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.
nutomic
joined 5 years ago
MODERATOR OF
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.
Thats from the rate limit, it seems you already did a settings import recently. That can take a lot of resources so its limited to once every 24 hours by default. If the import didnt work last time try again a day later.
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).
It helps if you block all those communities you don't care about. Or even block some instances.
Signatures are only used to deliver activities to inboxes. The Activitypub json data of posts is usually available without any auth.
Private communities will be in 1.0, along with some other visibility modes.
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.
You can setup a Lemmy community and link it in all your project repos. Sooner or later people will show up.