- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623718
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623713
I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.
There is a lot of misleading information in this post.
Dessalines and I had some discussion whether the linked issue should be closed or not. Anyway we decided to leave it open in the end. Then some weeks later a user came along and made a completely offtopic complaint that this decision making process is somehow wrong. I admit that I overreacted by giving a temporary ban for this, but mistakes happen and its completely disingenious to spin this as some sort of general toxic behaviour from our side.
This is your opinion and I doubt it is as widespread as you think.
What makes you believe this? I can only speak for myself, and I am not involved with lemmygrad in any way.
Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.
Why do you consider it petty? Its a fact that jgrim never opened any issue for the features he wanted, not did he attempt to contribute with a pull request. Its also true that it took multiple years of fulltime work to get Lemmy ready for production, and I dont see how Sublinks can be any faster when it has only volunteer contributors. That doesnt mean I wish for Sublinks to fail, in fact I hope it will be successful so that admins and users have more choices available, and to improve resilience through independent codebases and development teams.
Generally you seem to have an extremely entitled attitude. Lemmy is an open source project that is provided for free. I would also love to fix all the problems that users report, and implement all those features. But unlike Reddit we are not a billion dollar company with thousands of employees. We are just two individuals funded by donations and working from our homes. There is only a limited number of hours in each day and only so much work we can finish in that time. If you are unhappy with Lemmy then by all means switch to a different platform, because we dont get any direct benefit from having more users.
It is unfortunate that this is what you have decided to take away from the blog post instead of reflecting on the criticism I have provided. Instead of reflecting on my list of legitimate criticism you have decided to call me entitled and hone in on small aspects of the blog post in attempt to dismiss it completely. Per usual, it is everyone else that seems to be the problem but you. I outlined my own issues with lemmy after a LOT of patience and goodwill. That’s lost, and this comment solidifies further why I will switch away from lemmy as soon as I get the chance. Whether you decide to accept the points I have made is on you but ultimately your refusal to recognize the issues I have outlined will cause this project to fade away completely. And that’s really sad. I love lemmy as a project and an idea.
Responding to false criticism is important. For example you were under the mistaken impression that we reject pull requests or issues, or don’t care about moderation? All of those are provably false. Look at all the moderation PRs I’ve closed in the past MONTH alone. This is all easily verifiable if you go to our github accounts and see what we’re working on.
You also heard second hand that the sublinks developer is making sublinks because they got a bad reception from us, or were told that we’d reject features? They’ve never opened a single issue or PR.
Your post seems to mostly be 2nd-hand rumors from people who already don’t like us, and not from any people that are actually working on Lemmy. That’s perfectly fine, but it’d be wrong to not address these false criticisms.
Entitlement in open source is a real thing, and you would know our pain if you ran a codebase currently in use by > 40k people monthly. To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person. It’d be like if I criticized my grandmother’s free meal for it not being to my liking, and demanded she make it my way.
Goes both ways, from/by developers and from/by users.
Demands:
And the entitlement is pretty damn strong from your side too. It’s an open source project that is your baby; I get it. What makes you entitled to other people doing everything except the actual code portion, for YOU? If it gets to the point of needing an ‘RFC’ to contribute code to Lemmy or even request a change…
Well, good luck. Why should people do your work that you get paid to do (as said often by yourself and Nutomic), when they aren’t getting paid a cent?? That is the epitome of entitled. You want free work, but you don’t want to give your work for free
It is absolutely impossible for 2-4 devs to please everyone in a codebase used by >40k people. If you ran a codebase used by this many people, you’d understand our pain. You cannot make everyone happy.
Check out our github profiles if you think we aren’t doing work. This is easily verifiable.
How can you think that this tiny group of people, fielding the requests of thousands, is entitled? We’re simply requesting that people do the open source thing, and contribute a PR, when we don’t have time to work on an issue. Would you like it if I made you change your priorities and work on what I wanted you to work on?
How do I put this? If this is how you respond to criticism, and that’s what you’ve clearly shown repeatedly to do, then you should not be in any leadership position.
You do not apologize even when you admit to be wrong, you blame others instead of taking responsibilities for anything that was said here. It’s entirely a dismissive response. You might not have noticed but people do not feel valued at all when they speak to Lemmy’s developers. Their input is dismissed, they are told to make issues that you do not care for and when they ask for something to be better prioritized, you effectively tell them to fuck off. You make people feel that their time and effort towards Lemmy is worthless.
With the way you’ve acted, you have pushed back people from making issues, from contributing in code or otherwise, from wanting to host Lemmy and wanting to be associated with the project. Sincerely, all I can hope at this point is for Lemmy to be forked by better people or to be forgotten about.
I remember Beehaw wanted to switch away from Lemmy to another platform months ago. I encourage you to do that and point your demands and entitlement at someone else. We have enough users who actually appreciate our work.
respectfully (and as someone who has not paid attention to this thread outside of my one comment): i am continually failing to understand how asking you guys to give us better moderation tools to do our jobs–which is our primary reason we’re even looking elsewhere and, if resolved, would likely placate about 90% of the problem we have with continuing to use your software–is entitlement. we’re basically handing you a silver platter entitled “hey, here is our problem, and here is how you can keep us on Lemmy in the long term” and you guys seem to just not take that seriously at all? and now you seem to want to debate us out of thinking it’s an issue while simultaneously telling us to fuck off for investing in your software at all!
What makes you think that I want you to to keep using Lemmy? As far as I remember, Beehaw admins have only brought negativity and complaints to Lemmy development. You have never made any code contributions and based on your attitude I doubt that you donate any money. You need to realize that having more users on Lemmy gives us zero benefits, in fact more users means more work. So if you leave Lemmy it means less work and less complaints for us. Meanwhile Beehaw users who like Lemmy can easily switch to another instance.
i mean, if your response to a community which has stuck by your software for over two years now and hasn’t even publicly committed to leaving is “fuck you” because you don’t like that we are vocally opinionated on our problems, frictions, and perceived deficiencies with your software—yeah, why would we ever do anything to help you guys? you’re strongly vindicating us here in supposedly “never ma[king] any code contributions” or “donat[ing] any money” (and i’m just going to grant you that for the sake of argument, i’m not even sure it’s true). i’m not going to contribute to someone’s software when they’re openly contemptuous of me for trying to make their software better.
if i was on the fence previously about the upthread critique that you guys are kind of assholes to anybody who dissents about what you think should be the way forward, i am no longer. all i can say further is that you are acting severely out of pocket here as a spokesperson for the software and as a community manager and i would strongly encourage you to log off at this point before you say something that make your community relations even worse than they already are.
We gain nothing from you using Lemmy. It’s free software, a free meal that we’re providing freely to anyone as a public service.
Don’t like it? Don’t eat it!