Hey folks

Just a heads up that I will be doing some minor database maintenance shortly. I expect the downtime to last <5 minutes.

Have a nice day!

Update: maintenance is complete!

Hey, folks!

Today, we can celebrate the first anniversary of the creation of lemm.ee! I thought it would be cool to write down how lemm.ee was born, as well as collect some stats about our first year. Here goes!

A quick recap of the beginning of this instance

As probably many others here, I discovered Lemmy early last summer. I had been aware of the Fediverse previously, and always thought it was an amazing concept, but I had never been super interested in Twitter-style social networks. When I found out that Lemmy combined all the great parts of federation with the best parts of link aggregation, I knew that I had to join immediately.

As I was trying to find an instance to make my account on, I realized that most instances were struggling to keep up with a massive influx of new users. At the time, there was a big explosion in Lemmy user numbers, and the network wasn’t fully ready for it. I have some experience with building software for scale, so it felt natural to set up a new instance and try to help with spreading out the load. I got to work in the evening of the 8th of June, 2023, and I was actually so excited about everything, that I completely skipped sleep that night. By the morning of the 9th of June, lemm.ee was online.

From the very beginning, I always intended for lemm.ee to be a welcoming, reliable, and stable gateway into the Lemmy network. I wrote a welcome post on lemm.ee, which most of you have probably seen, as well as a comment on lemmy.ml inviting new users to lemm.ee (lemmy.ml, as many instances, was extremely overloaded at the time).

We started growing extremely quickly. Thousands of users joined lemm.ee over the first few months. Even during the biggest waves of new users, we never closed our sign-ups. The first month or two were definitely very stressful in terms of just trying to deal with the load, but overall, I think I managed to deal with it well enough, and lemm.ee has been running more or less smoothly (with a few exceptions) ever since.

Some stats about the first year

I promised to collect some statistics about lemm.ee so far. This is what I’ve come up with:

Usage

Overall, lemm.ee has 28,715 registered users. Of course, it’s easy to create an account, and most of these are probably inactive at this point, but it’s still a ridiculous amount.

Of all the registered users, 7903 have made at least one post or comment.

7373 users have never made any posts or comments, but have still been voting. This means that out of users who actually interact on lemm.ee, more than half generate content (through their comments and posts) - this is way more than I expected!

Meanwhile, we also have 13,439 users who have never made a single comment, post or vote. I guess most of these are people who just signed up and never got into Lemmy, but I’m sure there are quite a few hardcore lurkers among this group as well.

As for communities, our users have created 1430 of them. Most of these have not (yet) taken off, as only 491 of these communities have at least one comment in them. In general I am happy to see some great communities appearing on lemm.ee - my hope is that we can spread awesome communities out quite evenly on the network, so that in the end, no instance becomes a single point of failure for Lemmy.

Judging by posts and comments made by lemm.ee users, I feel like we’re definitely on the right track: our users have made 20,898 posts in local communities, and 30,847 posts in communities hosted on other instances. The situation is even better for comments, where lemm.ee users have written 42,785 comments in local communities, and a whopping 569,730 comments on remote communities! This means that lemm.ee is not just its own little closed pocket in the Fediverse, but indeed a proper gateway to the Lemmy network, which is exactly what I always hoped it would be.

Note about comment and post counts: I realize the numbers above don’t match the stats about posts and comments on our front page, I’m guessing something is out of sync there, but the stats I am sharing here are based on actual fresh data, counted directly in our database today.

Lemmy (and lemm.ee) would be quite useless without its users, so a big thanks to all of you for using lemm.ee!

Administration

We have a really awesome volunteer admin team, with admins putting in countless hours of their free time to help weed out bad actors. A lot of the work our admins do is completely invisible to most users. I think the admin team does not really get enough recognition, and in fact in many cases, they actually get some undeserved abuse thrown at them.

