You see, it’s not required for me to agree with whom you are criticizing, to criticize your inability to be civil. So keep making as many strawmen you like. We are in a post complaining about user behavior/content and your behavior and content are both completely unacceptable in a community.

Also, you can stop name-calling, this may have an effect when someone else values your opinion, I don’t.

Ok, but it’s the same thing from the perspective of all the people on an instance vs from the perspective of an individual. Those people are still there, creating posts etc., and they can easily move on other instances if they want too.

It’s just a “bigger blanket”, but the concept is essentially the same, with the plus that more people are “covered” and the minus that someone might be affected against their will.

Either way, it doesn’t solve the problem, it just masks it for the members of an instance. Why would it be a fundamentally better solution in this particular instance?

I had a look at your history, and you seem really incapable of behaving in a civil way, often using insults. I don’t think this is a good strategy to get your point across.

Be respectful of others.

This comment is in clear violation of the rules of this community. Be better, if you want to criticize others.

No, you’re putting a blanket over them and pretending they’re not there any more.

Isn’t defederation the same thing? Users won’t disappear (and they can also create accounts elsewhere…).

I guess Poland? I know from my colleagues that internet infrastructure jumped from old slow stuff to fiber there and it’s fairly cheap.

They have millions in funding, they will always move at a faster pace. The question is in which direction they will move, I suppose.

I am sure that for such small shops it’s trivial to explain that resources are extremely limited, I don’t see any data protection authority actually pursuing anyone based on the lack of privacy by design. The point is, nobody is forcing you to deploy the software as is, and technically anybody could write tools that bridge the gaps in the software. If the software does not offer data deletion, any instance admin could have identified this gap (a risk assessment for data collection is also needed technically) and wrote a script that would allow to satisfy data deletion requests or anything else that would have made them comply.

That said, I agree that these features are important. I do not agree that they are what the devs should work on right now, or that at least it takes some convincing to convey the fact that these are important features for instance admins to be compliant and for users (in general).

I also get the point about the “I am not taking your word for it” approach. Look how many people in this thread talk about GDPR without actually understanding who is the data controller/processor and who has to be compliant. I can only imagine the amount of uninformed people who open issues and waste time for already busy devs. We are seeing the couple of examples that the article picks, we are not seeing the rest of issues which justify this harsh approach.

The way I see it, having certain features implemented in the Lemmy software is one way to ease compliance for admins, and they should just upvote the issue and explain why it’s important for them, possibly even adding a bounty to the feature. OP’s approach doesn’t seem this and it’s much closer to demand stuff, as if the compliance responsibility was on the devs and the donation were some sort of reason to make them work on what other people want.

To be precise, it’s not devs that need to worry about GDPR, it’s instance admins. I don’t disagree with you, but I think it’s an important distinction to make.

That’s not the argument being made. What’s baffling is to pretty much only rely on the efforts of third party devs to fill in the missing gaps. It’s a profoundly bad strategy.

I literally quoted the article:

At this point, most of the solutions the ecosystem

I mean, there are some moderation features in Lemmy, for sure with gaps, but there are many gaps on other aspects as well, and if people can’t run the instances due to other technical issues, there is also nothing to moderate, so obviously prioritization is complex when resources available (dev) are so limited.

That said, I really don’t see the problem of third parties. We rely on third parties for one of the most fundamental features, which is community discovery (lemmyverse.net), for example. What’s the problem with that? I think that’s literally one of the benefits of making an open platform, where other people can build other tools in the ecosystem. We are not purchasing a service, we are not talking about an organization who has a substantial revenue and tons of people and can’t deal with basic functionalities. We are talking about a project with a team that is smaller than the team that in Facebook deals with which colors to make buttons, and it’s “paid” 1/20th of that. So I still don’t understand, what is “baffling”? Because from where I stand, all things considered, it’s totally normal that a project with these resources and that gained popularity less than a year ago has still tons of gaps and a long roadmap, and that tools in the ecosystem address some of these gaps.

It’s like with Bethesda releases a shitty half-finished game

No it’s not. Bethesda is company that sells you a proprietary product while having a revenue in the order of hundreds of millions. The relationship between Bethesda customers and Lemmy users has absolutely nothing in common.

Here, Lemmy makes some money

Lemmy makes no money. Considered the opportunity cost, Lemmy loses money. A single dev with a full time job can easily double the amount that Lemmy devS earn. Not to talk about the fact that the money they make are donations, without a contract bounding them to anything and also not granting them anything (tomorrow everyone could cancel donations and the income would disappear).

They can’t do that if the tooling is too brittle, shitty, or threadbare to actually handle the deeply fucking intense problem of managing and maintaining a server and community on the open Internet, where literally anything and everything goes. Factor in a myriad of local jurisdictions and laws about data and content, and a lot of these things end up becoming severe liabilities.

Sure, but again, if those were the only problems and the devs would be sipping cocktails in Hawaii splurging on those 4k/month, I would agree with you. If they think priorities are elsewhere, or are also elsewhere, they might have their reasons. In fact, in the article there is a complaint about them answering in a “hostile” manner, but I also understand that the issue in question is probably the 100th issue in a week/month in which other people tell them what they should do. This is a regular problem in OSS (See https://mastodon.uno/@bagder@mastodon.social - the maintainer of curl - for plenty of examples). After they understood better what’s the problem, their stance changed as well, which is also reasonable.

