Lemmy ask you anything

The developers for Lemmy held an Ask Me Anything this week, answering many questions from the community. If you’re interested in the direct responses I recommend checking out the AMA itself, there is a lot of interesting information in there. In this article I want to pick out a few common threads among the responses from the developers, and analyse them.

“There is no such thing as a neutral space”, developer Dessalines says at some point during the AMA, in response to a remark about the political stance of the developers. Software is never neutral, it is an expression of the people who make the software, with their explicit and implicit intentions, worldviews and ideas embedded in the software. Lemmy is an clear example of this; the developers explicitly identify as marxist-leninist, something they confirm multiple times in the AMA.

Its a matter of discussion that has come up for people before; do you feel comfortable using software made by people who’s political views might drastically differ from your own? But like Dessalines says, the question is also, how does the developer and their worldview impact software design? Because the views and ideas that developers Dessalines and Nutomic have about software, Lemmy and the fediverse are often much more mundane than their political views, but the impact on how they think about and developer Lemmy is there, all the same.

Communities and growth

A question that has come up regularly for discussion is that of duplicate communities. There are multiple large communities dedicated to tech news for example, all hosted on different servers. This can lead to confusion and duplicate postings. Here Dessalines has a clear view: the network effect will run its due course, and over time, people will either settle on a main community, or each duplicate community finds its own unique identity. Dessalines rejects the possibility of combining communities: “[they] should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.”

Fediverse growth is seen as something external, that will happen regardless of what Lemmy does or is. This is stated surprisingly explicitly, for someone who is responsible for developing the third biggest platform on the fediverse: “it [the fediverse] will grow whether we want it or not”, says Nutomic, adding “I dont see a way to influence this growth, we just need to adapt and deal with it.” Another comment by Dessalines gives more context, where he explains that he’d have expected growth to happen steadily but slowly, and feels that the actions by other actors such as Reddit have greatly increased the speed of the adoption process. The last few months have been overwhelming for both developers, and they are open about how stressful and chaotic it has been. Usability of the platform is also seen as something that happens outside of developer actions, with Nutomic saying "Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements".

Onboarding and moderation

This thinking about fediverse size and growth is also visible in other places. In the view of the developers, Lemmy is already “extremely huge”. They are coming from a perspective when you used to be able to catch up with all posts in half an hour, something that has drastically changed in recent months. One of the things they are thinking about and working on is giving more space to smaller servers. The current algorithms (such as ‘Active’) put large communities at the top, and tend to give little space to smaller places. With a different sorting algorithm this is something the developers hope alter this dynamic.

Another aspect that comes up in multiple ways is the current onboarding via join-lemmy.org. A rework of the website is on the roadmap, Dessalines confirms. Join-lemmy.org also contains an list of servers that new people can join, with minimal to no filtering of servers who can appear on the list. Asked whether Lemmy will implement a server convenant like Mastodon has, where a server has to sign a convenant stating host (among others) racist or transphobic content, Nutomic says that this is not necessary, and shows hesitation to such an idea. Nutomic’s opinion is that it is more preferable to advertise one server that racists can join, than to have them spread out over all different instances.

Regarding moderation there are a few comments: the ability for users to block specific communities is coming soon, the developers explain that they simply have not gotten around to it yet. When a recent patch introduced a bug in moderation tools, similarly they explain that they have to balance so many priorities, and get so many notifications, that they simply missed it, as there is simply no time for them to read all notifications.

Overall, the developers show a great willingness to engage with the community, answering a large number of questions on the AMA, in a context where they feel they are often overwhelmed at the amount of attention that is required from them from all directions. They are refreshingly open and honest, about the things they do not know as well. The answers from the developers show a software project that has had a specific niche and audience, which suddenly changed and grew rapidly as a result of the #redditmigration this summer. This means a new situation for the developers, with new responsibilities, and a rapidly growing audience that is much more diverse than from what used to be. How Lemmy will develop itself over the coming period remains to be seen, but the open and clear engagement with the community from the developers is a great step in the right direction.