I am personally very grateful for everybody who has stepped up to be a part of the team, and I think all lemm.ee users benefit from their work every day. In the past year, our admins have handled 12,329 reports from users. While most reports aren’t too bad, and don’t require harsh action, there is still a significant amount of these reports which contain the absolute worst content which you can find on Lemmy - hate speech, bigotry, gore, even illegal content. Our admins are constantly going through every single report they receive, to ensure that mods are getting admin-level support where needed, and to ensure that malicious users in general can’t use lemm.ee to spread garbage into the Lemmy network.

In terms of admin actions, I think the most interesting statistic might be amount of users banned by lemm.ee admins, grouped by their home instance. I will list the top 10 instances here:

• kbin.social: 581
• lemm.ee: 355
• lemmy.world: 31
• sh.itjust.works: 29
• m.mxin.moe: 28
• discuss.tchncs.de: 26
• kbin.chat: 22
• mastodon.social: 19
• lemmy.ca: 18
• fedia.io: 16

As you can see, with the exception of kbin.social, the vast majority of our instance bans are for our own users. Most of the big instances are actually very good at banning their own abusive users, and once they are banned on their own instance, our admins don’t really need to worry about them, as they have no way to log in at that point. kbin.social is a bit of a special case - they either don’t give out a lot of bans, or those bans just don’t federate to Lemmy properly, and for some reason, a lot of advertisers sign up on that instance all the time.

Financials

I have received some questions every now and then about how much it costs to run lemm.ee. While you can always get a sense for the predicted monthly costs for the current month on https://status.lemm.ee, I thought I might include a full breakdown of our costs for the first year here.

Here are all of our costs for the past year, grouped by service:

• Postmark: 177.06€
• Cloudflare: 222.28€
• DigitalOcean: 1744.27€
• Hetzner: 510.20€ (lemm.ee migrated from DigitalOcean to Hetzner several months ago)
• Backblaze: 3.78€ (we’ve been using Backblaze B2 for a few months now, it’s incredibly cheap)
• Domain registration: 100.70€ (paid for the next 10 years!)

We are currently completely funded by lemm.ee users!

There is a small minority of users who are shouldering the entire cost of lemm.ee for all of us. I am extremely grateful that others find Lemmy useful enough that they have put their own money into ensuring financial stability for lemm.ee.

We currently have 49 active sponsors on GitHub, and 7 active supporters on Ko-Fi. In addition, there have been 62 more sponsors on GitHub over the past year, as well as 49 additional supporters on Ko-Fi. This means that in total, 167 users have supported lemm.ee financially. This has completely exceeded all my expectations, I really think it’s incredible. A huge thanks on behalf of myself (and I think I can speak for all other lemm.ee users here as well) to all the supporters!

Conclusion

Running lemm.ee has certainly been a rollercoaster in many ways. There are a lot more things which happened during the first year that I could write about here. On the other hand, this post is already quite long, and a lot of the things which happened are probably best forgotten about anyway, so I think I should wrap up here 😅.

At its core, Lemmy is really an amazing piece of software. It’s helping real humans connect on the internet, without any corporate bullshit. I am very happy to be here with all of you, thank you for joining lemm.ee for its first year, and I hope you’ll join me here again when I write this post in another year from now!

Hey all!

Upcoming lemm.ee cakeday

Can you believe that lemm.ee is almost 1 year old? In just a couple of weeks (specifically, on the 9th of June), we will be able to celebrate our first instance cakeday.

I am thinking of compiling some stats about how lemm.ee has been used in its first year, if you have any specific stats in particular you would like to see, feel free to comment below. I will try to accommodate any ideas as I start gathering this info!

Infrastructure updates

A few weeks ago, I posted about plans to make some changes to our infrastructure in order to deal with different intermittent networking issues.. It took a bit longer than I hoped (just did not manage to get enough free time between then and now), but I am happy to report that this work has now been completed! Additionally, I have decommissioned our stand-alone pict-rs server.

With the two changes mentioned above, I believe lemm.ee should now be much more resilient going forwad, and I expect a significantly lower rate of infrastructure-related issues for the rest of the year!

