this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Highlighting the recent report of users and admins being unable to delete images, and how Trust & Safety tooling is currently lacking.

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 83 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't agree with the tone of the Lemmy devs, but they are right: it's opensource being worked on mostly in the free time of people. Do not treat the devs like they are paid to do your bidding, because they aren't. If you donated and have expectations, you don't understand the meaning of a donation.

Imagine if the author had a woodworking workshop on their compound where they made things out of wood; figurines, furniture, tools, sculptures, and so on. Say they opened it up to the public so that guests could have a look, play around, spend some free time there, and maybe even use the equipment there. But then guest started demanding the author buy newer equipment, make sculptures more to the guest's liking, made the workshop more accessible to invalids, put up the national flag, play the radio, and a host of other things. All the while not footing the bill for anything, not helping clean up, not volunteering to help in any fashion.
Then the author refused and invited the guests to help. But instead, the guests went off and made a blog saying the author was selfish, cold, self-centered, egoistic, rude, and what not.

This is what the author of this article and people in that github discussion come over as. If those people came into my workshop and told me how to do things without helping out in any way, I'd rightfully tell them to fuck right off.

Articles like these that are practically demanding change will not and do not improve the dialogue. They are actually bad for opensource as a whole because they give people who don't understand opensource the feeling that they have the right to complain, the right to demand, the right to expect, the right to be entitled to an opinion and an outcome.

That's a thumbs down from me dawg.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] Maalus@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago (8 children)

I have a better example. What if a small company made pills or medical devices. Do they get to be noncompliant with the EU law, and tell their patients "we won't get a medical license, there is too few of us to do it"? If you aren't okay with that, you aren't okay with lemmy being noncompliant GDPR-wise

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[–] ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world 73 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This link has been posted and discussed on Reddit too.

Of course, we shouldn't care about what people on Reddit think (and I noticed this post by chance since I log on there very rarely now), but some users in the thread genuinely ask about joining Lemmy and so I guess it's useful to know about possible obstacles to trying it that they may perceive.

[–] steal_your_face@lemmy.ml 50 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That OP has been crying everywhere about the Lemmy devs being mean to him. Saw a few threads of his here on Lemmy.

[–] CeeBee@lemmy.world 74 points 9 months ago (13 children)

Ya, reading the GitHub issue sounds entirely like burnt out devs being abused by users. It's a massive issue in open source.

The Late Night Linux and Linux Dev Time podcasts talked about exactly this in a recent episode. It can be extremely demoralizing to do all this work for free for a project only to be inundated by ungrateful people demanding you fix something or implement a feature they want. Many open source projects have died because of that.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 32 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (19 children)

We're not talking about a user demanding you release a flatpak build targeting their personal linux distribution running in a VM'd WSL, we're talking about a consumer facing social app that doesn't include the functionality for a user to delete something they added.

You know what the acronym used for describing the most basic functional web app api is?

CRUD - Create, Read, Update, Delete

[–] CeeBee@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (9 children)

we're talking about a consumer facing social app

What we're talking about is a complete free and open source project that's built and maintained completely through volunteer labour.

There are zero obligations towards the people actively using the software.

While I agree that the functionality should exist, the devs can literally do whatever they want. Nobody is paying them.

Edit: you're also seeing only a single instance of a conversation. I can guarantee that the devs have been dealing with asinine and demanding users for a while now. There comes a point where your patience wears thin.

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[–] spiderman@ani.social 16 points 9 months ago (10 children)

while i think there are people like that i think this particular issue is a serious issue that should be handled properly. i think the conversation should have been much professional from both sides, but nonetheless this issue addresses a serious problem.

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[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's how a Minecraft server I ran died. Too many people telling me how to run it and trying to break things when I was asleep.

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[–] sudneo@lemmy.world 59 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The fact that Lemmy’s core team is taking a fairly laissez faire position on moderation, user safety, and tooling is problematic, and could be a serious blocker for communities currently hosted on Lemmy.

At this point, most of the solutions the ecosystem has relied on have been third-party tools, such as db0’s fantastic Fediseer and Fedi-Safety initiatives. While I’m sure many people are glad these tools exist, the fact that instances have to rely on third-party solutions is downright baffling.

Honestly, what? Why would be baffling to have third party tools in this ecosystem? It would be baffling if that was the case for Facebook. Also the devs did work on some moderation features, but they probably have tons of other stuff to work on, all for an amount of money which is a low salary for one developer.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 55 points 9 months ago (9 children)

Instead of playing the blame game, let me see if I can help with a solution: I am fairly certain that I can take the "admin" functionality that I built for fediverser and use it as the basis for a "moderation dashboard". It's a Python/Django application that can communicate with the Lemmy server both through the API and the database. The advantages of it being a "sidecar system" instead of being built "into" the Lemmy code itself is that I am not blocked by any of the Lemmy developers and the existing instance owners do not need to wait for some fork to show up.

I can propose a deal: at the time of writing, there are ~200 people who upvoted this article. If I get 20 people (10% of the upvoters) to either sponsor me on Github or subscribe to my Europe-based, GDPR-subject suite of fediverse services, then I will dedicate 10 hours per week to solve all GDPR-related issues.

How does that sound? To me it sounds like a win-win-win situation: Instance admins get proper tooling, Lemmy devs get this out of their list of concerns and users get a more robust application for the fediverse.