Look at it this way: with federation, a handful of volunteers themselves are doing labor for free, for the devs, by propping up their platform, client ecosystem, and reputation in the space. If this gets bad enough, people will literally say “fuck it” and walk away.

I don’t look at it in this way at all. I think the devs made it extremely clear (even given the political stance of both) that despite the happiness of seeing their project flourish, they have no interest in growth as an end. In fact, I would say that nobody is doing work for the devs. But I see that we have a fundamentally different perception on the dynamics in Lemmy, so I see no reconciliation between our opinions.

The fact that Lemmy’s core team is taking a fairly laissez faire position on moderation, user safety, and tooling is problematic, and could be a serious blocker for communities currently hosted on Lemmy.

At this point, most of the solutions the ecosystem has relied on have been third-party tools, such as db0’s fantastic Fediseer and Fedi-Safety initiatives. While I’m sure many people are glad these tools exist, the fact that instances have to rely on third-party solutions is downright baffling.

Honestly, what? Why would be baffling to have third party tools in this ecosystem? It would be baffling if that was the case for Facebook. Also the devs did work on some moderation features, but they probably have tons of other stuff to work on, all for an amount of money which is a low salary for one developer.

I have also discovered very interesting blogs or site that I have then added to my RSS feed. They also offer a lens to only look within the small web, which they index themselves I think.

I have no problem with Proton drive for simple Directory-based backups (Windows only AFAIK at the moment). That said, it is not a specialized backup solution, and for that I think something like backblaze is much better (and cheaper, possibly).

On the other hand, you can approach the dramatic cut of emissions from both angles, as in “you are not legally able to do what you want as long as you can pay for it, and you have the responsibility in minimizing emissions”.

Internet does generate a lot of emissions. Streaming quality, website size. Whatever we do to reduce the energy demand is a good idea, as long as we don’t think of it as " The Solution", but as part of a wide range of actions aimed at slashing energy consumption.

None of those are requirements to be part of the fediverse.

They are de-facto values of the fediverse today. It depends what you mean by “requirements”. Technically, you can join the fediverse in many ways, but the fediverse is not just a bunch of servers talking to each other, it’s also a community of people. This community rejects some members for different reasons.

there’s multiple companies invested in the fediverse: Mozilla, Flipboard, Facebook, Automatic being the most obvious.

But those companies are very different, aren’t they? Mozilla and Flipboard are participating within the fediverse, they are not plugging in their things, and their business models are not the same as Meta, and it is compatible with the values mentioned (well, Mozilla is a no-profit, in theory?). Wordpress is on the other hand very much aligned with the values of the fediverse. It is not the same as Meta and Bsky, both with the Silicon Valley DNA in them and all that it entails.

Truth Social, Gab, Spinster, etc are all on the fediverse despite being abhorrent to the majority of the rest of the fediverse.

And this is exactly where I disagree. Are they part of the fediverse? I wouldn’t say so. They are completely isolated islands, that happen to use protocols that are similar to those used from the fediverse (software). They are not part of the fediverse if by that we mean the set of communities that populate it at all.

I suppose this is where the root of our disagreement lies. For me the technical network that links tools is not the fediverse. The fediverse is what is built on top of that network and it is inherently linked with the community and their values, in other words, it’s a social subject. Personally, I can’t care less if tomorrow anybody starts using AP and can (technically) interoperate with Lemmy or Mastodon etc., I would definitely push for the rejection of - say - Facebook (like the literal facebook) or Reddit, or Twitter etc.

Of course not, that’s idiotic behavior, but obviously not what I was referring to

I disagree, it is a set of multiple entities but there is a common denominator. For example, free software, no advertising as a business model, not commercial, not run by big corporations and talking over AP.

I think it’s not pointless nor wrong to discuss these shared values (de facto values, beyond the technical fact I can spin up an AP software) and how certain parties do not share them and therefore should not be part of the fediverse in principle.

While I disagree with some of the positions in this specific instance. They do have their right to express their opinion on the nature and direction of the fediverse. Reducing everything to the individual experience is focusing on technical features but not on the collective and social aspects.

There are also tons of people who can’t really help but using the same corporate metrics: growth, reach, users count, adoption. Not everyone agrees on these as objectives to pursue, and it makes sense to be vocal about the general direction from that perspective (because it goes way beyond my personal narrow experience).

That said, I can’t stand those who use excuses like “privacy” or “there are bad actors”, as their main motivations, because these are also largely individual problems. On the other hand, opposing to keep separated a corporate, for profit, social media from the fediverse is a whole different matter.

And that’s fair enough. However, putting a bounty on the feature is definitely a big incentive that might have caused those features to be implemented by someone else and/or prioritized.

I stopped hearing discussions about it long ago. I suppose the thing died down.

One thing I will never understand is their endless complaint about moderation tools. They had/have a decent amount of donation, why they didn’t just put a bounty on the features they needed in github and encourage contributions in that space (if not contributing directly)? It feels like it was sterile criticism when they had/have the means to actually work on the solution.

EDIT: Adding to the above. From their opencollective page, they are in +6k$. Even 1000$ on a feature and I think plenty of people will want to contribute. Considering that they were complaining about a handful of features, I don’t see how it was not feasible. That will both give back to the developers and get them where they are. Win-win…?