sunaurus @ sunaurus @lemm.ee

Not active on Lemmy any longer. If you send me a DM, I won't see it. Sorry!

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Joined

2 yr. ago

(and, last I checked, a substantial contributor to the lemmy source code too).

I think not a substantial contributor yet, but I hope to become one eventually 😃

The problem at hand is not about the usability (UI/UX, performance, etc.) of Discord but rather it’s private, closed source for-profit existence being used as a “support” channel for a free and open (source, platform, communication) environment.

I agree with you in principle, but on a pragmatic level, it's very hard to disconnect UI/UX/performance from everything else. I think it's OK to acknowledge that Discord has a weakness when it comes to not being OSS, but a strength when it comes to UX, and I also think it's OK to take advantage of that strength for users that want to do so.

Just to be fully clear, I am never planning to make Discord the main communication channel for lemm.ee announcements, nor to make users feel like it's in any way necessary for them to use Discord just for lemm.ee communications. I am also active on Matrix constantly, and read most of what happens in the Lemmy Matrix channels. Any user that wishes to reach me over Matrix can do so.

I think Discord is great, as long as you account for its shortcomings:

• It should be treated as ephemeral - up to the point of "the service could completely shut down tomorrow"
• It should not be treated as fully private or secure

I love how snappy it is (I never have to wait minutes for messages to load, as I do in Matrix), and also how there are a ton of Lemmy users who have Discord open in the background anyway. While I wouldn't ever propose moving something like the main Lemmy communication channels to Discord, I do think it's much easier to have IMs with regular Lemmy users on Discord than it is to do so on Matrix (as in my experience, most regular users do not have a Matrix client installed).

By the way, lemm.ee also has a Discord server. It's only treated as a secondary channel, all announcements are posted in our meta community on Lemmy itself, and just linked to from Discord, but it's still nice to have IMO.

It's coming very soon: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3869

I really appreciate the kind message, but I'm actually not in a rough spot financially for now. Fortunately I have some savings, so assuming I can land a new job soon (and I already have several interview processes active now), I will be totally fine, no fundraiser necessary.

To be clear, I would find it extremely amazing if sponsorships ever increase to a point where the income would cover something resembling a full time salary (in addition to infra costs) - in such a situation, I would definitely switch to working on open source full time and paying myself out of the sponsorships, but I think that's not realistic any time soon (if ever 😅)

The hammer and sickle symbol has a long history that supersedes the history of the Soviet Union as a state, even my “third-world country” in Latin America (I’m sure you can see in the logs where I’m posting from) has a history of using the symbol for liberatory causes.

That's a very important point, thanks for the comment. For me, such symbolism immediately associates with people glorifying the soviet union, but I understand that there can be lots of people out there who don't associate it with Russia at all.

I take your words to mean that I should be grateful that the soviets only replaced 20% of the population in my country, because the germans were planning to replace 50% (according to Generalplan Ost). To some, it may be an interesting philosophical debate whether evil can be measured in population replacement percentages, or whether we should try to measure evil like this at all. Believe me that what you're saying is nothing new to me (or to any Estonian who has ever discussed this subject with any non-Estonian). It's a debate I have heard hundreds of times throughout my life, and it's not one I wish to participate in again right now.

By the way, what you're saying is also a very common Kremlin talking point when it comes to the soviet occupation of my country - trying to direct the conversation to how horrible to Nazis would have been, so "surely the actions of the Soviets were justified in that context".

We were thankfully able to turn things around after the (relatively recent) collapse of the soviet union. We were able to join both NATO and the EU, and while quality of life has not fully caught up to the nordics, I have been able to witness a constant improvement since my childhood.

I have no trouble distinguishing them based on what kind of concentration camps they ran. I assure you that "the soviets occupied your country for 50 years, but it's ok because they initially fought the other guys who occupied you" is not as good of a "gotcha" as you believe.

The above users in this thread are posting (and then re-posting) soviet symbolism (and apparently calling me a Nazi for removing said content). I am banning the second user, as they are clearly aware that they are re-posting removed content.

Not sure if I actually have to justify removing soviet and/or nazi symbolism, but I have lived my whole life in a country on the border of Russia. My country been ravaged by both Nazis and Soviets in very recent history. I want to be clear that while I think criticising capitalism is totally normal and necessary, I am also extremely aware of constant Kremlin propaganda. Propaganda which is spread both in their media, but also crucially in online channels. Propaganda which includes things like downplaying horrifying actions of the soviet union, portraying their "enemies" (the west) in the worst possible light, and mixing in soviet symbolism wherever possible. I have no intention of allowing anything which resembles this propaganda to be spread through lemm.ee. If banning offending users does not work, then further steps will definitely be taken.

To the Hexbear users who are in this thread: I'm not sure what your goals are, but I'm sure you realize that this is the meta community of another instance, not some meme community. Are you trying to make your instance look bad? I see very few good faith posts from you guys here.

Mostly yes, but many users have also enabled e-mail notifications for post/comment/DM replies.

That user has actually not been in contact with any of our admins, I'm not sure why they are claiming otherwise.

In any case, I shared my position on piracy on lemm.ee a few months ago, and it has not changed. TL;DR discussions about piracy are fine, but explicitly facilitating piracy on lemm.ee is not allowed, and if any such content is reported on lemm.ee then I will most likely err on the side of removing it. Having said that, I am not planning to defederate lemmy.dbzer0.com at this point, as they have not been causing any issues for lemm.ee (but, of course, I do reserve the right to re-evaluate federation with any instance if at any point they start causing problems for lemm.ee).

