- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623718
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623713
I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.
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There is a lot of misleading information in this post.
Something that I notice said consistently by those who have little experience in Lemmy admin spaces is “why not just contribute then?”And the answer people try. And this happens. This unfortunately leads into the next point that is the developer teams behavior.
Dessalines and I had some discussion whether the linked issue should be closed or not. Anyway we decided to leave it open in the end. Then some weeks later a user came along and made a completely offtopic complaint that this decision making process is somehow wrong. I admit that I overreacted by giving a temporary ban for this, but mistakes happen and its completely disingenious to spin this as some sort of general toxic behaviour from our side.
There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.
This is your opinion and I doubt it is as widespread as you think.
Another aspect of this is that the Lemmy devs run two instances: lemmy.ml & lemmygrad.ml
What makes you believe this? I can only speak for myself, and I am not involved with lemmygrad in any way.
The biggest piece that broke all confidence in the Lemmy developers amongst many admins including myself is that during the CSAM spam attacks there was complete radio silence. The developers made no statement on the matter. And when Github requests were made to try and propose ideas about how to fix what happened, the developers explicitly stated they didn’t have time to focus on that. No dialogue.
Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.
As well, when a post was made about Sublinks (A project I will touch a bit more on, and am involved in due to the reasons I have highlighted above) the comments that were made by Lemmy’s lead developers were extremely petty. This lessens peoples confidence in your project, not improves it.
Why do you consider it petty? Its a fact that jgrim never opened any issue for the features he wanted, not did he attempt to contribute with a pull request. Its also true that it took multiple years of fulltime work to get Lemmy ready for production, and I dont see how Sublinks can be any faster when it has only volunteer contributors. That doesnt mean I wish for Sublinks to fail, in fact I hope it will be successful so that admins and users have more choices available, and to improve resilience through independent codebases and development teams.
Generally you seem to have an extremely entitled attitude. Lemmy is an open source project that is provided for free. I would also love to fix all the problems that users report, and implement all those features. But unlike Reddit we are not a billion dollar company with thousands of employees. We are just two individuals funded by donations and working from our homes. There is only a limited number of hours in each day and only so much work we can finish in that time. If you are unhappy with Lemmy then by all means switch to a different platform, because we dont get any direct benefit from having more users.
It is unfortunate that this is what you have decided to take away from the blog post instead of reflecting on the criticism I have provided. Instead of reflecting on my list of legitimate criticism you have decided to call me entitled and hone in on small aspects of the blog post in attempt to dismiss it completely. Per usual, it is everyone else that seems to be the problem but you. I outlined my own issues with lemmy after a LOT of patience and goodwill. That’s lost, and this comment solidifies further why I will switch away from lemmy as soon as I get the chance. Whether you decide to accept the points I have made is on you but ultimately your refusal to recognize the issues I have outlined will cause this project to fade away completely. And that’s really sad. I love lemmy as a project and an idea.
Responding to false criticism is important. For example you were under the mistaken impression that we reject pull requests or issues, or don’t care about moderation? All of those are provably false. Look at all the moderation PRs I’ve closed in the past MONTH alone. This is all easily verifiable if you go to our github accounts and see what we’re working on.
You also heard second hand that the sublinks developer is making sublinks because they got a bad reception from us, or were told that we’d reject features? They’ve never opened a single issue or PR.
Your post seems to mostly be 2nd-hand rumors from people who already don’t like us, and not from any people that are actually working on Lemmy. That’s perfectly fine, but it’d be wrong to not address these false criticisms.
Entitlement in open source is a real thing, and you would know our pain if you ran a codebase currently in use by > 40k people monthly. To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person. It’d be like if I criticized my grandmother’s free meal for it not being to my liking, and demanded she make it my way.
Entitlement in open source is a real thing
Goes both ways, from/by developers and from/by users.
demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person.
Demands:
- They’ve never opened a single issue or PR.
