We would like to start by saying thank you β€, no really π THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!
Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard π£ loud and clearπ£.
So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We've added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.
We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that's no fun!
Sooo...
The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.
Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.
Any big moves would be discussed with the community. We aren't the best at communicating sometimes, but we do care about supporting the user base here. We would never want to put anyone in a bad spot.
Admins, mods, users; we're all human. I dunno if it's some big secret but I use /c/asklemmy posts as informal posts, and just consider the highest comment as the most popular opinion. Imperfect but effective.
I asked what community Lemmy most needs, and the most up voted comment was 'cranes trains and excavators and stuff like that'. I made the sub and it's been pretty popular. Maybe you guys could take the same approach, just an informal asklemmy post asking for input before any site changes?
I think a lot of folks don't realize how hard it is to run a website.
Everyone says "too bad, you caused it yourself by being this big", well someone had to do it...
All we ever really wanted was a nice place for folks to express themselves. And the thing is, the Fedi is only going to get bigger, if it wasn't us specifically, it would have been another server that would have gotten big.
The whole team here has dumped 1000's of hours into keeping this thing alive. It's just rough to see the comments here.
All the best to you and the team, I understand it can be rough. But similarly, I think most of what you wrote could just as well have been written by a Lemmy maintainer:
I think a lot of folks donβt realize how hard it is...
All we ever really wanted was a nice place for folks to express themselves...
The whole team here has dumped 1000βs of hours into keeping this thing alive. Itβs just rough to see the comments here.
Lemmy devs are in exactly the same position, and reading the comments in this thread, I am getting the vibe that lemmy.world admins are not willing to see this. Just check the messaging your admins are putting out there (even in the comments under this post), imagine reading that messaging as a Lemmy dev, and tell me it wouldn't feel just as rough.
Btw, I think a clear source of all the negative comments here is not the fact that Sublinks is being developed. Every time Sublinks gets advertised on Lemmy, there is this toxic "finally we can get rid of the original Lemmy dev team" messaging along with it - sometimes it is more hidden between the lines, other times, it's very blatant. This messaging inevitably creates uncertainty in users about the future of their instances. THAT'S the real issue here, at least from my point of view.
Just wanted to say that i am really thankful that you at lemmy.world had open doors when others couldn't cope with the signups last summer, and i was also very happy being on lemmy.world, i always had the impression that you want the best for your users. But i am also irritated by the animosity towards the lemmy devs, and after seeing that f.e. sunaurus apparently is able to have a constructive relation with them, the behaviour or claims of some of the world team seems really odd to me. I have no knowledge about what's going on at admin / dev level, i am just a user, so i can only go with what i can read here on lemmy.
Some of the world team
That is probably me. I am sorry about it.
Sublinks should not replace lemmy but add alternatives to the fediverse. We understand it is difficult to maintain such big software especially if there is always that exceptional "big" instance that has special requests for special / specific features. With it we just want to have less "beef" with the lemmy devs, with "big" instance issues.