Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:

• https://startrek.website/c/news
• https://starwars.website/c/news

This also isn’t unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.

Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.

There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.

Overall tho, I’m against the concept of “combining / merging communities” that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.

Wow lots of questions here.

• Im doing well, its exciting to know that so many people like the software Ive worked on for the last years. The first month after the migration was really stressful, but by now its calmed down a lot. Plus there are many contributors now which are helping a lot.
• Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
• I think the “breaking bugs” were really minor considering how we had to constantly rush out performance and security fixes. This should get better as we dont need to make emergency fixes, and have more time to let the community test release candidates before making the full release.
• Supporting downgrades means that someone has to test them and report/fix problems. We dont have time for that, but feel free to do it.
• Like I said, our recent releases had urgent performance/security fixes so we didnt have enough time for testing. We also didnt find out about these problems until later. Part of the problem is that keeping up with issues is almost a full-time job on its own, so I rarely read them anymore. If you see something important reported, do let me know.
• No concrete plans, but I definitely think that admins are the main actors who should have a voice in development. Its impossible for us to listen to all the individual users, because there are too many and they often dont have the necessary technical knowledge. If you have some ideas how to facilitate communication between devs and admins, let me know.

Are we almost done? Nope, only halfway. Will answer the second half a bit later.

Alright second part:

• The biggest problem is definitely that there are too many things to do, but only the two of us working on it fulltime. The day only has so many hours and its impossible to keep up with everything. Thats why community contributions are really important.
• The amount of contributors is very high compared to a few months ago, its not easy to keep up with all the pull requests. Its going to take some time for processes to adjust to the new scale, and for new contributors to learn how everything works.
• This is a question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml
• People work on whatever they are passionate about. Generally that works quite well.
• I am only working on Lemmy and thats already a lot. So another question for @dessalines@lemmy.ml

The instance list is fine as is. Think about it like this: do you want racists to join a single instance so they are all in one place? Or do you want them to spread across all different instances, causing moderation problems everywhere?

Wasnt free speech all about being able to express your opinion without getting banned?

What type(s) of transphobia?

Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there’s anything else needs to be added, we’re open to PRs.

Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn’t be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I’d rather focus on improving lemmy’s search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.

o7 comrade. I’m glad I can help out in any way.

The lack of forced monetization is why I joined Lemmy. It’s a feature.

Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don’t know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn’t do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.

We have a Legal section under admin settings, that’s an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We’d need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.

Im not a lawyer so I dont know about GDPR. Do you know how similar platforms such as Mastodon handle it?

You don’t have to bother with GDPR until you’re a certain size company

If lemmy is working as intended (many small, connected servers), hosting costs should be small: like < $10 USD / month. (images are another issue, but I’ll answer that in other comments).

Of course we don’t plan on adding any monetization directly into lemmy or its UI, including ads, or required payments. Right now at least the best way is to put donation links in your site sidebar.

People reporting those instances / users, then admins can add them to the blocklist, or ban them and remove their content.

I dont follow /c/worldnews so I dont see much of that. Also hexbear is federating now, so it might easily swing back the other way again.

Im from Germany and studied computer science. Was always very interested in open source and decentralized software. Worked in a couple different companies, but was never happy making profit for someone else. Luckily I found Lemmy shortly after Dessalines started the project, and put a lot of work into it. Then we found the NLnet funding which allowed us to work fulltime on the project.

As a communist, I’m also receptive to a more democratic and less-hierarchical style of moderation. A LOT of reddit communities have been wrecked by an absent top moderator, who suddenly and suspiciously “becomes active” and removes the moderators who have been keeping the sub going for years.

We’ve had several people make proposals on github, but my issue has always been this: these are mostly untested, and potentially insecure. In the online space without any sort of real-person verification, If some kind of voting on mod actions were implemented, people could just create fake accounts to game the system, or find other ways.

AFAIK there hasn’t been any forum or community software that doesn’t implement the top-down chain of trust model. And of course this is less of concern with decentralized software like lemmy, where people always have the option to host their own instance, or create their own community, and moderate it exactly as they see fit. That’s not an option you have with reddit.

Please add a statement on the apparent connection between lemmy.world and their support to the US led NATO: The United States is the worst human rights violator in post-war history. The United States is responsible for over 300 million deaths directly and as the sole world superpower that has imposed its economic system on nearly the entire world, its system based upon deprivation for many (in exchange for luxury for a few) has led to the intentional starvation of 9 million people annually and imposition of poverty that has led to 5 million deaths annually from lack of medical care. On top of the 300 million the United States has killed directly, the 14 million lives taken annually by its world-wide imposed economic system has killed 448 million people through social murder since 1991 when its economic system was finally imposed nearly worldwide.

The United States, through its international secret police organization (CIA), also runs secret black sites throughout much of the world where people are detained without charge or trial and often tortured. The United States has openly admitted to running a torture program in breach of international conventions it has signed.

The United States also illegally invaded, and currently occupies 30% of Syria, controlling 90% of its petroleum. This illegal occupation violates Syrian sovereignty and occurred long before the conflict in Ukraine.

As the user wrote above, free speech is important, but human rights violations are just not acceptable.

Edit: I forgot to add, the United States has a system of racial apartheid and mass incarceration targeting ethnic minorities within its own borders. As a country representing about 4% of the worlds population, it contains more the 20% of the worlds prisoners. These prisoners are forced into labor for private corporations and often subject to solitary confinement (which the UN has called a method of torture) This system of mass incarceration and forced labor is unlike any other in the world, and is largely a holdover of the United States system of race-based chattel slavery, that was subsequently replaced by a codified racial caste system that denied Black Americans all human rights until a few decades ago.

For obvious reasons, we don’t want to be involved in inter-server conflicts. Admins are free to run their servers however they see fit.

Would you think Ranked Choice voting for admins i.e. with the Schulze method - which Debian power-genius uses - integrated into the sites would mean that better community supported decisions can be made for both moderation as well as in comments/communities about stuff?

I don’t know how the debian one works (I’m also personally a fan of olympic score / range voting over ranked choice). Because of the possibility of weaknesses of these community-moderation proposals(people creating fake users to vote, and gaming them in hundreds of other ways I can’t think about) I’d rather not stress-test them in lemmy.

We don’t have a remind-me, but someone could implement it, it’d def be useful. I don’t even think there’s an open issue for that one yet.