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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I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side. This is not how journalism should work.
Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free. You also completely ignore that this is an exception, there are thousands of issues and pull requests in the Lemmy repos which are handled without any problems.
Besides you claim that we dont care about moderation, user safety and tooling which is simply not true. If you look at the 0.19.0 release notes there are numerous features in these areas, such as instance blocking, better reports handling and a new moderator view. However we also have to work on improvements to many other features, and our time is limited.
Finally you act like 4000€ per month is a lot of money, however thats only 2000€ for each of us. We could stop developing Lemmy right now and work for a startup or corporation for three or four times the amount of money. Then we also wouldnt have to deal with this kind of meaningless drama. Is that what you want to achieve with your website?
The thing that really gets me with these, is that we are 2-4 devs working on software used by over 40k ppl. It is absolutely impossible to please everyone, and fix every issue, there just isn’t enough of us.
Oftentimes we ask for ppl to do the open source thing, and contribute a PR, and many of them do.
Anyone can look at our github profiles and see how busy we’ve been, and how many moderation related issues we’ve been working on, this is all out in the open. Yet writers of these articles somehow never bother to look, or reach out to us for questions. The amount of entitlement and second-hand rumors is really dissapointing.
I’ve reviewed both your and @Nutomic’s comments, your latest blog updates, and GitHub PR’s, and added a section accordingly: https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/lemmy-image-problem/#giving-credit
Thank you for your hard work, and for taking necessary steps to improve something that is essential for instance operators.
Thanks that is a bit better. Unfortunately people who have already read the article wont see the update, and even people who read it now may not read all the way to the end, and still leave with a negative impression. Still its better than nothing.
To get an idea how most Lemmy users feel, have a look at this thread. Practically every comment is positive about Lemmy, you can hardly find any negative sentiment. And certainly no one cares about this image deletion issue, which proves that the complaints of a few individuals are completely blown out of proportion.
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Thanks for the donation!
As a user, I love lemmy, and I want to thank you and the other devs that work tirelessly to develop it.
Also as a user I value the ability to manage my data, and hope to see image deletion implemented when you’re able to do so.
After having read the Nightmare piece, my decision was to stop posting images directly to lemmy. To share images, I’m going to self host an Imgur like service so if I do want to delete an image, I can.
I’m not a developer, and can’t contribute code to address the problem, but, at least for myself, I’ve got a solution I can implement.
To chime in: Yes, people are positive about Lemmy. I like Lemmy, people like Lemmy. And Lemmy users in general want to see activity at Lemmy. Who wouldnt? That’s kind of a given… but still I want Lemmy to continue to evolve in functionality. That doesnt contradict itself?
And if someone points out that certain things arent technically possible at the moment, I as a user would expect that this isnt considered a “complaint” or a “negative sentiment”.
Especially when it’s a functionality that might have legal implications. Does “no one care” about that because people think it’s unnecessary? Or because they have never noticed before that this isnt possible? The GDPR is not a joke, and foss does not have an exemption clause for adhering to it. Additionally a lot of people on Lemmy are very privacy-conscious.
Therefore I think it’s great that this issue has been brought up now and you guys are working on a fix for that. Thanks for all of your work on this project, it’s really appreciated.
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Its funny because there is no one in the world who signed any sort of development contract with us. All the money we have ever received for Lemmy have been donations which means there is no obligation for us to do anything. This includes money from NLnet which provided most of our income for the past years. And I bet the people complaining so loudly no have never even made any donation.
Then we also wouldnt have to deal with this kind of meaningless drama.
The day to day drama in corporate software development is MUCH more meaningless than what you’re dealing with.
If you can take a moment to move your massive, fragile ego out of the way, you’ll realize it’s not a hit piece. It’s criticism of your behavior in reaction to what is frankly a reasonable set of requests.
Journalism is not just about serving as a propagandic mouthpiece to lionize you and your work. Sometimes, I have to report on subjects that are frankly horrible, people acting shitty, and how people in spaces react to that.
Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free.
This issue is basic fucking table stakes for user safety and data compliance, and the fact that it still does not exist after four years of being a project is wild to me. It creates liabilities for admins. The fact that it’s still a problem, right now, illustrates that these things are not direct concerns in how you design software.
I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side.
Your comments were in the GitHub issues.
massive fragile ego, frankly horrible, acting shitty
So this is how you see me, all based on two issues out of thousands and never having talked with me directly. Honestly this comment would be a good reason to ban you for harassment and violating the site’s code of conduct. But lucky for you I don’t care what random strangers on the internet think about me.
No, it’s how I see you based on pretty much any time I observe you making a public comment. Which is unfair of me, admittedly, I can’t possibly see everything you write. Most of the time, though, you come across as hostile, and read as though you’re dunking on other people and projects.
Anyway, the article was updated somewhat to give proper credit for your recent developments and point to your fundraising efforts.