- no specific feature requests t
- never opened any issue for the features he wanted
- not[sic] did he attempt to contribute with a pull request
- switch to a different platform, …
And the entitlement is pretty damn strong from your side too. It’s an open source project that is your baby; I get it. What makes you entitled to other people doing everything except the actual code portion, for YOU? If it gets to the point of needing an ‘RFC’ to contribute code to Lemmy or even request a change…
Well, good luck. Why should people do your work that you get paid to do (as said often by yourself and Nutomic), when they aren’t getting paid a cent?? That is the epitome of entitled. You want free work, but you don’t want to give your work for free
To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person.
I don’t know how you managed to do this in one thread but I’ll leave these two contradictions here:
- Lemmy devs claim to both “work full time” on the project because of donations and NLNet grants so sublinks could never reach parity in a reasonable timeframe
- Lemmy devs claim that Lemmy is all a labour of love and that asking for a change in leadership and priorities is just “entitled”
Like, I’m not going to deny that entitlement in open source is a thing - it is a thing and it is awful.
However, people are giving you their time, effort and money - you keep dismissing that and doubling down on erasing this work.
I mean, unless you want to tell me how I’m acting entitled to your work despite spending countless hours trying to support my community, spending hours sorting through issues that Lemmy has to label them, spending countless hours advocating for people to make issues and for change in the Lemmy project.
And after all that, trying to have any input on prioritising moderation was met with : (paraphrasing) “I will not change my priorities”, “I think you’re exagerating moderation issues, they work fine” and plain out refusing to acknowledge lolicon pornography as CSAM, refusing to acknowledge my request to put moderators in Lemmy’s matrix channels despite obvious problems during weekend.
Seriously, I kinda expected better from you. I have no trust in Lemmy’s leadership and your response here just examplifies that.
I appreciate your work in organizing issues and helping to label them, and I’m sorry if I did not give some things proper weight. But are my priorities not my own? Why is this such an affront that I choose what I think is important? Would you like it if I did the same to you, demanded that you change your priorities to do what I want you to do? What if there are thousands of other people asking you the same thing?
Scale is also left out of the equation here. Thousands people are asking 2-4 devs for features. It is simply impossible to please everyone, unless some people do the open source thing, and work on a feature they’d like to have. Many people have and continue to do this, rather than dismissing the project because the small number of developers can’t keep pace with issues.
because the small number of developers can’t keep pace with issues.
Maybe there’d be plenty more devs if it wasn’t written in a new, up and coming, difficult language to understand let alone master. Maybe there’d be more code contributions if existing ones weren’t closed because you don’t see this being an issue. Maybe there’d be more developers if you’d let there be.
But are my priorities not my own? Why is this such an affront that I choose what I think is important? Would you like it if I did the same to you, demanded that you change your priorities to do what I want you to do? What if there are thousands of other people asking you the same thing?
When you accept donations and grants for Lemmy’s development and when you work with other people, I think it is normal and good to think about priorities in a more collaborative fashion. I cannot write rust code and many other people cannot do that. When their issues are left ignored, dismissed and repeatedly told that they have no input towards Lemmy’s direction - people tend to not want to work with you because they feel that their work is pointless.
Why make an issue if developers admit to not reading them and not changing priorities? Why help towards a collective goal if everyone is just working on their own personal thing? As someone who is not good at writing code - it just feels like shit. My work felt entirely pointless because there was no way for my effort to amount to anything I wanted. Only people who can write code can actually influence the Lemmy project.
I understand feeling burned out but I tried contributing, I tried making things better and all I was met with was “I will not change my priorities” or “I do not think it is valuable to try to bring direction in the Lemmy project” or straight up dismissal or silence. If what you wanted all this time was for you to work on your own thing with no outside input, well, all I can say is you’ve done good work to make that happen.
I don’t think there’s anything left for me to tell you.
mistakes happen
Mistakes happen, typically once or twice; and are learned from and not repeated. Habits are recurring. These things are a Lemmy Developer habit.
There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.
This is your opinion and I doubt it is as widespread as you think.
+1 user to their opinion.
no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard,
Really?. Does this relate? Not related, not a feature request. I mean there probably wasn’t a specific feature request for the exact specific matter at hand. But plenty of noise and discussion around something needing to help address the problem.
Why do you consider it petty?
