Parenting in the Middle East isn’t working very well.

You are supposed to sneak across the border to go have sex with one of those wild girls at the music festival.

Humanity is unable to teach Love and Compassion. We are failing, Big Time!

You think you can raise your 2023 children on Middle East and Levant memes? You think those old memes are safe to feed to your kids?

Do you not see the hate that comes out of those 3 big story books?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta5hPRmxo8k

Middle East religions are also good at totally screwing up the minds of 17 year olds about sex and clergy who have sex with children!

One really wonders where the priorities of this project really lie? https://www.reuters.com/world/us-accuses-china-global-media-manipulation-2023-09-28/

On a positive note, an actual concern for data integrity expressed by core developer!

"This is a major issue with moderation, we should consider publishing the fix in an 0.18.5 release."

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3988

Although the project has an obsession over deleting data. Removing data. For communist flag waving project leaders, why is there such a focus on messages being deleted/removed? Why isn't it more like WIkipedia where commons is emphasized and terms-of-service emphasize that this is primarily a public forum and contributing to commons (communism?! hello?).

The lack of care for data and actually noticing data on the site keeps being demonstrated. Issue has been ignored for months - and was newly introduced bug when all the post Reddit API change was going on…

Just opened today, people repeating it, which the site creators do not repeat these easily solved bugs as priorities. Why not have a “top 20 bugs” and organize them 2 ways, easy of fix and importance of fix. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3987

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3980

2023-09-22

Communications… still really odd how May, June, July there was so little: https://sh.itjust.works/post/5652703

The claims to support Reddit level performance without listening to what Reddit has to say about PostgreSQL scaling from more than a decade ago is… still really bad. They still claim ‘high performance’ on the front page of the project as they have for a long time, when it isn’t because it lacks any caching and there are still bugs lurking in database due to lack of testing with significant data.

Claiming that federation scales to Reddit when Reddit is a single-site (and has no federation equivalent) is pretty odd performance claim.

The logging that comes out of the Rust code on errors really says it all. Over 4.5 years of coding on the same project and running it on the live public Internet at lemmy.ml - and there is no way for a site operator/admin to view the Rust code failure logs without having to do all that independently (and no recommendations on the importance of viewing logs). And when GitHub issues get posted with log problems, the developers with all the Rust code experience ignore them.

This gem of a quote: "That index is great, I didn't see that because on my database I guess the person table is too small for it to matter." https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3960

That's exactly the problem with the whole project, no data, not concerned about data, ignoring all the problems on lemmy.ml since April despite 4 years of experience… data is not the focus of the project developers. lemmy.ml ran for 4 years on public Internet with nearly zero data. Not even a couple hundred megabytes of data… and no testing and observation of problems with scaling and more data. It seems like they have 4 years of experience that isn’t experience… just like Beehaw has shown with moderation experience and tools.

They ignored Issue 2910 for months during the critical Reddit API issue period, it worked fine with no data in the system, but was surely crashing lemmy.ml lemmy.world beehaw and all my test systems once even a modest amount of data is populated (it really does not take much)!

data loss… this has been going on for more weeks than I can count, and the developers with over 4 years experience are not the ones fixing such data-damage/data-loss bugs… just has been the pattern since Issue 2910 was ignored for months.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3965

Yesterday, you probably saw this informal post by one of our head admins (Chris Remington). This post lamented some of the difficulties we’re running into with the site at this point, and what the future might hold for us. This is a more formal post about those difficulties and the way we currently see things.

Up front: we aren’t confident in the continued use of Lemmy. We are working through how best to make the website live up to the vision of our documents—and simply put, the vast majority of the limitations we’re running into are Lemmy’s at this point. An increasing amount of our time is spent trying to work around or against the software to achieve what we want rather than productively building this community. That leaves us with serious questions about our long-term ability to stay on this platform, especially with the lingering prospect of not having the people needed to navigate backend stuff.

Long-time users will no doubt be aware of our advocacy for moderator tools that we think the platform needs (and particularly that we need). Our belief in the importance and necessity of those tools has only hardened with time. Progress of those tools, however—and even organizing work on them—has been pretty much nonexistent outside of our efforts from what we can see.[1] In the three months since we started seriously pushing the ideas we’d like to see, we’re not aware of any of them being seriously considered—much less taken up or on the way to being incorporated into Lemmy.

In fact: even within the framework of Lemmy’s almost nonexistent roadmap and entirely nonexistent timetable on which to expect features it has been made clear to us that improving federation or moderation on the platform are not big priorities.[2] We have implicitly been told that if this part of the software is to improve we will need to organize that from scratch. And we have tried that to be clear. Our proposal is (and has been) paying people bounties for their labor toward implementing these features, in line with paying all labor done on our behalf—but we’ve received mixed messages from the top on whether this would be acceptable. (Unclear guidance and general lack of communication is symptomatic of a lot of our relation with the Lemmy devs in the past few months.)