I'll leave a tehcnical overview about the problem & solution below for those interested, but if these details don't interest you, then you can safely skip the rest of this post.

For context, lemm.ee has been hosted on Hetzner servers for most of this year (having migrated from DigitalOcean initially), with everything except our database being hosted on the Hetzner Cloud side, and the database itself living on a powerful dedicated Hetzner server. This mix allows a great amount of flexibility for redeploying and horizontally scaling our application servers, while still allowing a really cost-effective way of hosting a quite resource-hungry database.

In order to facilitate networking between the cloud servers and the dedicated database server (which live in different networks), Hetzner provides a service named "vSwitch". This service basically allows you to connect different servers together in a private network. Unfortunately, I discovered quite quickly that this service is very unreliable. During the short few months that we have been using the vSwitch, we have gone through one extended period of downtime (where the service was just completely broken for several hours), as well as dozens (if not hundreds at this point) intermittent disconnects, where servers randomly lose their connections over the vSwitch. After such a disconnect, the connection never recovers without manual intervetion.

For most lemm.ee users, the majority of these vSwitch issues have been mostly invisible, as we have redundancy in our servers - if one server loses its connection to the database, other servers will take over the load. Additionally, I have generally been able to respond quite quickly to issues by redeploying the broken servers (or deploying other temporary workarounds). However, in addition to a huge amount of these issues which lemm.ee users hopefully haven't ever noticed, there have also been a few short periods of downtime this year so far, as well as a few cases of federation delays. These more extreme cases were generally caused by multiple servers losing their vSwitch connections at the same time.

After several attempts to work around these issues, I decided that we need to migrate away from vSwitch.

As of earlier today, lemm.ee is no longer using Hetzner's vSwitch at all!

I finally found enough time earlier today to focus on this migration, and I was able to successfully complete it. None of our networking is relying on the vSwitch anymore.

In the end, I went with quite a simple solution - I configured a host-level firewall (nftables) on our database dedicated server, which will deny all connections by default. Whenever any cloud servers are added/removed, their corresponding public IP addresses are added/removed in the allowlist of our database firewall. It would have been ideal to do this whole logic in Hetzner's own firewall, but that one unfortunately has a limit of only 10 rules per server, which is just not enough for our setup.

Bonus: our pict-rs server has been decommissioned!

Pict-rs is the software which Lemmy uses for everything related to media (image storage mostly). Initially, pict-rs required a local filesystem to store both files as well as metadata about files. Since the beginning, lemm.ee has used a dedicated server just for pict-rs, in order to ensure we could easily redeploy the rest of our servers without losing any images.

Over the past year, pict-rs has gained the ability to store files in object storage, and metadata in a PostgreSQL database. This meant that the server running pict-rs itself no longer contained any of the important data, so it became possible to redeploy without losing any images. Additionally, this meant that it would be possible to run multiple pict-rs servers in parallel.

While we had already migrated our pict-rs server to use object storage and PostgreSQL several months ago, we still had the single dedicated pict-rs server up until today. I have been planning for a while to decommission this server, and start running pict-rs directly on each one of our Lemmy application servers. Earlier today, I was able to complete this plan. This should hopefully mean that our pict-rs server is less likely to get overloaded, and it also means a tiny reduction in our overall monthly infrastructure bill (due to one less server running).

With the above changes, I think our infrastructure has become more robust, and hopefully, we will experience less issues with images, federation, and general downtime going forward.

That's all from me for now. Feel free to leave any thoughts or questions in the comments, and as always, I hope you're having a great day!

Hey folks!

This is a quick notice about a change to our moderation policy.

We have had a policy on lemm.ee for administration and federation nearly since the very beginning. This policy has also always included a section about moderator responsibilities. Today, we have made two changes to this policy:

1. The policy has been renamed to Policy for administration, moderation, federation - this is to make it clear that the policy is also relevant for mods
2. We have introduced a new responsibility for moderators, they must "Ensure that they only provide accurate and clear reasons for mod actions".