Look at your responses to instance admins on your platform and Github. And then ask yourself that question again. You sorely need some self-reflection.
I personally got kicked out of and banned on everything Lemmy Matrix related for daring to challenge you and and Dessalines. You are petty AF.
From the linked comment:
never even bothered to open an issue about it.
From the parent comment:
not did he attempt to contribute with a pull request.
READ the rest of the post. Literally the first damn thing YOU quoted from it.
And lastly, from you:
- I wouldnt expect that this ever becomes useful for production.
- I dont see how Sublinks can be any faster when it has only volunteer contributors.
- It would take at least multiple years to catch up with the current features of Lemmy.
Really showcasing what Gabe said in his post, eh ?
Really?. Does this relate? Not related, not a feature request. I mean there probably wasn’t a specific feature request for the exact specific matter at hand. But plenty of noise and discussion around something needing to help address the problem.
All of these are resolved, what more do you expect?
I personally got kicked out of and banned on everything Lemmy Matrix related for daring to challenge you and and Dessalines. You are petty AF.
I dont remember the exact details but the reason you got banned was because you actively attacked a Lemmy maintainer. Someone who actually works on the project to make it better, as opposed to you who only complains. Such a ban is well deserved.
Anyway Im done talking to you. Please switch Beehaw away from Lemmy and use another platform so you can stop bothering us.
How do I put this? If this is how you respond to criticism, and that’s what you’ve clearly shown repeatedly to do, then you should not be in any leadership position.
You do not apologize even when you admit to be wrong, you blame others instead of taking responsibilities for anything that was said here. It’s entirely a dismissive response. You might not have noticed but people do not feel valued at all when they speak to Lemmy’s developers. Their input is dismissed, they are told to make issues that you do not care for and when they ask for something to be better prioritized, you effectively tell them to fuck off. You make people feel that their time and effort towards Lemmy is worthless.
With the way you’ve acted, you have pushed back people from making issues, from contributing in code or otherwise, from wanting to host Lemmy and wanting to be associated with the project. Sincerely, all I can hope at this point is for Lemmy to be forked by better people or to be forgotten about.
I remember Beehaw wanted to switch away from Lemmy to another platform months ago. I encourage you to do that and point your demands and entitlement at someone else. We have enough users who actually appreciate our work.
I encourage you to do that and point your demands and entitlement at someone else.
respectfully (and as someone who has not paid attention to this thread outside of my one comment): i am continually failing to understand how asking you guys to give us better moderation tools to do our jobs–which is our primary reason we’re even looking elsewhere and, if resolved, would likely placate about 90% of the problem we have with continuing to use your software–is entitlement. we’re basically handing you a silver platter entitled “hey, here is our problem, and here is how you can keep us on Lemmy in the long term” and you guys seem to just not take that seriously at all? and now you seem to want to debate us out of thinking it’s an issue while simultaneously telling us to fuck off for investing in your software at all!
What makes you think that I want you to to keep using Lemmy? As far as I remember, Beehaw admins have only brought negativity and complaints to Lemmy development. You have never made any code contributions and based on your attitude I doubt that you donate any money. You need to realize that having more users on Lemmy gives us zero benefits, in fact more users means more work. So if you leave Lemmy it means less work and less complaints for us. Meanwhile Beehaw users who like Lemmy can easily switch to another instance.
You have never made any code contributions […] I doubt that you donate any money.
What a horrible take on being an open source community. If this is what you want for Lemmy instances or admin to become “worth it” to you, change your license; or your change your attitude. You keep bringing up that Lemmy is open source as your argument, but really not understanding how open source works, or the culture of such.
