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Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon (techcrunch.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw.... existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement... "

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[–] 6 points 2 years ago (19 children)

Yeah I've considered leaving Lemmy because of who is in charge of development right now. They were not ready for its sudden burst in popularity and are not handling it well.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Could you expand? How aren't they handling it well?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    The biggest issues that have come up so far are moderation and database optimization. The moderation issue is significant enough that large instances have considered shutting down, but the database optimization thing is what really drives me crazy. It is absurdly expensive for hosts considering we only have 35k MAU (just one of our midsized instances should be able to host the whole userbase for the cost they currently pay) and it has been largely deprioritized to the point that contributors who have tried to fix it have been told off.

    It’s one thing if it’s just a couple of devs working on the project and trying their best, it’s an entirely different thing when a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues. At this point a significant number of users have been lost because the devs have been largely unable to capitalize on previous waves on growth due to slow development.

    Not to mention things like authorized fetch, which if fixed would ensure Lemmy/Mastodon interoperability and would effectively make Lemmy the go to place for groups on the fediverse. This would constitute a huge boost in engagement from the broader fediverse.

    Because of all this Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)
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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago*

    That post seems like an overreaction. Which makes me think that the linked GitHub issue is just the straw that broke the patience of the developer that has moved on. Which is fair, but their action to post an emotional and negative public announcement is as immature as the thing they're complaining about.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I am a dev, but not a Rust dev.

    Rust, Go, and C# look like the future to me. Everyone is moving to strongly typed, explicitly typed languages for a reason.

    Rust is as fast as it gets, and much much safer and easier than C or C++ at the cost of slightly odder syntax than higher level languages.

    Microsoft has done great things with C# and open source and multi-platforming. It's the easiest, quickest, safest way to develop business applications. The performance is really pretty good until you compare it to Rust.

    Go is between the two, but probably a little closer to Rust.

    Other languages will stick around the same way Fortran has still been in use despite being deprecated for 30 years. But really nobody should be developing anything new in PHP.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Time for a repo fork?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    You can have as many forks as you want, but that's a software engineer's solution to a social problem. Lemmy is the "name brand" now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation, and it will be orders of magnitudes more difficult to get support for forks, both from a contributor and from a user perspective.

    Just look at last year's Twitter migration, and the sea of people complaining about Mastodon not having features they felt were a requirement for adoption, while also ignoring every other Mastodon alternative on the Fediverse that had everything they were looking for.

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  • [+] [B] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    As I see it, there are three major ways a fork could gain significant standing among the community:

    • They could get features out faster. Scaled sort would've been absolutely pivotal during a migrationary wave, as it would have allowed small communities to gain exposure on the front page in a far more natural and organic way. Currently new communities are largely dependent on the community spotlight subs and there's not a whole lot of ways to actually gain momentum after that initial posting.
    • They could improve performance and appeal to admins. The current cost of hosting Lemmy is fairly bloated from my understanding.
    • They could invest in moderation. Beehaw would certainly be interested.

    I honestly think any one of these is easily manageable by a handful of people in off time. Other parts of the fediverse of similar size are chock full of forks.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Lemmy is the “name brand” now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation

    Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.

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