Have a nice day.
massive fragile ego, frankly horrible, acting shitty, basic fucking table stakes
you come across as hostile
Go back to reddit
The fact that the issue exists after 4 years clearly shows that you are in fact blowing it out of proportion. Actual issues that affect large numbers of people running servers end up being addressed by people contributing to the project. Lemmy is an open source project that anybody can contribute to, and fix the issues that are affecting them. The fact that this hasn’t happened shows that this issue is not as high priority as you want to make it out to be.
This doesn’t mean this isn’t a real issue that should be fixed at some point, but it’s simply not the show stopper you paint to be.
So yeah, you are absolutely doing a hack job here.
If you can take a moment to move your massive, fragile ego out of the way
Lmao do you think of yourself as a professional?
Not at all.
Wow, when are you going to realize that you work for your users?
This isn’t “one user” being “so demanding”. Its a trend. Read what others have said. Learn from your mistakes. Your community of instance admins are pissed because you’re constantly throwing them under the bus. And, yes, your moderation tools are crap. Thats objective.
And 2000€ per month is a ton of money. Most open source devs get nothing. Stop being so ungrateful and disrespectful to the community that you work for.
This is your brain on consumerism.
What do you want for nothing, your money back?
2000€ is rent for a 1 bedroom apartment lol.
Also this is not reddit. If you don’t like something, you can change it yourself. That’s how open source works.
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Also big
vibes lol. Telling others to stop being ungrateful and disrespectful, while being ungrateful and disrespectful themselves.Yea takes an impressive level of self awareness to go from “you work for us” to “no you don’t deserve more money” to “why arent you personally catering to me more” in that amount of time
You mean to all if the instance admins
Fuck off lol you do it then if it’s such a trivial task.
“Ungrateful” yea they should be super grateful for making a little over 10 bucks an hour to listen to this kind of self important bullshit.
Wow, when are you going to realize that you work for your users?
Do you pay their salary and have an employment contract with the developers of Lemmy? If not, they do not work for you.
And 2000€ per month is a ton of money. Most open source devs get nothing. Stop being so ungrateful and disrespectful to the community that you work for.
This is not a typical open source side project. The developers work full time on it, it’s basically their job. That 2000 Euros is their monthly gross salary. Average monthly salary in France is 2340 euros net as of 2022. The developers of Lemmy are earning well below average.
I love lemmy, having been here since the very earliest hexbear days. In my view, the devs are doing the best they can. They’re a tiny team surviving on grants, trying to produce software that the users, for some reason, expect to have feature parity with reddit, a large corporation with a large paid dev team. It’s weird to say the least.
My understanding is that nutomic and dessalines survive solely on that 4000 euros per month, because all of their time goes to lemmy. How do you want them to survive? They need to eat and pay rent, you know. The real world exists and they’re humans in it, needing food and sleep and shelter.
It seems to me you want magic. You don’t want the lemmy devs to be humans, you want them to be magic coder gods who are infinitely patient, with boundless time and energy. But that’s completely unrealistic, you surely must see that, right?
delirious_owl is a troll people stop feeding it.
Sorry if you were just making a joke, my sarcasm detector is not really working anymore (/s at the end would help). But if not, this comment really perfectly captures the entitlement in open source.
Now imagine you spend months (or even years) of your free time to build something for people to use freely, and the result is that you get endless comments from random strangers, telling you that you work for them and that you need to respect and be grateful to them. I honestly am impressed that open source still exists at all at this point.
I think it’s a question of philosophy. If I take donations for something, is it really still my hobby projects I build in my free time?
Not really IMO. The moment I make money off it, it’s more than that.
And if I have a community of people who use that project, I should be transparent with them and engage with them. Maybe the Lemmy devs are doing this in some place where I’m not (like on their matrix), but I have never seen them explain why they are working on certain features and not on others. Their development updates are awesome and I appreciate them, but it’s very much a communication of “we are doing this, see you next time”. The recent AMA was a good example of engagement that gives the possibility to explain things better and get into contact. My advice would be to work on communication and feedback channels.
But everyone is free to see that differently.
Micheal Douglass breakfast sandwich-ass
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Stop being so ungrateful and disrespectful to the community that you work for.
Fam, this is Free Software. Capitalism is that way → www.reddit.com .
Lemmy’s Image Problem
I see what you did there…
that’s not a bugModeration is obviously important, but what are the realities around deletion in a federated ecosystem?
I feel like the push around this and GDPR are similar to the DMs situation in mastodon, where you might feel like you’ve deleted your stuff but it’s actually very much out there still.
I’m sure there’s a middle ground where some amount of deletion occurs and it’s better than nothing. But as with the BlueSky bridge conversation, it seems to me having a frank conversation about the kind of system we’re dealing with here is just as important.
Yeah, I agree. I think the important thing is “was the local content scrubbed?” Because at least if that was done, the place of origin no longer has it.
Federated deletes will always be imperfect, but I’d rather have them than not have them.
What might actually be interesting would be if someone could figure out this type of content negotiation: deletes get federated, some servers miss it. Maybe there’s a way to get servers to check the cache and, if a corresponding origin value is no longer there, dump it?