The reason for the addition is that mod log actions federate out to other instances, and are more or less permanent (due to how Lemmy and federation works right now). This means that users do not really currently have any easy way to clarify or defend themselves against inaccurate accusations in the mod log.

As always, I am very grateful to all mods for your efforts in building awesome communities on lemm.ee. I hope you can understand why this new policy is necessary - I do not want to make your lives more difficult, the goal is to just try and reduce any mod log related misunderstandings in the future.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day!

Hey folks!

We unfortunately had about half an hour of unplanned downtime today. This was caused by an issue with our hosting provider. The issue is solved for now, and I am planning to make some changes to prevent similar issues in the future. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Technical details

Our servers are communicating with our database over Hetzner's "vSwitch" service. Unfortunately, this service seems to be quite flaky - over the past few months, I have had to deal with the connection just dropping without recovering many times. Mostly this has not resulted in any noticeable downtime, as we have redundant servers, so even if one of them stops working, it won't affect lemm.ee users. However, in this instance, all of our API servers lost their connection to our database at the same time, which resulted in actual downtime.

I have now decided to migrate our setup away from the vSwitch in the near future to hopefully stop these issues for good. Should be possible to do this migration without any downtime, I just need to set aside some time to actually create an alternative solution for us, most likely over the coming weekend. I will update this post once the migration is complete.

Update: the migration is now complete! You can read more here.

Hey folks

This is just a quick heads up that I need to perform some maintenance & upgrades on our database server, which unfortunately will require downtime. I don't expect the downtime to last for longer than 2-3 minutes, but just wanted to give a heads up first so you know not to be concerned.

That's all, hope you have a great week!

Edit: maintenance complete!

Milestone 1 complete!

This is just a mini-announcement & celebration for the fact that I have completed the scope for the first milestone I set for myself in the roadmap.

Of course, I am still planning to keep improving and tweaking things as I go, but in terms of the raw list of features, the work for milestone 1 is complete. I am now going to take a day or two to clean up the code and work on some performance optimizations, and then in the later half of the week, I will continue working towards milestone 2, starting with commenting features!

If anybody is interested (and brave), please feel free to check it out at https://next.lemm.ee, and feel free to share any thoughts and feedback in the comments!

Hello, friends!

TL;DR: I am working on a new Lemmy frontend in nextJS. There is still much work to be done, but you can already have an early look at https://next.lemm.ee

First of all, quick note to lemm.ee users: I am making this announcement post in [email protected], as this is also a notice that I will be hosting an alternative frontend (lemmy-ui-next) for the first time on lemm.ee. Going forward, I will post updates about lemmy-ui-next in a separate dedicated community: [email protected]. If you're interested in future updates, please subscribe there!

What is lemmy-ui-next?

Lemmy is generally accessed through some kind of frontend UI. By default, Lemmy provides its own web interface (lemmy-ui), which you can find on the front page of most Lemmy instances (including lemm.ee). There are also several other independent frontends, for both the web and different mobile platforms, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with.

Lemmy-ui-next is a brand new alternative frontend, built from the ground up with modern and popular tooling - a framework known as NextJS. Lemmy-ui-next has (or aims to have) the following high-level features:

• Open source (AGPL)
• Drop-in replacement for lemmy-ui - same exact URL structure, so all existing links will continue working
• Very plain & minimalistic UI, strongly inspired by other link aggregator sites (of course including the original lemmy-ui!)
• Very basic and "typical" NextJS architecture, to encourage open source contributions
• Fully functional even when JavaScript is disabled (but works better with JS enabled!)
• Optimized data transfer between your browser and the server (filtering out only relevant data from the Lemmy API, caching, memoization)
• Strong focus on privacy and security (all authentication with the Lemmy API is done through secure httpOnly cookies, user IP addresses are not leaked to external image hosts, etc)

What is the current status of lemmy-ui-next?