[–] gabe 12 points 9 months ago

I wish you the best of luck on this and I truly hope you do this, but this is what the lead dev of Sublinks tried to do. That's the missing piece here. He tried making an external mod tooling system. Maybe you'll have better luck than he did. I really hope you do.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 10 points 9 months ago

That sounds great! Be sure to get in contact if you run into any problems or limitations with the API.

[–] Xyre@lemmus.org 9 points 9 months ago

In a similar vein, I've seen a lot of auto moderator implementations created. If instead of creating yet another project, people started contributing to existing ones we'd have a good core set of functionality that could be shared across instances. Competing implementations are fine, but at some point the efforts get spread so thin that progress is limited.

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[–] Murvel@lemm.ee 37 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy devs being man children when confronted with GDPR compliance.

And if Lemmy if supposed to better Reddit in basic fucking decency then GDPR is absolutely crucial.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 21 points 9 months ago (25 children)

how are you supposed to do gdpr compliance on a federated system though?

[–] maynarkh@feddit.nl 29 points 9 months ago (7 children)

You are responsible for data collected by your own instance. If a deletion request comes through, you are responsible for deleting it from your account, and forwarding the deletion request and responses to other instance you federate with. You are in the clear as long as you don't keep data you legally can't, and have sufficiently informed other instances of your obligations.

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[–] Badeendje@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)
  • By defining all information that is processed and why.
  • By not processing and storing any personal identifiable information (an IP address is PII for example) without a clearly defined need.
  • When stored ONLY using data for the defined purposes. This also means shielding data that should be shielded.
  • By implementing the mechanics for someone to be forgotten (delete my account, should delete all info, especially PII).
  • Making sure the mechanics to federate these changes/deletions exist.
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[–] anders@rytter.me 13 points 9 months ago (14 children)

@deadsuperhero Damn..breaking GDPR is a big problem

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[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Hey everyone, I just wanted to thank you for the lively conversation and thought-provoking insights. We don't have to agree on every point (or at all), but I've decided to synthesize a lot of thoughts and ideas from these conversations into a blog post: https://deadsuperhero.com/2024/03/economic-musings-on-federated-networks/

[–] rglullis@communick.news 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I know you said it is a brain dump, but your follow up still seems mostly an emotional reaction to how the devs responded rather than a reasoning synthesis process.

E.g, your "Where Fediverse Software Differs", it seems like you want to pay off the set up you've placed in the previous paragraph (about the difficulty of being an open source developer), but this payoff never comes and instead you end up the argument with "The feature requests valid, and the devs responded like dicks".

Even if we take "the feature request was valid" for granted, it does not follow that the devs must act on it right away. If the Lemmy devs acknowledged the issue and said "You are absolutely right and we strongly advise anyone hosting an instance in the EU if they are worried about GDPR", then what? Do you think that whoever wrote the "perfectly valid feature request" should still be pushing for making it a higher priority? On what grounds?

Also:

The operators, who to some degree help the project gain visibility, support, and money, are themselves doing unpaid labor: community building, moderation (...)

shouldn't ever be used as an excuse to justify free labor from developers. This is not Self-Loathing and Display of Low Self-Steem Olympics. Anyone that comes to me with a "I'm not gaining anything from my work" argument will promptly receive "The fact that you can not establish boundaries and are martyring yourself is not my problem" as a response.

The fact that developers of FOSS software project are able to tell users "If you want something done, you need to give us the resources or do it yourself" should be lauded, not criticized or be seen as "dicks".

If instance owners are dealing with bad users "and not getting paid for it", they can do two things: close down the instance, or put proper boundaries and tell what they are willing and not willing to do for free. Alternatively, they can do what I do and make the relationship explicitly transactional: I'm more than willing to work a lot to solve my customer's problems, but this is only after they actually paid me for it. The fact that I only accept paying customers makes my instance noticeably easier to manage. Even if I'm charging way less than what some people would donate to their favorite instance, the fact that all the users from the instances are paying make for an excellent filter.

The common denominator is relatively simple to understand: good optics of a project leads to more users, leads to more communities, leads to people building all kinds of apps and tools for those communities, leads to more people being willing to donate to a project.

This "donation-based" approach needs to change. Mastodon has no problems with "optics", and its "Founder and CEO" is reportedly making 30000€ as yearly salary. This is ridiculously low. This is less than what an intern makes at Facebook. The three Lemmy devs are sharing less than 4k€/month. You can make more money by working part-time on Uber Eats. To think that this is enough to claim "they are making some money" is frankly absurd.

If society in general is so tired of exploitative Big Tech, society needs to give a strong signal that it's willing to pay for the alternative. If we don't want to have the most brilliant minds of our generation working on how to optimize the amount of ads that you get to see online, then we need to show that those building better solutions can be properly rewarded. It's not up to the developers to try to build out everything perfectly and then go around begging for people for breadcrumbs and their seal of approval.

To sum up: I'm not saying that developers need to be worshipped because they can do what others can't. I'm also not saying that the Lemmy devs were right in how they communicate with its users, but I am saying that they are absolutely right in establishing their priorities and not let their work be dictated by someone that is not putting any Skin on The Game.

[–] laverabe@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago (4 children)

The problem sort of is capitalism right? These public good projects should have public funding. Imagine if the public funding for open source software projects was like that of the Apollo program in the 60s (2.5% of gdp).

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