Lemmy Lead Developer and father of two children.

I also develop Ibis, a federated wiki.

  • 132 Posts
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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2020

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  • 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.













  • Fully agree that theres too much politics. Like you say too often about attacking some kind of enemy rather trying to understand other perspectives. For better or for worse, those seem to be the types of people more likely to use a new platform like Lemmy. Hopefully in the future they will also get tired of this stuff.