Things aren’t much better on the non-moderator side of things. The problems with databases are almost too numerous to talk about and even Lemmy’s most ardent supporters recognize this as the biggest issue with the software currently. A complete rewrite is likely the only solution. Technical issues with the codebase are also extensive; we’ve made numerous changes on our side because of that. Many of the things we’re running into have been reported up the chain of command but continue to languish entirely unacknowledged. In some cases bugs, feature requests, and other requests to Lemmy devs have explicitly been blown off—and this is behavior that others have also run into with respect to the project. Only very recently have we seen any overtures at regular communication—and this communication has not hinted at any change in priorities.

All of what was just described has been difficult to get a handle on—and having fewer users, less activity, and more moderators has not done a whole lot to ease that. We honestly find that the more we dig and the more we work to straighten out issues that pop up, the more pop out and the more it feels like Lemmy is structurally unsound for our purposes. (One such example of what we’re working with is provided in the next section.)

In summary: we believe we can either continue to fight the software in basically every way possible, or we can prioritize building the community our documents preach. It is our shared belief that we cannot, in the long-term, do both; in any case, we’re not interested in constantly having to fight for basic priorities—ones we consider extremely beneficial to the health of the overall Lemmy network—or having to unilaterally organize and recruit for their addition to the software. We are hobbyists trying to make a cool space first and foremost, and it’s already a job enough to run the site. We cannot also be surrogates for fixing the software we use.

PenguinCoder: A brief sketch of the technical perspective I’ve said a few words about this topic already, here and here. Other Beehaw admins have also brought some concerns to the Lemmy devs. Those issues still exist. To be clear: this is a volunteer operation and Lemmy is their software; they have a right to pick and choose what goes into it and what to put a priority on. But we have an obligation to keep users safe and secure, and their priorities increasingly stifle our own.

In the case of this happening for open source projects, the consensus is to make your own fork. But:

The problem with forking Lemmy is in starting from all the bad that is inherently there, and trying to make it better. That is way more work than starting fresh with more developers. IE, not using Rust for a web app and UI, better database queries from the start, better logging/functions from the start; not adding on bandaids. A fork of Lemmy will have all of Lemmy’s problems but now you’re responsible for them instead.

We don’t need a fork, we need a solution.

To give just one painful example of where an upstream solution is sorely needed: the federation, blocking, and/or removal of problem images.

You post an image to Beehaw. Beehaw sends your content out to every other server it’s federated with Federated server accepts it (beehaw.org is on their allowlist), or rejects it (beehaw.org is on their denylist) If the server accepts it, a copy of your post or comment including the images are now on that receiving server as well as on the server you posted it to. Federation at work. Mod on beehaw.org sees your post doesn’t follow the rules. Removes it from beehaw.org. The other instances Beehaw pushed this content to, do not get that notice to remove it. The copy of your content on Beehaw was removed. The copy of your content on other servers was not removed. The receiving federated instance needs to manually remove/delete the content from their own server For a text post or comment that’s removed, this can be done via the admin/mod tools on that instance For a post or comment including a thumbnail, uploaded images, etc; that media content is not removed. It’s not tracked where in Lemmy that content was used at. Admin removal of media commences. This requires backend command line and database access, and takes about a dozen steps per image; sometimes more. There are dozens of issues—some bigger, some smaller—like this that we have encountered and have either needed to patch ourselves or have reported up the chain without success.

Alternatives and the way forward If possible the best solution here is to stay on Lemmy—but this is going to require the status quo changing, and we’re unsure of how realistic that is. If we stay on Lemmy, it is probable that we will have to do so by making use of a whitelist.

For the unfamiliar, we currently use a blacklist—by default, we federate with all current and newly-created nodes of the Fediverse unless we explicitly exclude them from interacting with our site. A switch to a whitelist would invert this dynamic: we would not federate with anybody unless we explicitly choose to do so. This has some benefits—maintaining federation in some form; staying on Lemmy; generally causing less entropy than other alternatives, etc. But the drawbacks are also obvious: nearly everything described in this post will continue, blacklist or whitelist, because a huge part of the problem is Lemmy.

Because of that we have discussed almost every conceivable alternative there is to Lemmy. We are interested in the thoughts of this community on platforms you have all used and what our eventual choice is going to be, but we are planning on having more surveys in the future to collect this feedback. We ask that you do not suggest anything to us at this time, and comments with suggestions in this thread will be removed.

As for alternatives we’re seriously considering right now: they’re basically all FOSS; would preserve most aspects of the current experience while giving us less to worry about on the backside of things (and/or lowering the bar for code participation); are pretty much all more mature and feature-rich than Lemmy; and generally seem to avoid the issues we’re talking about at length here. Downsides are varied but the main commonality is lack of federation; entropy in moving; questions of how sustainable they are with our current mod team; and more cosmetic things like customization and modification.