I have mentally split the initial work I want to complete into 3 milestones:

1. Lurk - All read-only features of Lemmy
2. Participate - Voting/posting/commenting/DMs/reports, etc
3. Moderate - Handling reports, creating & managing communities, etc

I am now nearing completion of the first milestone. It's not 100% there yet, but you can already log in, browse, subscribe to communities and even vote. Some things may still look a bit wonky, and some features are still missing, but the core experience is getting there.

In terms of code contributions, I would ask anybody who is interested in getting involved to contact me first before working on anything. I am not looking for PRs just yet - the code structure is still a bit loose, and I am redefining it as I add more stuff. I would ideally really like to complete the first 3 milestones before opening things up for external contributors.

Who can use lemmy-ui-next?

At the moment, it is only hosted on this instance, at https://next.lemm.ee. I do not yet have any formal instructions for running it on other instances, but generally speaking, it is a simple NextJS app - to deploy it, you just need to do: npm install, npm run build and LEMMY_BACKEND=https://<your lemmy api here> npm run start.

Why not just improve lemmy-ui instead?

Lemmy-ui is an extremely important and valuable project. There has been a significant amount of hard effort put into it so far, and nobody can refute that it is the frontend which has really carried Lemmy to this point.

Unfortunately, there are some architectural problems with lemmy-ui (mostly related to how data is fetched and how sessions are stored in memory), all of which would require quite a significant rewrite to fix. Additionally, I think that the core technical solution used for lemmy-ui is just a bit too obscure, which has been an obstacle to my own contributions, as well as to contributions by others. If a rewrite is on the table anyway, then I believe a different technology is the best way forward.

Why not work on lemmy-ui-leptos instead?

Lemmy-ui-leptos is another rewrite of lemmy-ui, which is being lead by Lemmy maintainers. It is based around a Rust web framework called Leptos. I think this is really cool tech, and will be happy to host lemmy-ui-leptos on lemm.ee in the future as well.

There are a two key reasons why I personally decided to start working on another alternative, though:

• I have heard from several people on Lemmy that they feel like Leptos is a big barrier to entry in terms of them contributing
• Even for myself personally, I am very comfortable (and think I can move very fast) when working on something like NextJS, but with Leptos, I think the learning curve would be quite big and I would get much less done with any time I invest into it

My hope is that by providing a very vanilla alternative, I can provide an outlet for potential open source contributors who would like to work on Lemmy, but aren't prepared to do it with Leptos.

Does this mean that lemm.ee will change in ways I don't like?

First, let me be clear: lemm.ee will always host the default Lemmy frontend. This means lemmy-ui for now, and most likely lemmy-ui-leptos in the future.

I am however considering the possibility of switching things around at some point in the future, so that lemmy-ui-next will be hosted directly on lemm.ee, and lemmy-ui will be accessible on a different subdomain (like ui.lemm.ee). This would only happen once I have completed all 3 milestones for lemmy-ui-next. The main reason I am considering this is that I feel like I will always be in the best position to offer technical support to users on the frontend which I am myself maintaining. If you have any thoughts about this potential change, please let me know in the comments below!

That's about it for now!

This is something I've been thinking of doing for a while now, and I'm very excited to finally get the ball rolling! If you have a chance, please feel free to check out what https://next.lemm.ee looks like so far, and please let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback!

Hey

This is just a quick heads up that our host, Hetzner, has been experiencing networking issues today, which has caused some downtime for lemm.ee.

I have a workaround in place for now, so we should (fingers crossed) be recovering at the moment, but I am still waiting on the proper solution from Hetzner. You can track their issue here: https://status.hetzner.com/incident/9406c500-9c8b-48be-9591-a73691134096

Also, this is a good opportunity to remind everybody about https://status.lemm.ee - you can be sure that I will provide updates on that page as soon as I am aware of & dealing with any issues. I have been posting status updates for the current issue there as well.

Sorry for the inconvenience and I hope you have an otherwise great day!

UPDATE: Hetzner claims they have fixed the issue, but the problems have not been resolved for lemm.ee servers yet, so I am keeping my temporary workaround active for now. Will continue troubleshooting this tomorrow.

