Thanks this is very useful feedback. Especially the search box in community sidebar would be very useful and easy to add. Formatting for community ids should also be easy to improve. A bit later when I have time I will implement these things, and then make a post in the Help Design Lemmy Series regarding search.

By the way basic reading is working for me in Tor browser with JS disabled. Though buttons like switching Local/All, sorting and of course forms like register, login and search are not supported. We could use contributors to help fix these things.

You can setup a Lemmy community and link it in all your project repos. Sooner or later people will show up.

In what way is the search function in Lemmy awkward to use, is there anything specific that can be fixed? You are right about subtopics, and also Lemmy normally doesnt show discussions organized by topic on the frontpage. That can be changed though with different frontends like lemmyBB.

The lifecycle of open-source software development is well-established in lore if not in fact: under- or unpaid developers work on a project that started as a labor of love. The love disappears, and the labor quickly turns to animosity and dread, as Git repos devolve into loud, angry people demanding this or that, reporting bugs but not contributing to fixing existing ones, and always the politics, politics, politics.

That might be true for some open source projects, but I personally am still very happy to work on Lemmy. If there are loud or angry people on Github we quickly ban them so that has never be a real problem. And politics on Lemmy are easy to block if you want to.

I’ll back up a moment. I am not naive. I will ever conflate lemmy, or really any open-source software written by a small handful of volunteer or underpaid developers, with stability. And that’s OK. I accepted the fact that I would be in for a few bumps and scrapes here and there: like the time a new lemmy UI version was released that cocked up any form fields, resulting in a shitty UI experience. Or the time that the lemmy backend would just fuck around and die, taking others down with it in a spectacular blaze of error messages, all cryptic to me. Or the time when never-ending scrolling was dismissed because one person who happens to be the main developer just does not want it.

The vast majority of Lemmy servers are absolutely stable. Lemmy.ml has been running for 6 years now and there have never been any problems like you describe. Maybe you have corrupt hardware or something, but its definitely not something you can blame on the Lemmy software. You should join the admin chat, people there can probably help you to resolve the problem.

Concurrently, as lemmy.fan slowly grew and went through its adolescent phase, development on lemmy became less predictable and eventually stalled to the point where significant bugs and other issues were, and still are, being neglected as lemy version 1 is developed. I will NOT be that loud, vocal, open-source criticizer who laments the lack of work and progress from underpaid developers not giving into my demands and wants, so I began to research other options.

Development is definitely not stalled, there were 87 pull requests merged and 66 issues closed just in the last month. The only unresolved issues are very minor or only affect the development version. And there is a lot of progress on 1.0, it will include many features such as private communities and multi-communities.

Sounds like a variant of Doom. Now I want to play this game and shoot up the monsters.

He is right though, 5000 USD per month for an instance with 12k monthly active users is completely unrealistic, or it is run very inefficiently. mastodon.world is a similar size and costs much less than 2300 Euro per month (which includes numerous other instances like lemmy.world etc).

We don’t have the capacity to implement all the features users ask for, at least not without additional contributors or waiting a long time. So it’s better to implement it as a bot.

The cleanest solution seems to be the one described in my previous comment, so you get an archived community with all the original content, correct usernames etc. And make a new community for new posts. Or have the bot create new posts and comments with the same content, and credit the author in markdown body. But that seems like a worse solution in many ways.

Many of these are already implemented in Lemmy, others are too controversial and wont be added (such as karma).

We are currently preparing the 1.0 release which will have lots of major new features, such as private communities, multi-communities and much more. Although 0.19 is also getting constant updates with smaller improvements, for example 0.19.11.

Can you say which mod tools Piefed has that are missing from Lemmy?

Im not familiar with Wikidata, but with enough development time it could probably also be recreated as a Fediverse project.

join-lemmy.org has such an instance picker.

This setting is only about how downvotes are displayed. They still exist and will be visible to other users, but not to the post creator. Disabling downvotes entirely as default is a separate discussion.

Algorithms are definitely needed to discover good content. There are some good videos on Peertube, but its very difficult to find them due to all the low effort spam. Lemmy also had different algorithms from the beginning and no one ever complained about them.

The problem with algorithms used by Reddit, Facebook etc is that they are completely intransparent, and include factors which dont benefit the user, such as “engagement” or advertising. As long as Fediverse algorithms are focused on benefitting the user and are transparent there is nothing wrong with them.

I can replace them if you can suggest better alternatives. Anyway Lemmy users seem to be older than Reddit users, and those who have spare money to donate should know these normal financial terms.

I rewrote the text again, have a look and let me know what you think. Also made some more design changes the donation page.

“Help Design Lemmy” sounds good, thanks for the suggestion. I looked around for some info about A/B testing but it seems relatively complicated to setup. Do you have any tools to suggest for that? And I can see what you mean about the text sounding unsure. What do you think about this one?

We provide Lemmy as free and open source platform without any tracking or advertising, and work every day to improve it. Yet we also need money to pay our bills and provide for our families. Only 2% of Lemmy users donate, so we need your donation to keep this model working. Thank you for helping to create a new form of social media.

AGPL specifies that everything is provided without liability or warranty, so I dont see how anyone could have reason to sue. Besides Lemmy is not a company, if anything a nonprofit would make sense.

I opened an issue regarding a donation dialog for instance admins, which seems closer to what you mean.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5613

We devs have never met in person, and we are too shy to publicly share our pictures :D