Well I’m sure there are a number of nice ways of arranging federated delete, including your suggestion, but it seems to me that the issue is guaranteeing a delete across all federated servers where the diversity of software and the openness/opt-out-ness of federation basically ensure something somewhere will not respect a request out of either malice, ignorance or error.
Ultimately, it seems a weird thing to be creating and expecting fediverse platforms in the image of those designed with complete central control over all data and servers. Like we’re still struggling to break out of the mould.
Even if one platform makes a perfect arrangement for something like delete, so long as servers running that platform push to / federate with servers that run something else, where it’s ultimately impossible to tell what they’re running because it’s someone else’s server, there will be broken promises.
I’m interested to hear your response on this actually, because it increasingly seems to me like we haven’t got to terms yet with what decentralisation actually means and how libertarian some of its implications are once you care about these sorts of issues.
I suspect it gets to the point where for social activity some people may start realising that they actually want a centralised body they can hold to account.
And that feeling secure on a decentralised social media platform requires significant structural adjustments, like e2ee, allow-list federation, private spaces, where public spaces are left for more blog like and anonymous interactions.
Also, sorry, end rant.
No, you’re good, and we’re mostly on the same page! My general expectation is that your server tries its best, maybe there are still copies out there, but you shrug and say “eh, I wiped my stuff locally, good enough”.
But yeah, I agree that once something leaves your server in terms of the passage of data, there are no guarantees. And I do agree that significant structural changes are necessary and important for the network’s continued evolution!
Because of this, I never upload directly an image to Lemmy and others, using instead a sharing tool (FileCoffee, IMHO the best). With my account there I can easily delete the hosted image with which it disappear everywhere.
It’s not a bad thought, but the way some Fediverse software works, it can still get proxied and/or cached locally.
That is a general problem in the internet, not only in Lemmy, images andother content can be copied, this you can’t avoid, it would even be imposible if you could delete embedded images in Lemmy, someone could have copied and pasted it somewhere else. But by using an imagesharer where you later delete the image, you also eliminate your origin as the author, since it no longer appears in your contributions in Lemmy or other sites.
tbh I just assume that despite GDPR or CCPA any images I put up are there forever, it’s not like the tech is that different in the fediverse from anywhere else. nowhere is going to be scrubbing their storage drive blocks on delete if it even can be deleted
I take it you’ve never run a community instance. The problem is, laws vary by jurisdiction, and can have a very real effect on how you run your server when shit hits the fan.
We recently ran a story about a guy building his own Fediverse community and platform, who just happened to be a bit naive about the network. He’s off in his corner, doing his own thing, people find his project and assume it’s some kind of weird scraper. After disinformation came out about it, someone remote-loaded child pornography to his server, for the purpose of filling a report with the police.
The guy is based on Germany. Local jurisdiction requires one year of prison time minimum. It matters.
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Can you mention this in your article?
…image hosting is actually handled as an auxiliary service called pict-rs, which runs alongside a given Lemmy instance. While pict-rs itself works fine for handling uploads, downloads, and modifications to pictures, the devs neglected to add anything to Lemmy’s interface to handle deletions. In fact, the platform as a whole lacks any tooling for moderating images whatsoever.
I endorse the Lemmy developers banning this entitled fucking loser.
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/
If your are going to act so entitled just because the devs get 2k euro a month (which is under the average income in france and germany) you should just go back to reddit
I generally think these guys are being a bunch of assholes.
However, some people in the comment threads challenged my point of view, and stated that users have no rights to demand anything from developers who give away their work for free.
Just wow that is how they start it
They’re not wrong. On multiple occasions the devs have acted like assholes, this one as well. Especially the part where they initially didn’t think GDPR would apply because they aren’t a commercial entity (paraphrasing) is comically depressing.
Having said that, I won’t be cancelling my donations anytime soon. Assholes though they might be, I still want to pay back to the Lemmy community, and I can’t think of a better way than this.
TL;DR: it came out that some devs of one of the biggest platforms in their respective space neglected to bring in some very basic functionality regarding the ability for users, mods, and admins to delete images that were uploaded. When a user asked about having this functionality, especially in the context of GDPR compliance, the devs acted like a bunch of entitled dicks, effectively bellowing at the person for daring to make such demands of their time.
I generally think these guys are being a bunch of assholes.
Software engineer full-time ~70k/year, lemmy dev 24k/year. You should look into the mirror.
And it’s not that the devs won’t fix the issue but there are other issues with more priorities than this. Europe is not the only continent. So just like any other FOSS projects, wait for it or smash money if it’s really important or do it yourself.
Btw based on Nutomic’s comment, it’s fixed next release if you bother to look before making 2 articles back to back.
spoiler
Unfortunately there was some miscommunication in this issue and we failed to get to the root cause. In fact the Lemmy backend has an option to delete all content when an account is deleted. This used to be the default behaviour but was changed in 0.19 so you need to set a parameter delete_content. We failed to add a checkbox for this parameter to lemmy-ui.
However the checkbox is added now in #2385 and will be included in the next Lemmy release. Other frontends and clients may also need to adjust the delete_account api call.
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