[Opinion] Voyager developers should first spend time on Lemmy development to fix fundamental issues
[Opinion] Voyager developers should first spend time on Lemmy development to fix fundamental issues
Lemmy is a decentralized platform that uses ActivityPub to offer an alternative to Reddit, but I’ve come to the conclusion it’s lacking serious development.
As I’m not a software developer myself, I cannot contribute to it’s development and therefore my critique is obviously unfair to sone extent: who am I to point out what’s wrong with Lemmy?
That said, I’ve decided to return to Reddit for now. The reason are at least three issues that I think should be fixed ASAP, but aren’t.
(1) No way to migrate communities or user accounts.
This is crucial IMO, as an instance administrator can suddenly decide to quit an instance, remove communities or stop updating the server. Most if not all administrators are volunteers working with donations, so there’s really nothing one can demand of course. But without a possibiliy to backup and migrate accounts and communities, there’s nothing you can do if a server has frequent issues.
Again, I don’t blame administrators. And yes, I know it’s possible to setup your own instance, but the fact is that most people don’t setup their own instance.
Mastodon does offer migration from one instance to another and I think Lemmy should offer it ASAP.
GitHub issue #3057
(2) No way to block or delete direct messages (DMs)
Every Lemmy user can start sending you DMs and there’s nothing you can do about it. As long as you don’t mind DMs, that’s fine of course. But I don’t want to receive them. Moreover, apparently people are receiving offensive DMs or spam, but it’s impossible to delete it without an administrator getting involved.
Allowing an account to DM you is one thing, but people sending you DMs without asking for them is really annoying. Not being able to delete them is taking it up even one more step.
Github issue #3640 and #3629
(3) Deleting user accounts
You can’t. Yup, that’s right. It’s apparently impossible to delete a user account.
Now this is plain stupid. I’ve decided to quit Lemmy for now, but had to resort to deleting every post and comment by hand first only to discover today it’s impossible to delete your user account. To be clear: I haven’t tried it yet, so this might be instance related. That said, one would say this isn’t rocket science, but it’s awaiting a fix for over a month now. But again, I’m not a developer so this might be a very difficult bug to fix.
Overall, IMO Lemmy isn’t a very well thought through platform. Development is slow and issues like migration tools still aren’t available.
My suggestion to the Voyager developers would be to invest time in the development of Lemmy first before putting in more time developing Voyager. It’s a really nice PWA and I hope the native app works out, but bottom line Lemmy currently isn’t up to it’s task yet IMO. There are too many issues laying around for too long.
Again, that’s easy for me to say as I don’t have the skills to contribute to the development in a sensible way. But for now, I’m returning to Reddit in full awaiting further Lemmy development.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
Lol the skills to make Voyager do not necessarily equal the skills to work on Lemmy fundamentals, and it’s also not their responsibility to fix Lemmy to begin with.
Lemmy ought to also be improving on its own given that ActivityPub is FOSS and interested people like OP should actually do something about contributing to.
As a developer myself, I love people who combine
it’s lacking serious development.
with
As I’m not a software developer myself
there’s nothing you can do if a server has frequent issues.
True. And migrating might be useful. But going back to Reddit where you can't do anything at all seems kind of contradictory.
(3) Deleting user accounts
You can’t. Yup, that’s right. It’s apparently impossible to delete a user account.
Wrong.
//Edit formatting
It's good feedback, but I'd like the voyager developers to stay focused on their software.
You can donate to Lemmy development directly: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
I don‘t think that these issues are for Voyager‘s developer to solve, but you‘re totally right. Lemmy still feels broken to me, important features like migrating aren‘t added yet.
It‘s not user friendly (okay, with Voyager it is). I‘m still confused by this defederating thing - an angry admin from another instance can lock users out of dozens of communities there. The sorting algorythms are weird.
The only reason I‘m still here is this app. And people are much nicer here.
And people are much nicer here.
That's the biggest thing for me. I'm happy to be with a few hundreds nice people compared to millions of angry strangers. I actually noticed than here, when "bad" behaviour is called out (e.g. someone phrasing a request in a very demanding way, while everyone here is a volunteer), people usually react very well, apologize, and go on with their day. That's science fiction for current Reddit.
If you are not a benevolent dictator or core contributor of the project, I think you cannot directly dictate what should be done. But you can always vote which should be prioritized first.
Things you can do are
- hire developers to work on the issue you mentioned
- bounty the issue or donate (some FOSS asks for donation for specific feature e.g. Wayland support for Barrier)
- create a campaign to raise money to solve the issues
For me, none of the issues are deal breaker for me.