Some years ago we used to post weekly development updates to let the community know what we are working on. For some reason we stopped posting these updates, but now we want to continue giving you information every two weeks about the recent development progress. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.
We’ve been working towards a v0.19.0 release of Lemmy, which will include several breaking API changes. Once this is ready, we’ll post the these changes in dev spaces, and give app developers several weeks to support the new changes.
This week @nutomic finished implementing the block instance feature for users. It allows users to block entire instances, so that all communities from those instances will be hidden on the frontpage. Posts or comments from users of blocked instances in other communities are unaffected. He also reworked the 2-Factor-Authentication implementation, with a two-step process to enable 2FA which prevents locking yourself out. Additionally he is reworking the API authentication to be more ergonomic by using headers and cookies. Finally he is adding a feature for users to import/export community follows, bocklists and profile settings.
@dessalines is currently implementing a redesign of the join-lemmy.org website. He is also keeping the lemmy-js-client updated with the latest backend changes 1 2 3.
@phiresky optimized the way pagination is implemented. He is also fixing problems with federation workers which are causing test failures and performance problems in the development branch. These problems were introduced during a complex rewrite of the federation queue which was recently finished, and is thought to allow Lemmy federation to scale to the size of Reddit.
@SleeplessOne1917 is implementing remote follow functionality, which makes it easy to follow communities from your home instance while browsing other instances. He is also fixing problems with the way deleted and removed comments are handled .
@codyro and @ticoombs have been making improvements to lemmy-ansible, including externalizing the pict-rs configuration, adding support for AlmaLinux/RHEL, cleaning up the configuration, as well as versioning the deploys. These will make deploying and installing Lemmy much easier.
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 (scroll to bottom of page)
Looking at the Liberapay, it’s shocking Lemmy only gets $332 a month to fund this entire social media. Compare that to the totally “grass roots” normal NFT growth where they immediately had millions poured into them from venture capitalist. As it turns out, actual grass roots social media without profit incentive isn’t profitable! And that’s how you know we’re on the right path.
For as many users as lemmy has now, its kind of astonishing how little donations we have, like less than the average youtuber / streamer with a patreon. Its more when we sum up the other platforms, but I’d really like us to be able to add more full-time devs and grow the coop.
And not just us of course, but open source software in general needs so much more funding than its currently getting. If you use open source software, consider donating to those devs!
Once I finish the join-lemmy.org site redesign, I’ll put a section on the donation page that sums all these up for transparency’s sake, and we’ll probably try to have a once-per-year donation push to try to make sure we get fully funded.
I wonder how many people don’t understand Lemmy and thought when they were donating to their instances it benefitted lemmy development as a whole? I see many posts about donating to your instance, but little to donating to devs. Do any instances share their donations?
Instance runners should also get donations, if not just for the hosting costs (which shouldn’t be too much), then for their labor time spent moderating and building spaces.
I’m sure many of them also do contribute to lemmy’s dev upstream.
For as many users as lemmy has now, its kind of astonishing how little donations we have, like less than the average youtuber / streamer with a patreon. Its more when we sum up the other platforms, but I’d really like us to be able to add more full-time devs and grow the coop.
Why look at youtubers when you can look at a open source project?, look at misskey which is very similar , it makes about 4k while having about 10k monthly active users, that’s about 0.4 dollar per user.
Lemmy has about 40k monthly active users and makes about 3962 , about 0.1 dollar per user.
If you will push the conversation rate to be as high as misskey, that should give you currently about 16K a month (40k * 0.4).
I have a few ideas about how to increase it, i can open a issue throwing some ideas, for starter (I don’t remember if i said this before) the part in the UI where people are suppose to learn lemmy wants donations (the little heart), is probably very hard to notice.
Thank you, all of that sounds like very good news.
Thanks to all the people working on this.
This week @nutomic finished implementing the block instance feature for users.
Thank youuuuuu!
Great work. Thank you for the update Nutomic.
Amazing job as always!
If these are API-breaking changes, shouldn’t you bump the major version? https://semver.org/
I think you’re forgetting this:
- Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.
Fair enough.
From an end user perspective, it feels like it’s operationally stable, though I don’t know about developmentally stable. Maybe it’s worth a 1.0 release soon. Lots of people are running it in production now.
Before 1.0 we definitely need to do an API cleanup, the paths are a real mess. However that will require lots of breaking changes so Im not sure when we can do it.
Yea. I feel like once it can scale pretty well and has been for a bit of time that would be a good opportunity to release 1.0. But another major factor here is that the backing and sustainability of the project is still up in the air, so the flexibility of breaking changes is maybe rather valuable for a while.
We’re reserving 1.0.0 for a mostly unchanging and stable API. That def isn’t the case currently, as we’ve been rapidly adding features, changing api objects, etc. So minor versions (and usually not patch unless it’s security related), signify breaking api or config changes.
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I would say that that’s is what you want. We don’t have a survey on user intentions.
I for instance would like to block furry instances, as an example, but I have nothing against their users. I don’t care if someone is into furry, I simply don’t want to see it myself
Just adding another voice agreeing that I just want to block instance posts, not comments from their users.
If people really don’t want to see anything from an instance then they should join an instance that is bit federated with the one in question.
If blocking all users from an instance does get implemented I believe it should be separate to blocking posts as they’re very different use cases.
You can join an instance that has defederated and it’ll be exactly what you’re looking for.
Exactly that, if i block an instance, i want it blocked.
Excellent work! Keep it up!
Posts or comments from users of blocked instances in other communities are unaffected
Hate to say it but this makes that feature a little insufficient
