This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they'd like to myself, @[email protected] , SleeplessOne , or @[email protected] about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
NLNet Funding
First of all some good news: We are currently applying for new funding from NLnet and have reached the second round. If it gets approved then @[email protected] and SleeplessOne will work on the paid milestones, while @dessalines and @nutomic will keep being funded by direct user donations. This will increase the number of paid Lemmy developers to four and allow for faster development.
You can see a preliminary draft for the milestones. This can give you a general idea what the development priorities will be over the next year or so. However the exact details will almost certainly change until the application process is finalized.
Development Update
@ismailkarsli added a community statistic for number of local subscribers.
@jmcharter added a view for denied Registration Applications.
@dullbananas made various improvements to database code, like batching insertions for better performance, SQL comments and support for backwards pagination.
@SleeplessOne1917 made a change that besides admins also allows community moderators to see who voted on posts. Additionally he made improvements to the 2FA modal and made it more obvious when a community is locked.
@nutomic completed the implementation of local only communities, which don't federate and can only be seen by authenticated users. Additionally he finished the image proxy feature, which user IPs being exposed to external servers via embedded images. Admin purges of content are now federated. He also made a change which reduces the problem of instances being marked as dead.
@dessalines has been adding moderation abilities to Jerboa, including bans, locks, removes, featured posts, and vote viewing.
In other news there will soon be a security audit of the Lemmy federation code, thanks to Radically Open Security and NLnet.
Support development
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
- Liberapay (preferred option)
- Open Collective
- Patreon
- Cryptocurrency
What happened with the domain Lemmy.ml when Mali took back controls over its domains and some sites went offline? Are you confident that the .ml domain will be reliable in the future?
We're paid up on our current registrar for a few more years, but I honestly don't know how much that can be trusted. Its pretty difficult to get clear information on which ones are safe, and which ones aren't.
If lemmy.ml goes down, it will be a major annoyance as we migrate domains, and will likely have a day or two of downtime. Even outside of DNS yanks, we do daily DB backups, and have our pictures backed up locally as well, so a full restore is possible, but federation would definitely have issues, and would probably need to do a lot of re-subscribes. Overall tho, it wouldn't destroy the lemmy project or anything, and if people migrate to smaller servers in the process, that would give us a lot more time to code ๐ .
I apologize for that tho , it was something I didn't forsee and wasn't even thought of many years ago when I registered.
Have you considered migrating while you still have control of the domain? You could at least make the domain redirect in that case. Though not sure if federation could somehow pick up that lemmy.ml has moved elsewhere.
Seems a bit too risky, because there's always the possibility that our current registrar will be fine, and just make whatever agreements they want with Mali's government.
I recommend lemmy.su for obvious reasons if that ever happens lol
I'd be very curious how you guys migrate to a new domain if you ever need to, maybe there will be an open source tool to help with it, and maybe some improvements inside Lemmy's code, like api calls from both domains to initiate the migration
There's some instructions here, but I haven't tested them recently: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/backup_and_restore.html?highlight=backup#backup-and-restore-guide
We might be able to make something inside lemmy's code that could do a lot of that for you, but someone would need to open an issue and work on it.
I meant stuff like other instances updating your domain name for all its users/communities, fixing their subscriptions and stuff