosted communities to succeed, you absolutely have to build in the tools and utilities necessary to deal with all the crazy shit that comes with the territory. Ignoring this causes a cascade of problems that gradually get worse the longer they remain unaddressed.
The devs are surviving on crowdfunding and grants, and doing the best they can with that. That’s commendable! They probably need more of both to have their needs fully covered. But don’t get it twisted: receiving proceeds for your work is not the same thing as working for free.
Accepting donations is not the same as entering into a contract agreement where the person giving a few bucks per month entitles them to dictate how the work should be done. If people want to enter in a relationship where they get exactly what they want for the money they are giving, then they will be better off by going to a commercial provider, so that the nature of the transaction is explicit and mutually agreed.
About the grants: AFAIK they got the grant to make federation work, which was completed to everyone’s satisfaction. If they had received a big grant from NLNet, got the money but didn’t deliver on what they promised on the application, then you could argue that they did not hold their end of the bargain. But do you it’s fair that because they got money from one part of the work that they should be responsible for all subsequent deliveries?
I’m really trying to understand where you are coming from with this. You mentioned your work on Diaspora, and I don’t know how much you were involved on it, but I do feel that one of the things that doomed Diaspora was that the founders mistook the attention and money they got in 2010 as an indication that they were all alone responsible in “saving us from Facebook”. If Ilya had learned to say “it’s not my responsibility to build everything to win a fight against a multi-billion corporation”, perhaps he would still be around.
With respect, this is a framing issue and depends on your point of view. Does a donation mean someone contracted you to do something specifically? Not really. But, will mismanagement of expectations and hostility convince someone to stop donating to a project? You’d better believe it. If you’re working full-time on a project, donations are your lifeblood. They literally put food on your table. You literally can’t afford to disregard the needs of users and admins. But of course, you are at discretion to decide what those needs actually are, and how critical they are. Nevertheless, the relationship is more transactional than it appears to be.
Overall, I think their grant from NLNet was a good thing, and I think they did good work on that. As long as their work was in scope of the grant, I don’t see a problem with that.
Community Manager, circa 2011 to 2013. I was basically an air traffic controller for GitHub issues, acted as a developer liaison, served as a face of the project to the community, and engaged on the network every single day to get a pulse on what was going on. A lot of it involved smoothing things over with people who were upset about things, resolving conflicts, drumming up volunteer coders, and indicating to core team what varying needs were across the user and developer communities. I lived and breathed it every day.
This is somewhat inaccurate, and here’s why: Diaspora never advertised itself as an Anti-Facebook. They were building a federated network that focused on user freedom, and it was a combination of timing and insanely good luck that their Kickstarter campaign picked up as much as it did. The whole “we’re going to save you from Facebook” thing was an invention of the media to get people to click headlines. What really doomed Diaspora was that the core team wanted to be a startup, the community wanted it to be a project, and getting the company into yCombinator had the team focus on things further and further away from their original goals.
This is where we fundamentally disagree. This is only true if the developers puts the project above themselves, which is the wrong attitude on multiple levels. Developer owe nothing to those donating, they owe nothing to the project and they should never be compelled to accept anything because other people are putting a metaphorical gun to their heads.
And like I said before, even successful projects are barely getting by with donations they are getting. Instead of putting themselves on some imaginary treadmill (one more feature, and we will get people to like us!) it is healthier for everyone if we dropped the pretense that “community is enough” and established beforehand what all parties want to get in order to get something done.
So, here’s the thing: these guys are working full-time on the project. Their only source of income, grants aside, are donations via fundraising. Effectively, they are putting the project above themselves.
The common model for this nowadays is the Patreon / OpenCollective / LiberaPay, where donations are usually given continuously over an indefinite period. It’s closer in form to crowdfunding than it is traditional institutional donations.
This is going to sound shitty: just as the expectation is set that no one should make demands of work done for free, so too is the expectation that development work technically isn’t owed a single penny. Any donor can stop giving, for any reason, at any time.
If I as a donor feel my needs aren’t being met, I can stop donating. As a collective action, a bunch of dissatisfied supporters can do the same all at once.
I’m not saying either side should threaten each other. But let’s not pretend that this is some hoity-toity Utopian model where donors selflessly hand over money with no expectations, and the developer just works on whatever. If your livelihood depends on it, if you can’t put bread on your table without it, then you’ve got to keep your backers happy.