We’re currently investigating the most promising of them in greater depth—but we don’t want to list something and then have to strike it, hence the vagueness. If we make a jump, that will be an informed jump. In any case logistics mean that the timetable here is on the order of months. Don’t expect immediate changes. As things develop, we’ll engage the community on what the path forward is and how to make it as smooth as possible.

Other administrators have probably vocally pushed for these things, but we’re not aware of any public examples we can point to of this taking place. Their advocacy has not produced results that we’re aware of in any case, which is what matters. ↩︎

Perhaps best illustrated by the recent Lemmy dev AMA. We’ll also emphasize that Beehaw’s admin team is not alone in the belief that Lemmy devs do not take mod tools or federation issues particularly seriously. ↩︎

What it comes down to me in May was that after 4 years of coding - if they knew they had scale problems (the queue system of federation and the PostgreSQL were both buggy and performing badly)…

The natural answer was to split the code out. Push more to lemmy-ui, such as adding caching to the API calls for “trending communities” and getSite call to NodeJS caching… something.

If they wanted to maintain their Rust approach to development, create a temporary app to get out of the problems and have a fresh approach. Nginx would allow even specific API paths to be redirected to another application. The read-only post and comment listings, community listings, could have been forked out.

The API is why people left Reddit. and Lemmy had an API and kbin did not have an API.

https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/432318/Is-it-just-me-or-has-Lemmy-become-more-negative

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Clearly people liked many aspects about how Reddit presented information, as an information system. And there has been very little positive discussion on Lemmy about the good and what to keep. It’s mostly been hate-filed expressions of “fuck spez” instead of “what worked well and why anyone cared positively in the first place”.

Reddit 2013 and earlier was very different, 2013 was the year of Cambridge Analytica engaging populations.

25 years ago… When Islamic societies used hate and anger as ways to motivate street gangs, everyday people criticized the hate and anger.

But now it’s become politicians and leaders all over the world in 2023 who are using them - without any need for Islam. Politicians and other leaders have had hate and anger professionally endorsed by Cambridge Analytica medical professionals now for over 10 years.

Again, we used to criticize Islamic people for using hate and anger to form street gangs and followers.

There are people with great social skills… but they aren’t becoming leaders away from hate or exploitation of crowds. A social movement towards goodness is long overdue, but it doesn’t seem to take hold.

Christianity in USA has degraded to be almost pure anti-science and out-group hate oriented. Sure, this was there all along since 1492 when it came to Americas from Europe. But it has become notably worse since 2012, and people don’t seem alarmed that groups can be shifted that way… much like Germany in 1930.

There are no easy ways to measure these things, but there are warning signs when entire populations become motivated by hate and mocking.

On Reddit it became extremely popular to hate on Facebook by 2015, but very few would discuss why or how. It isn’t as if Reddit was advertising-free and didn’t have documented cases of grass-roots exploitation. The code and management of Reddit put a huge amount of time into trying to prevent vote manipulation (and make it a trade secret) - where none of that seems to be going on with ActivePub platforms. People notice where Reddit fails, but they don’t seem to notice how hard the problem really is to solve when nobody cares about real identity.

Facebook people mostly used real names, real houses, real photos with their family. Reddit seems to really hate that for the mainstream audience, and that carries over to Lemmy in 2023.

People don’t use fake identities to share secrets about companies by name, instead more often than not fake identities are used to pump garbage and copy old content and present it as new.

It’s funny how when people talk about Facebook as bad, they never seem to mention the real identity aspects of many people on it who joined 12 or more years ago. And there is something kind of sick about a society where real identity and real problems have to be hidden to be accepted online. The thugs have kind of won.

YouTube you often know who the person is because so much is presented in the images and audio. Some of the small-time youtubers with only 700 views talking about technical topics are really the kind of sincere and earnest thing that have largely been abandoned.

Surfing memes of billionaires - be it Trump memes from his antics or Hollywood film memes or video games making billions of $ - and their memes… is dangerous. Trump rode on “high energy” and mocks scientific thinking. The crazy shark-frenzy trend-chasing of memes has become the cornerstone of Lemmy.

lemmy has had wave after wave of hate. Hate towards Reddit bring bitter and hate-filled emotions as the central core of Lemmy for many months. And hating on Elon Musk. And hating on this or that. It really has been an emotional Mob Mentality of hating things.

That’s the kind of emotion Cambridge Analytica was spelling out to those who wanted to ‘lead the masses’, aka get votes - was packaging in 2013. Now it’s all just accepted, the constant hate as a ‘fun topic’. Bitching all the time.

Self-evident is that the May through August opportunity from Reddit didn’t work out, the over 4 years of experience from the key developers just didn’t get applied to the project in much time. But there seems to be a recognition of technical issues more instead of just front-end apps / API smartphone apps… so maybe things will progress through the experience people have gained in having the code crash / lacking features.

It isn’t the only social media software that isn’t progressing, It isn’t even just Twitter and Reddit, it’s bottom-up society.