Some years ago we used to post weekly development updates to let the community know what we are working on. For some reason we stopped posting these updates, but now we want to continue giving you information every two weeks about the recent development progress. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.
We've been working towards a v0.19.0 release of Lemmy, which will include several breaking API changes. Once this is ready, we'll post the these changes in dev spaces, and give app developers several weeks to support the new changes.
This week @nutomic finished implementing the block instance feature for users. It allows users to block entire instances, so that all communities from those instances will be hidden on the frontpage. Posts or comments from users of blocked instances in other communities are unaffected. He also reworked the 2-Factor-Authentication implementation, with a two-step process to enable 2FA which prevents locking yourself out. Additionally he is reworking the API authentication to be more ergonomic by using headers and cookies. Finally he is adding a feature for users to import/export community follows, bocklists and profile settings.
@codyro and @ticoombs have been making improvements to lemmy-ansible, including externalizing the pict-rs configuration, adding support for AlmaLinux/RHEL, cleaning up the configuration, as well as versioning the deploys. These will make deploying and installing Lemmy much easier.
Support development
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
Looking at the Liberapay, it's shocking Lemmy only gets $332 a month to fund this entire social media. Compare that to the totally "grass roots" normal NFT growth where they immediately had millions poured into them from venture capitalist. As it turns out, actual grass roots social media without profit incentive isn't profitable! And that's how you know we're on the right path.
For as many users as lemmy has now, its kind of astonishing how little donations we have, like less than the average youtuber / streamer with a patreon. Its more when we sum up the other platforms, but I'd really like us to be able to add more full-time devs and grow the coop.
And not just us of course, but open source software in general needs so much more funding than its currently getting. If you use open source software, consider donating to those devs!
Once I finish the join-lemmy.org site redesign, I'll put a section on the donation page that sums all these up for transparency's sake, and we'll probably try to have a once-per-year donation push to try to make sure we get fully funded.
I wonder how many people don't understand Lemmy and thought when they were donating to their instances it benefitted lemmy development as a whole? I see many posts about donating to your instance, but little to donating to devs. Do any instances share their donations?
For as many users as lemmy has now, its kind of astonishing how little donations we have, like less than the average youtuber / streamer with a patreon. Its more when we sum up the other platforms, but I’d really like us to be able to add more full-time devs and grow the coop.
Why look at youtubers when you can look at a open source project?, look at misskey which is very similar , it makes about 4k while having about 10k monthly active users, that's about 0.4 dollar per user.
Lemmy has about 40k monthly active users and makes about 3962 , about 0.1 dollar per user.
If you will push the conversation rate to be as high as misskey, that should give you currently about 16K a month (40k * 0.4).
I have a few ideas about how to increase it, i can open a issue throwing some ideas, for starter (I don't remember if i said this before) the part in the UI where people are suppose to learn lemmy wants donations (the little heart), is probably very hard to notice.
Maybe opt-in ads? It could be opt-in for both the instance and the end user
I'm not demanding it to be opt-in, just taking the assumption that you don't want to just put ads there, and that there would be a backslash if you just put them there
I regularly comments from users who were not aware or the financial situation. Maybe "we" need to promote it a bit more. But it is 332 per week, not month. At the beginning of the last migration it stood at 40 something, so we at least got some traction.
Thanks for the update and thanks for the work guys, I really appreciate it
Also devs please feel free to take a well-deserved break whenever you feel like - wouldn't want to see anyone getting burned out from spending the majority of available time working on Lemmy. I can imagine the reddit migration has shaken a few things out of order especially
Thanks for the concern. Personally I took plenty of time off during summer. Now Im motivated to code again, and honestly I would get really bored if I did nothing.
@phiresky optimized the way pagination is implemented. He is also fixing problems with federation workers which are causing test failures and performance problems in the development branch. These problems were introduced during a complex rewrite of the federation queue which was recently finished, and is thought to allow Lemmy federation to scale to the size of Reddit.
I can't wait for this to get into action! Separating the federation into a separate process with the ability of using a separate physical resource is so good!
We've been working towards a v0.19.0 release of Lemmy, which will include several breaking API changes. Once this is ready, we'll post the these changes in dev spaces, and give app developers several weeks to support the new changes.
Thank you for the update and the heads up.
How will this be announced, and what specifically does several weeks mean? Since Lemmy goes beyond Mobile Apps to all kinds of systems including moderation tools, auto-purgers, bots, CSAM, auto-subscribers, searchers, etc, breaking changes to the API can have far-reaching impacts.
Could something be set up specifically for breaking-change announcements where participants could be alerted? Even just a Breaking Changes issue that could be followed would work nicely.
When we are ready to publish the first release candidate, we will make a post that lists all the breaking changes. You can follow [email protected] via rss reader to get notified about it. We will also share it in different Matrix chats, and I'm sure it will get upvoted to the frontpage as well.
Do you have any sort of timeline for when 0.19 or the release candidates will become available? I only wonder because I'm eager to check out some of the new features that have been mentioned here and on Github
Thanks for the update! I think it's a good idea to get the word out there more often on what's being worked on and how progress is going at a regular interval.
From an end user perspective, it feels like it's operationally stable, though I don't know about developmentally stable. Maybe it's worth a 1.0 release soon. Lots of people are running it in production now.
We're reserving 1.0.0 for a mostly unchanging and stable API. That def isn't the case currently, as we've been rapidly adding features, changing api objects, etc. So minor versions (and usually not patch unless it's security related), signify breaking api or config changes.
The post only includes pull requests which were active last week. Scaled sort was already completed earlier. It will definitely go into the next release, like every merged PR.
I spend enough time on Lemmy, enjoying the spoils of your hard work that I couldn't not donate. Like others have noticed, the weekly amount at it's current level ($350/w) is embarrassing.