That instance list is built completely automatically by a crawler, no one approves instances before they are listed. In this case it was removed as soon as we became aware of it. Next time please make a pull request like that one, its much more effective than complaining.

Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.

Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.

Update: For those of you who want to support Lemmy development without financing the hosting of lemmy.ml, know that the hosting is paid exclusively through OpenCollective. You can see the payment details at this link. This means donations through all other platforms (Liberapay, Ko-fi, Patreon, Crypto) are exclusively for Lemmy development, and not a single cent goes to lemmy.ml hosting.

Edit: Liberapay is the preferable donation option, as it has very low fees and is also open source.

Because we dont want to moderate porn, simple as that. Other instances are free to do this differently.

We are a bit unlucky with this server

I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side. This is not how journalism should work.

Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free. You also completely ignore that this is an exception, there are thousands of issues and pull requests in the Lemmy repos which are handled without any problems.

Besides you claim that we dont care about moderation, user safety and tooling which is simply not true. If you look at the 0.19.0 release notes there are numerous features in these areas, such as instance blocking, better reports handling and a new moderator view. However we also have to work on improvements to many other features, and our time is limited.

Finally you act like 4000€ per month is a lot of money, however thats only 2000€ for each of us. We could stop developing Lemmy right now and work for a startup or corporation for three or four times the amount of money. Then we also wouldnt have to deal with this kind of meaningless drama. Is that what you want to achieve with your website?

Account migration is not in the works, and I consider it very low priority. Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy isnt focused on individual users, so it doesnt matter much if you start posting from another instance one day. If its important for you, you can always put a link in your profile to your other accounts. I would rather implement a way to export/import account data. Thats much simpler and can also be used as a backup in case your instance goes down.

I definitely didnt expect it, nor did I expect that there would suddenly be more than a dozen different apps. But its not a problem, the more choices users have the better. Those who like such clients can use them, thout it affecting anyone else. Plus monetization of apps could potentially help to fund development of Lemmy itself.

For instances with ads its pretty much the same, more choice for users. But I really doubt that model can have any success considering how many free instances are around which are run by volunteers. Defederation should be unnecessary assuming that ads are only shown to local users.

All the code is open source, everyone is welcome to look through it for potential problems and report/fix them. we dont have any money to pay for a professional audit. Maybe there are some organizations which would do audits of open source projects for free, might be worth searching for.

I only stopped there for transit on a flight to Mexico. Just before boarding my flight I was told that I need a visa for the US, which is extremely weird because normally airports have transit zones where you don't need any visa. But apparently the US is special, so you actually have to enter the country before going right back into the airport. This nonsense made me miss my flight.

Also I remember in the airport there was a security guard doing nothing but shouting nonstop that it's not allowed to carry water. Why not simply put up a sign?

Haha youre a very curious one :D

1. See https://lemmy.ml/comment/2348893
2. It sure isnt perfect, partly because Mastodon makes no efforts to be compatible and expects everyone else to cater to their way of doing things. Regardless, the fact that you can interact between different platforms is a huge improvement over current social media platforms. And Im certain that interoperability will only get better over time.
3. Its already happening, look at Kbin combining the concepts of Reddit and Twitter into one. Or mitra which adds cryptocurrency integrations. There are probably others which Im unaware of.
4. Sure usability needs to improved, this will happen naturally over time as more users join and suggest improvements.
5. Its really genius because it combines the best aspect of centralized (simple login with username/password and an admin who manages technical stuff) with those of p2p (no central point of failure). Real p2p is great in theory, but it requires way too much technical knowledge for the average user, so its unlikely to ever gain mass appeal.
6. Personally I think the Fediverse is really the future of social media, so it will grow whether we want it or not. And its much healthier than the corporate platforms with their tracking, advertising and manipulating algorithms, so the more people leave them behind, the better. I dont see a way to influence this growth, we just need to adapt and deal with it.
7. Basically my previous reply, I dont know enough about journalism to give a more specific answer.
8. The biggest and proudest was definitely when tens of thousands of Reddit users suddenly came here, and most of them actually liked it. Cant say there was anything bad or embarrassing, the experience for me is really positive.
9. It feels great, I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.

The site currently runs on the biggest VPS which is available on OVH. Upgrading further would probably require migrating to a dedicated server, which would mean some downtime. Im not sure if its worth the trouble, anyway the site will go down sooner or later if millions of Reddit users try to join.

Its nice that Reddit is promoting Lemmy like this. I just wish they would give us more time to optimize the code so that it can handle all the new users. For now it looks like many Lemmy instances will be completely overloaded from Monday, but lets see.

It depends where and how you are hosting. Hetzner or OVH have small VPS which can host hundreds of active users for those 10 usd. Of course if you host on AWS or Digitalocean its much more expensive. lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server. Hosting costs will also go down as the code gets more optimized.

Lemmy is not a company, it's built by volunteers. If you want a corporate platform go to Reddit.

Limitations no, if anything the protocol is too extensive and lets you do too many things (or do the same thing in different ways). But thats somewhat expected for a protocol which can handle all types of social media platforms. I think the protocol is fine as is, but it needs minor changes here and there to keep up with how it is being used in the real world. The FEP process is doing a good job of that.

From what I know the AT protocol used by Bluesky is entirely centralized, so it doesnt look like a competitor yet. They claim that it will be decentralized in the future, but I will believe it when I see it. For now the decentralization seems more like a marketing gimmick.

Wow this "policy" has 3700 lines in total. It must take a lot of time to create and maintain it. How does someone even find the time for that?

I tried to access some blocked users and communities via tesseract.dubvee.org and it simply shows a generic "Not Found" error. So this is impossible to figure out for the average user. Even for developers it would be hard to figure out if the JSON file was hidden a bit better.

Cant respond, too many notifications to read and problems to fix.

The only reason is that no one got around to it yet. Its not that difficult, in fact I plan to work on it soonish. There have just been tons of more important things to work on recently (like improving performance and keeping up with all the pull requests).

EU officials are, incidentally, exempt from chat monitoring – which is quite convenient for someone like von der Leyen. Their communication is explicitly NOT to be monitored. The mere fact that those who drafted this law don't want it to apply to them tells you everything you need to know about it.

https://x.com/martinsonneborn/status/1995182586612609241