Nutomic @ nutomic @lemmy.ml

Lemmy Lead Developer and father of two children.

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Posts

111

Comments

903

Joined

6 yr. ago

Moderating

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I looked at some of the pull requests and most of them seem very small, only changing a couple of lines. Still impressive but not really comparable to implementing a new feature in Lemmy. For that we need to make changes to various different parts of the code (database, federation, api, js library, frontend), then test it and pass code review. All that takes a lot of work because we need to ensure that existing functionality doesnt break. In this way a web server like Lemmy has much higher standards because there should be no bugs at all. If your AI project has some bugs, users can easily roll back their local install to an earlier version.

Youre right about lemmy-ui, unfortunately it doesnt have enough contributors. I dont know why that is, you'd think a project written in a popular language like Typescript would easily find contributors.

The entire time after the Reddit migration was extremely chaotic. I dont remember when exactly the CSAM attacks happened, but around that time we were already very exhausted from all the urgent work we had to do on scaling, patching security vulnerabilities and fixing countless bugs. I also dont remember receiving any requests from admins to help out with this. So if you notice something similar in the future, feel free to message me directly. Anyway we are only two people working full-time on Lemmy, and have lots of different tasks to take care of. So it gets very difficult to give everything the attention it deserves, and to prioritize things correctly.

@haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com if this is true then you should try adding some swap space.

Exactly

I suppose there is still room for database optimization then, but its hard to find people who know how to do this.

But yeah, the moderation tools have to be the worst. Lemmy has an amazing development group that’s separate from the main developers who have patched together a good set of tools, from automods to CSAM and illegal scanning, huge props to them - but these issues are routinely ignored by the main devs. I was shocked, honestly shocked that when we were under CSAM attacks that there was not an immediate roundtable of the head devs to try to solve the problem officially. Here was a problem that 99% of countries would immediately and gladly throw us, the instance admins, in jail over and they just handwaved it away. In fact, I don’t know that there was ever an official post about it, or even that there are things coming to help with it.

My impression at the time was that admins were handling the CSAM wave just fine with existing mod tools and through Matrix chats. A roundtable wouldnt have solved anything except make people feel good. Besides we still were extremely busy at the time to scale up Lemmy and resolve problems revealed by the huge amount of new users. Keep in mind that Lemmy is still at version 0.x which means that its not feature complete. So if something is missing that you find important, consider waiting a year or two and checking back then. Or get it implemented yourself, thats what open source is all about.

That said most of the features you mentioned have already been implemented, including a list of all locally uploaded images.

Not just that its boring, mod tools also require a huge amount of work because you need to make changes across all parts of the code (database, api, federation and frontend).

There is documentation, if anything is missing we definitely appreciate contributions.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/administration.html

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs

It would be interesting to investigate why Lemmy has high CPU usage. In principle it should be quite efficient as its written in Rust. Its also not doing anything particularly performance intensive, unless you are subscribed to lots of communities or have lots of users.

Did you read the changes in 0.19.4? Those are only the highlights, there is also a full changelog linked. 0.19.0 before that had even more features. And I doubt you can show any hobby projects that have faster progress with only two devs.

Our last NLnet funding round is from 2022 which is just getting completed now. At a total of 60.000€ over two devs and ~24 months thats around 1250€ a month. So about 3050€ per month which is quite low for a software developer. Additionally the NLnet payments are very irregular as they are not monthly but when specific new features are implemented. The number of 750€ a week is for estimating the payment for NLnet milestones, but a large part of our work cannot be funded by them. NLnet only funds development of new features, but we also need to spend a lot of time fixing bugs, reviewing pull requests, preparing releases etc.

We are two fulltime developers and a handful of devs who regularly contribute in their free time. We could definitely use more devs but the donations are simply not enough.

The Lemmy frontend is written in Typescript which is a very popular language, yet it has even less contributors than the backend.

No that's not merged yet, still needs more feedback from plugin devs.

The key is refreshed after 24 hours so it will work if you wait a bit.

The users who voted all look legit, I also didnt notice any accounts upvoting multiple posts from this user.

There were optimizations related to database triggers, these are probably responsible for the speedup.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4696

No that's a completely different issue.

Yes something seems to be broken, but so far we don't have any idea what it might be. On Monday we will deploy the 0.19.4 release candidate which has various performance improvements, hopefully that will help.

Yes I have more time available than expected, at least for now. And whenever I don't program for a while, I get a strong urge to write some code so I can't stop myself.