UPDATE 2: Hetzner has now fixed their issue, and our network has been restored to its original optimized state.

Hello!

I am sunaurus, the head admin of lemm.ee. Ever since I created my instance, I have been following a lot of public and private discussion channels between different parties involved with Lemmy. As I’m sure many others have also noticed, the discussions in such channels sometimes get heated, and in fact recently, I feel like there has been a constant trend in these discussions towards a lot of demands, hostility, negativity, and a general lack of empathy between different participants in the Lemmy network.

I am writing this post for a few reasons:

1. I would like add a bit of positivity by expressing my gratitude towards every single person who has helped improve Lemmy.
2. I want to speak up in defense of different people who have been receiving negativity lately.
3. There are a few false rumors spreading on Lemmy, which I would like to try and counteract with very simple evidence.
4. I want to remind everybody that at the end of the day, all of us care about building and improving Lemmy. We all have the same goal, and it’s too easy to lose sight of that.

I will split up what I want to say in this post by different user groups - users, mods, admins and developers. I understand that many people belong to several (or even all) of these groups, but I just want to highlight the value of, and express my gratitude to each group separately.

Users

At the end of the day, Lemmy would not be worth anything without the users. Users bring Lemmy to life by posting great content, getting involved in discussions in comments, helping surface interesting content for others through voting and even keeping the platform clean through reports. I am extremely thankful for all the users who have given me so much enjoyment on this platform.

I believe that users often get treated unfairly on Lemmy based on what instance they are participating from. I’m sure so many of you have noticed comments around Lemmy along the lines of “Oh, another user from , I’m going to completely ignore your stupid takes”. I’ve also many cases of people treating users as second-class citizen if they are not on the same instance - for example, I’ve seen users who are active and valuable participants in communities on another instance receive comments like “why are you participating in our discussions, go back to your own instance”. In my opinion this is completely counterproductive to the whole idea of federation. On a human level, I can understand it - you’re far more likely to notice or remember what instance somebody is posting from if you have a negative experience. As a result, as time goes by, people tend to develop negative views of each instance, despite potentially having had many positive interactions with other users of those same instances. The message I want to put out here is that instances, especially bigger ones, are not monoliths - do not judge users based on what instance they are browsing Lemmy from, judge them by their actual words and actions.

Mods

There are some excellent communities already on Lemmy, and these communities are all continuously being built up and maintained by mods. Mods put in huge amounts of their free time and energy in order to provide spaces for all Lemmy users. They form the first line of defense against bad actors, they keep communities alive and often receive no praise, only criticism. I am very grateful to everybody who has dedicated time to building communities on Lemmy.

Users rarely notice the lengths mods go to in order to keep communities running smoothly - mods more often than not only get noticed when users disagree with some mod actions. I believe mods deserve a lot better than this. Constructive criticism can of course be useful to improve communities, but it must be balanced with empathy and kindness towards people who have been putting in effort to provide something for users. Remember that there is another human being reading your words when you start writing about the mods of any particular community. Users who are not happy with mods of a certain community always have the opportunity to start their own community and run it as they like.

Admins

Admins provide two main key functions for the network:

1. Taking care of the actual infrastructure of Lemmy
2. Working as a higher level defense against bad actors, in cases where mods are not enough

I can tell from my own experience that being an admin of a bigger instance requires constant energy and attention. I don’t believe that there is a single medium-to-big instance where the admins have not put in hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of their free time, as well as in many cases, probably their own money. This is a service which admins provide for free, and it is necessary in order to keep the Lemmy network healthy. I have endless respect for anybody who is willing to put themselves in the position of a Lemmy admin.

I have seen awful messages towards admins from all the other groups listed here, including other admins. These messages range from condescending and rude, to downright hateful. I have seen admins treated as useless and their work taken for granted. I have seen people getting frustrated with admins for not spending every waking minute on Lemmy. I have seen some users consistently spreading provably false rumors about particular admins in an effort to tarnish their reputation on Lemmy.

Before you take out frustration on admins, please remember that they are also humans who have been working tirelessly to improve Lemmy in their own way.