No. They are working on something according to their own terms and their own value scales. They are giving a clear indication of what they are willing to do for the miser amount of money they are getting, and are telling quite clearly what they do not value highly enough to justify spending their time on it.
They would be sacrificing themselves only if they bent over and worked on something they already said they don’t want just because other people see value in the work they already done and want them to keep pushing out the missing functionality.
It sounds shitty because it is shitty. The donation-based model is insufficient and unsustainable. What you are describing is the main reason that I’d rather shut down any of the communick instances over turning to “donation-based” access. At the same time, the reason that I have managed to keep things running (even if not profitable) is that by refusing to play this game I don’t put myself in an unsustainable situation.
The surprising thing is to see how even people who have been involved in the space for so long continue to advocate for the donation-based model. Perhaps it would help everyone if we accepted reality and started telling people that it is not okay to push people to work for free? That donations are only a way to show support for what people are doing and do not entitled them to make demands of any kind? Thay if you want something done according to your exact preference and expectations you need to enter a proper contract where both parties agree to the terms?
This is why I was a bit frustrated with your last blog post. You acknowledge that there is a problem with FOSS development, but instead of trying to elaborate on a alternative model, it went down the route of victim-blaming the FOSS developers who you think should swallow the opportunity cost and keeping cranking out code. This is not healthy at all.
Why? If your argument were “users of the system need to have these type of tools ancillary utilities to be able to use the core product”, I certainly agree. What I am failing to understand why do you think that this must be the responsibility of the developers of the core product.
What is so bad about the developers delegating this away?
Developmental drift and code rot. Both parties can try their best to keep up with changes and adjustments, but an external resource is always going to lag behind of core. This isn’t necessarily bad, but having it in core at least kind of ensures that future development and updates have to take into account how those things are affected.
Couple of reasons:
It’s core. Super crucial parts of the platform should, ostensibly, be done by the core development team, who can ensure they have someone to work on it as needed. If you delegate the development of a core feature to someone who isn’t part of the core team, there is always a possibility that said person will fall off the development wagon, and the feature either languishes, or core team is stuck having to babysit a part neither of them directly worked on.
The people building the platform need to have a significant understanding / frame of reference for these parts and how they work. When doing future feature development, they need to be keenly aware of which features touch which fixtures.
Trying to delegate this kind of thing to volunteers is just such a mixed bag in terms of Quality Assurance that I cannot recommend it. You might get something great! But regardless, you’re delegating to someone who is a relative stranger, who may have done things in a hacky way that will break something else later on, or may have not even bothered with code or documentation. Worse yet: trying to reconcile a volunteer’s PR with upstream is not always a cakewalk, and this can drag on and on and on. I’ve literally seen projects with PRs open that sat in that state gradually getting adjusted, tweaked, and rebased by various volunteers who came and went, that are still open to this day.
I assume you missed all the microservices hype cycle of 2015? The whole idea was to isolate the dev teams into their core functionalities and to only let them talk through specific APIs.
Speaking as someone with 20 years of software development experience and from the work on Fediverser: all I need from the Lemmy devs is in the API that already exists. None of the functionality related to content moderation and instance administration needs to be implemented in Rust and frankly trying to tie it with the core code would make development slower.
Can you trust me on this one? This is not about the Lemmy devs being dicks or not wanting to do this work, this is me saying that they are right when they say that someone else could take care of this instead.
I’d love it if the API that exists was more reliable… It’s getting better, but the amount of basic features that didn’t work (usually without specific combinations of params or unknown ranges, but sometimes not at all) is pretty crippling. (If there’s a central place of discussion, I’d love to hear about it…I don’t speak rust or flutter, but I’ve had to muddle through source several times)
I’ve never done anything as a mod so I have no idea what kind of tools they need, but I noticed enough basic parts to build all sorts of things.
There’s definitely no reason to build it into the core though… Why put it on the machine busy serving everyone? You could do stuff so much cooler if you offload it… Like you could track mod actions against users/communities/servers, give a sample of random posts across their vote distribution, show the top few communities they get down voted… All things psychotic to even consider in the core right now, but a reasonable project for a separate system
And since you seem like you’d get it, I want to share a win I made today. I’ve got a lemmy app I want to mix feeds (including between accounts and servers) to make a unified feed algorithm on your device. I also want it to support kbin, and maybe more… I took a couple cracks at it and charted out several designs, but I was getting too deep into abstraction.