Quoting my original comment about piracy on lemm.ee, just for full context:

There’s nothing inherently illegal about VPNs, P2P, seedboxes, torrents, software for torrents, etc - as a software engineer, I have no trouble understanding that these things all have legal purposes. There can be no realistic case made against someone just because they use (or discuss the use of) any of these things. You can post and comment about stuff like this all day long.

Also: discussing piracy topics in general (like commenting on the legality of it, just saying you do it, whatever) without actually using lemm.ee servers to host anything sketchy is fine as well.

On the other hand, telling people “go to coolpiracywebsite.com to download the latest avengers movie” is very sketchy - you’re not directly distributing anything, but I think a case can be made that this comment is directly facilitating piracy, and if someone sends me a legal letter to remove such a comment, then TBH I will most likely just comply rather than deal with the hassle of trying to figure out how legal it is. Just being frank here - I don’t want to create false expectations of lemm.ee servers being a safe haven for content with sketchy legal status.

We are using Postmark to send e-mails, they charge a base fee of $15 per 10k e-mails, plus an extra $1.80 per each additional 1000 e-mails after that. Btw, that's all in USD, and our bank account is in EUR, just to be clear.

Have you noticed them causing any problems in our communities? I haven't seen it so far myself, haven't really noticed any reports about them either.

If you're asking based on what they post on other instances, then I would be interested in seeing specific examples of these posts if you have any, but know that as a general rule I do not go out looking for terrible content on other instances, and I don't expect other lemm.ee admins to do this either. If it becomes an issue for lemm.ee (for example, Kremlin propaganda starts taking over our feeds), then for sure we will respond, but for now it doesn't seem to be the case as far as I've seen.

Good:

• Starting to line up interviews now after finding out a few weeks ago that my start-up is folding.
• Excited to be working on some cool code projects in my free time.
• I'm super happy about the upcoming release of Starfield and the upcoming console release of Baldur's Gate 3, can't stop thinking about those two games!

Meh:

• I have a lot of constant construction noise in my home due to ongoing repairs of some recent water damage.
• I've been seeing a lot of negative comments from Lemmy users recently about the volunteer work many people do on Lemmy and it's starting to wear on me.

Bad:

• I'm feeling a lot of stress due to this being the first time in about 10 years when I'm looking for a job without already being in a position of job security. I'm very worried about worst case outcomes.
• Finding it hard to motivate myself to be healthy right now, I haven't worked out at all in a few months already.

Thanks for posting this thread, it's good to vent a bit.

Looks like there was a gap in incoming traffic from lemmy.world, but afterwards it resumed again and as of right now everything seems to be in sync.

I'm sorry if you feel like I was rude to you, that was not my intention. Try to see it from my point of view - there are dozens of people like yourself who are making demands to instance admins in different channels on a more or less weekly basis. "You need to be doing more X", "You need to stop doing X", "You need to react faster, we need deadlines for admins", "You need to stop reacting so hastily", etc. It's really exhausting to read and respond to these (conflicting!) demands constantly, I think I am going to have to take a step back and start ignoring such posts in the future.

Please remember that I am a volunteer. Over the past few months, I have put in hundreds of hours of my own time and hundreds of euros of my own money into building up this instance. I understand you feel like I have a responsibility to invest even more time, but I have been very upfront about what I'm prepared to offer in terms of federation - that's the whole idea behind having a public federation policy, which is on display not just in our sidebar but also in our pinned welcome post. If that policy is not a good fit for you, then that's fair enough. There are plenty of other instances out there with much more strict policies (I can recommend Beehaw, for example).

By the way, contrary to what you're claiming, until today, lemm.ee has only ever defederated bot instances + one instance which encourages posting CSAM drawings (+ there is also the decision to not immediately federate with Facebook if that ever becomes a possibility). Sure, I've seen some users from other instances who post seriously disturbing content, and these users have been dealt with (through bans and some other methods as well), but so far, I have not seen any federated instance which has users posting bad content at a scale that would only be solvable through defederation. Keep in mind that reports are my main source of seeing such content - I do not go out looking for it on other instances, I never promised to do so and I don't plan to start any time soon. This is a group effort, and users are expected to help build a community they want to be a part of through reports and/or downvotes.

The approach to federation with Facebook is documented here: https://lemm.ee/post/851217

For the time being, I have no plans to change our federation policy. I realize this is not what you want to hear, and I'm sorry to disappoint you. It's just not a goal for lemm.ee to curate external instances for now.

There are probably many instances out there that have horrible content (content which would get users banned if they posted it on lemm.ee), but vetting instances and maintaining a defederation list is a big effort, and I believe this effort is much better spent elsewhere.

I've stated this in many other similar threads, but let me also reiterate here: the above should not be taken to mean that lemm.ee is some bastion of free speech absolutism. Users or communities breaking rules on lemm.ee are dealt with. Also, we do reserve the right to defederate any instance which starts causing problems for lemm.ee on a bigger scale (so in cases where banning individual users is not effective).

I realize this is a topic where it's impossible to make everybody happy, because each person has their own view on what should be federated or defederated. At the end of the day, for anything that's not illegal or directly hurting lemm.ee, I believe it's best to leave these decisions up to users - you can make your own choices with which users and communities you block, and I'm certain that soon you'll have the tools built in to Lemmy itself to make the same decision on an instance level as well. And if that doesn't work for you, then there's always the possibility of joining a different instance with a different approach to federation.

I think latency should be pretty decent thanks to our global CDN, but I think in the end you should just try it out and compare it to some other instances to get the best picture.