Stop using my Software says the developer of an open source/source available software.
https://beehaw.org/comment/884681
It doesnt really matter what you want. The software is open source so anyone can use the software freely.
i mean, if your response to a community which has stuck by your software for over two years now and hasn’t even publicly committed to leaving is “fuck you” because you don’t like that we are vocally opinionated on our problems, frictions, and perceived deficiencies with your software—yeah, why would we ever do anything to help you guys? you’re strongly vindicating us here in supposedly “never ma[king] any code contributions” or “donat[ing] any money” (and i’m just going to grant you that for the sake of argument, i’m not even sure it’s true). i’m not going to contribute to someone’s software when they’re openly contemptuous of me for trying to make their software better.
if i was on the fence previously about the upthread critique that you guys are kind of assholes to anybody who dissents about what you think should be the way forward, i am no longer. all i can say further is that you are acting severely out of pocket here as a spokesperson for the software and as a community manager and i would strongly encourage you to log off at this point before you say something that make your community relations even worse than they already are.
We gain nothing from you using Lemmy. It’s free software, a free meal that we’re providing freely to anyone as a public service.
Don’t like it? Don’t eat it!
You really think I should be grateful that you stuck by my software? Why arent you grateful for the years of work I put into this software, and for allowing you to use it for free? There are many instances which have “stuck by” Lemmy for years, such as hexbear or lemmygrad, and none of them ever showed the sort of entitled attitude that beehaw admins have.
Again I dont have any obligation or even incentive to do any work for you specifically. If you dont like how I act as “spokesperson” or “community manager” (in reality Im an open source maintainer), then stop using Lemmy and go to Sublinks, Reddit or any other platform.
i don’t care about debating this with you. i will, as a concluding remark, just note incredible irony in lecturing about entitlement while simultaneously demanding gratitude for your work from people you literally just told to fuck off from this service three replies ago. in very blunt terms: i think you are getting the exact level of gratitude you deserve from us after this exchange, which is none. my experiences with you have been thoroughly unpleasant, unkind, and paint you as a toxic person and it is my view that your “years of work put into this software” are meaningless in the face of the blatant disrespect you show members of your community.
I think this is a pretty clear example of what I mean when I say that my work was never valued.
I did do work that was non-code - I labeled tons of issues, closed duplicates and those which had already been fixed.
I did try to write code contributions (here and here). One of which was rejected based on purely aesthetic preferences and whose follow-up PR was made dormant forever afterwards.
I tried to help and contribute in the ways I could - apparently this work is just “negativity and complaints”.
Changing a total of three lines is hardly worth mentioning. The issue labeling was somewhat helpful, but in the end this task should be done by someone who is familiar with the code. And anyway it was too risky to continue this after relations with beehaw soured. So yes there were some positive contributions, but they dont outweigh the negativity and complaints.
Changing a total of three lines is hardly worth mentioning.
As a professional software I know that the actual typing is hardly any of the work - let alone on someone else’s code!
And you’re a developer too, so you know this. This minimising of his contributions comes across as you arguing in bad faith, not to mention backing up the complaints about your hostile attitude.
Gabe, a couple of weeks ago, nutomic was asking for ideas on a name for his federated wiki alternative project, I put forth my suggestion that I thought was better (also because I didn’t want it to be named after the bin chicken), but he told me, pretty bluntly in fact, that he is sticking with his original choice.
Am I bummed about it? Of course.
But it would be silly of me if I kept pestering him because he didn’t do exactly what I want, because at the end of the day, he doesn’t owe me anything.
I can make suggestions to him, but he doesn’t have to take them, I’m not his manager, and I can take no as an answer. (He could have let me down a little easier though.)
From reading your blog post, I get the impression that you are venting because 1. the Lemmy devs didn’t prioritize on the “improved moderation tools” that you wanted and 2. you are unhappy with the way they are running their own instance, which is kind of the point of decentralization that instances are ran independently from development.
Let me ask you a follow-up question to think about (you don’t have to answer me): You are putting weight into Sublinks right now, what’s to say that you wouldn’t have any disagreement with jgrim about the development priorities of Sublinks?
Lastly, sorry I never did the thing that I promised you to do a few months about moderating a comm on lit cafe, been kind of stressed and irritable recently and can’t really find the energy to do much creative writing. Sorry.
Sorry I didnt mean to be rude to you, unfortunately its always tricky to convey the right meaning over text. I definitely appreciated your input for the naming!
Totally fine, and I didn’t mean to impose, because at the end of the day, I’m just a normal user who shitposts and make dumb jokes here and there.
I wish everyone could be so humble.