Today, I finished working on a ridiculously generic abstraction layer - it handles not only tracking pagination, buffering, and preprocessing, it also enumerates all of the options in the Lemmy sdk so I can auto magically build most of the controls when I update. It also disambiguates resources (and actors) across instances and could describe valid actions you can take on it (I think that might be too far, so I’m resisting the urge… This time)
Everything is done through the account level, everything knows where it came from and can call the API by passing itself to its account to be worked on. It’s also neatly serializable, you just have to write one function to pull the next page, and the rest is just an absurd amount of generics
Now, if I can figure out how to translate all that into a usable UI, I’ll be getting somewhere…
I just had to share that with someone who can appreciate crazy data flow, it’s been in the back of my head for months and today (after pulling my hair out for an hour and realizing I was forgetting to actually pass the posts to the UI) it worked beautifully
I like to think of it like this - many hands makes for a very stable project. Stable as in reliable, but also stable as in resistant to change.
Everyone is going to pull in a different direction, and it kind of averages out and slows things down.
Right now, lemmy is extremely immature. It’s amazing how well it’s held up really. There’s a lot to go to get to a solid baseline - just enough to keep
If everyone dogpiled it, someone could easily solve the image problem. Granted, that might block someone else working on the database, and changes to improve or extend federation would likely be set back as they step on each other’s toes.
We could still probably quickly get popular features quickly… For example, one person could get more useful mastodon and kbin federation going in a reasonable period of time. But then, when the core team goes in to overhaul the database or the API, now they need to make sure they don’t break it - and the person who did those changes won’t have the same vision as the core team, and now you have to either refactor the whole thing or work around it until it’s causing too many problems
Certain things can be spun off more easily than others - I think other people have totally taken over deployment of instances.
Some are good candidates but require more maturity - like if they handed off jerboa and the default web client, there’s one place that would need to be reinforced - the API.
Way down the road, they could build plug-in/mod interfaces so instances could choose feed algorithms, or individuals could come up with their own karma systems, or all sorts of other things.
To get to that point, you have to have a clear vision and stable growth though - that takes time, and is better done by an individual or small team keeping things heading in one direction
You know that you are riffing on the theme of “The Cathedral and The Bazaar”, right?
Anyway… For this to work well things needs to be enforced at the API level, but APIs are exactly that: a contract between two separate applications that need to interface with each other programmatically.
I for one wished that “the API” was not something ad-hoc and developed exclusively for Lemmy, but as long as “Lemmy’s API” can be used as a de-facto standard for discussion-group applications on the Fediverse, then I don’t mind working with it.
Huh, I’ve never actually come across that, I’ve only gotten it indirectly. I bet my first mentor put it on in my head, the guy built out our entire system, then a v2, with one intern while the rest of us extended the framework he built.
And that’s the sad part… The Lemmy api is not only not that, federation is an API+ that gives an amazing starting point. As far as I can tell, the lemmy API was made with the official clients in mind, and everything else was an afterthought made in a hurry during the last Reddit Exodus
I started reading through the kbin API, which starts with “here’s a link to activity pub standards, they’re surprisingly readable”. They were… It’s unwieldy in a lot of ways and maybe too all-encompassing, but they left so much on the table.
For one, uri ids. Lemmy has them for everything (which is nice), but they aren’t directly usable. You can get the local ID for the home instance, but if I’ve got a url for lemmy.world I want to see on my instance, my only option is a search. Which should kick off federation, but what if it’s there already? I want an endpoint to resolve it (or even to tell me it’s not here right now so I can fall back).
And the way they handled metadata is pretty awkward… They next objects inside of collections of activity data and object properties, which is annoying because it’s so inconsistent. Like, if you get a comment response, it gives you the comment reply, which is basically a comment without the usual metadata like vote count or the full actor object.
It gives you too much, then suddenly too little - I don’t need the bio, tagline, and banner of a server every time I see a post, and I also don’t need it for the community and user
But I do need the comment votes when I get a reply - I’ll wait on the comment chain and root post, but I don’t want to have to build a post-body only component to show while I wait to replace it with the whole thing
I do really like that they autodoc everything… Even if a lot of it is indecipherable with no context offered. Like the honeypot parameter on getPosts… It’s actually intended to be a honeypot. Like if you set it to true, it’s supposed to not give you posts, or log you or something? I tracked down a one line confirmation on GitHub which left me baffled. I had to try it… It didn’t seem to do anything
/Rant
It is getting better though, the amount of completely breaking changes that pop up is very frustrating, but this time around it is significantly improved