Also, a reminder: the absolute best feature of Lemmy is that users are free to pick their instance - and as a result, users are also free to pick their admins. Even more than that, users can always become their own admins by spinning up their own instance. Yes, this requires dedication, effort, and research, but that’s exactly my point. It’s not easy running an instance, and mistreating people who do this as a free service is completely unacceptable.

Developers

Lemmy development has been lead by a few key maintainers, with a massive amount of smaller contributors. The software is constantly being improved at a very good pace, and everybody is able to benefit from this effort at no cost whatsoever. I am extremely grateful to everybody who has participated in the development of the Lemmy software, and other related software, as without you folks, none of us would even be here now.

There seems to be a huge amount of people with very little appreciation of the work that has gone into the software. I’m sure many of you have seen countless messages where people express that the devs should be doing more in one way or another. “They should work faster”, “they should prioritize this obviously most important feature”, “they should be available 24/7 to offer support”, etc. I just want to take a moment here and acknowledge what core maintainers have already done for Lemmy:

• Years worth of work on the code itself
• Offering support to the community and other admins
• Reviewing literally thousands of pull requests on GitHub
• Acting fast in stressful situations where the Lemmy network has been overloaded
• Not abandoning the project in the face of constant hateful users
• Sacrificing literally hundreds of thousands of euros in missed salaries which they could have been getting if they were working for a tech company instead of working on Lemmy

I also want to take this moment to discredit some rumors which I have seen repeated too many times:

1. Rumor: Lemmy devs do not accept outside code contributions

This is completely false - the maintainers are completely open to (and even constantly asking for) contributions. When somebody starts contributing, they will receive support and code reviews very quickly. I can tell you that I have experienced this myself several times, but that’s anecdotal, so let me also provide evidence:

a. Contributors list for the Lemmy backend: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors

b. Contributors list for Lemmy UI: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/graphs/contributors

Both of these lists include 100 different names, and that’s only because GitHub literally caps these pages to 100 users. Actually, the amount of different contributors is even bigger. If Lemmy devs did not accept and encourage outside contributions, then there would be no way for these lists to be so big.

2. Rumor: Lemmy devs work too slowly

This is an extremely entitled and frankly stupid claim. I try to keep on top of the changes made in the Lemmy repo, and let me tell you, the pace of improvement is very good.

I very firmly believe that if the network started downgrading to Lemmy versions from ~8 months ago, the whole network would just collapse, as none of the instances could keep up with the current volume. That is to say, we have come an extremely long way since last summer alone.

Let me provide some more evidence. Take a look at the Pulse page for the Lemmy backend on GitHub: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pulse. As of writing this, Lemmy devs have merged 18 pull requests in the week leading up to this post - that’s an average of 2.5 merged PRs per day. This is extremely good for a project with a small underfunded team.

3. Rumor: Lemmy devs do not prioritize the important issues

There are two sides to this. First of all, there are endless users who turn to the Lemmy devs with what they believe is the most important issue and should immediately be prioritized - the problem is that almost none of these endless users have the same view of what the most important issue actually is! In that sense, it’s literally impossible to please everybody, because everybody wants different things.

On the other hand, even when Lemmy devs do prioritize things which some users have been desperately asking for, I have on several occasions seen a dismissive response along the lines of “too little too late”. Basically, the demands made are often unrealistic and impossible to meet.

If you are somebody who feels like Lemmy devs are not doing enough, I would ask you to please take a step back, look at the actual contributions which they have made, and consider how you yourself would feel if after making such a massive contribution, you would still need to listen to countless strangers on the internet tell you how you’re not good enough in their opinion.

Conclusion

Lastly, I am very thankful to anybody who took the time to read to the end of this post. Again, my goal is to try and defuse some of the hostility, as well as to put out a message of gratitude and positivity. I am very interested in the success of Lemmy as a whole, and that is much easier to achieve and maintain if we all work together. Thank you, I hope you're doing well, and have a nice weekend!