@dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml

I am one of the Beehaw admins.

I, personally, have not had negative experiences with you or anyone else associated with the Lemmy software platform.

I appreciate that everyone here, in this thread, has been able to vocalize their praises and constructive criticisms.

I believe that it is very important, for the further development of the fediverse, to keep these conversations open to everyone involved.

Please, let us all reflect on the reasons that we are invested in the fediverse.

Personally, I believe that the fediverse has an enormous potential to replace all of the corporate-run social media platforms.

I am invested in Beehaw and the fediverse for the sake of the people.

There is a lot of misleading information in this post.

Something that I notice said consistently by those who have little experience in Lemmy admin spaces is “why not just contribute then?”And the answer people try. And this happens. This unfortunately leads into the next point that is the developer teams behavior.

Dessalines and I had some discussion whether the linked issue should be closed or not. Anyway we decided to leave it open in the end. Then some weeks later a user came along and made a completely offtopic complaint that this decision making process is somehow wrong. I admit that I overreacted by giving a temporary ban for this, but mistakes happen and its completely disingenious to spin this as some sort of general toxic behaviour from our side.

There is a fundamental lack of confidence amongst a majority of Lemmy instance admins towards the lead developers of Lemmy.

This is your opinion and I doubt it is as widespread as you think.

Another aspect of this is that the Lemmy devs run two instances: lemmy.ml & lemmygrad.ml

What makes you believe this? I can only speak for myself, and I am not involved with lemmygrad in any way.

The biggest piece that broke all confidence in the Lemmy developers amongst many admins including myself is that during the CSAM spam attacks there was complete radio silence. The developers made no statement on the matter. And when Github requests were made to try and propose ideas about how to fix what happened, the developers explicitly stated they didn’t have time to focus on that. No dialogue.

Correct the CSAM wave was handled by admins on their own. As far as I remember there were no specific feature requests that would have helped in this regard, and anyway they would have taken too long to implement and publish.

As well, when a post was made about Sublinks (A project I will touch a bit more on, and am involved in due to the reasons I have highlighted above) the comments that were made by Lemmy’s lead developers were extremely petty. This lessens peoples confidence in your project, not improves it.

Why do you consider it petty? Its a fact that jgrim never opened any issue for the features he wanted, not did he attempt to contribute with a pull request. Its also true that it took multiple years of fulltime work to get Lemmy ready for production, and I dont see how Sublinks can be any faster when it has only volunteer contributors. That doesnt mean I wish for Sublinks to fail, in fact I hope it will be successful so that admins and users have more choices available, and to improve resilience through independent codebases and development teams.

Generally you seem to have an extremely entitled attitude. Lemmy is an open source project that is provided for free. I would also love to fix all the problems that users report, and implement all those features. But unlike Reddit we are not a billion dollar company with thousands of employees. We are just two individuals funded by donations and working from our homes. There is only a limited number of hours in each day and only so much work we can finish in that time. If you are unhappy with Lemmy then by all means switch to a different platform, because we dont get any direct benefit from having more users.

Gabe, a couple of weeks ago, nutomic was asking for ideas on a name for his federated wiki alternative project, I put forth my suggestion that I thought was better (also because I didn’t want it to be named after the bin chicken), but he told me, pretty bluntly in fact, that he is sticking with his original choice.

Am I bummed about it? Of course.

But it would be silly of me if I kept pestering him because he didn’t do exactly what I want, because at the end of the day, he doesn’t owe me anything.

I can make suggestions to him, but he doesn’t have to take them, I’m not his manager, and I can take no as an answer. (He could have let me down a little easier though.)

From reading your blog post, I get the impression that you are venting because 1. the Lemmy devs didn’t prioritize on the “improved moderation tools” that you wanted and 2. you are unhappy with the way they are running their own instance, which is kind of the point of decentralization that instances are ran independently from development.

Let me ask you a follow-up question to think about (you don’t have to answer me): You are putting weight into Sublinks right now, what’s to say that you wouldn’t have any disagreement with jgrim about the development priorities of Sublinks?

Lastly, sorry I never did the thing that I promised you to do a few months about moderating a comm on lit cafe, been kind of stressed and irritable recently and can’t really find the energy to do much creative writing. Sorry.