After a year online the free speech-focused instance ‘Burggit’ is shutting down. Among other motivations, the admins point to grievances with the Lemmy software as one of the main reasons for shutting down the instance. In a first post asking about migrating to Sharkey, one of the admins states:
This Lemmy instance is much harder to maintain due to the fact that I can’t tell what images get uploaded here, which means anyone can use this as a free image host for illegal shit, and the fact that there’s no user list that I can easily see. Moderation tools are nonexistent on here. It also eats up storage like crazy due to the fact that it rapidly caches images from scraped URLs and the few remaining instances that we still federate with. The software is downright frustrating to work with, and It feels less rewarding overall putting effort into this instance because it feels like we’re so isolated.
A few weeks later, in the post announcing that Burggit was shutting down, another admin says the same:
The amount of hoops that burger has to go to in order to bring you this site is ridiculous. To give you an idea of how bad this software is, there’s no easy way to check all the images uploaded to the site (such as through private messages). When the obvious concern of potential illegal imagery is brought up to lemmy devs, they shrug and say to plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for illegal imagery. That response genuinely has me thinking that this is by design, and they want it to be like this. We can’t even easily look at the list of registered users without looking through the DB, absolute insanity.
The other thing is there’s no real way to manage storage properly in Lemmy, the storage caches every image ever uploaded to any instance forever.
Also the software is constantly breaking.
They also say that Kbin has many of the same problems, so I’m just curious to know if the admins of bigger Lemmy & Kbin instances feel the same way about these software.
This is a general issue I think, not just for lemmy but the whole fediverse (whatever one’s opinions might be on particular priorities).
It’s all non-profit and being run and built at a much smaller scale than many users would appreciate (I think). Sure there are plenty of people here, but not that many. Combined with no obvious revenue streams, such as ads or subscription fees, there really is only so much that can be done. Some time last year even the Mastodon team (by far the most successful fediverse platform) admitted that they didn’t have the capacity to work on new things for a while … they were just busy keeping things running. And they are (apparently) notorious at being slow to ship new features. Meanwhile platforms like firefish just straight up died last year.
So yea, it might be a critical point, for sure. But putting more on the core dev teams may not be the answer for the simple reason that it’s just not viable in the long run.
If we enjoy the bigger community focus and open and non-profit organisations that makeup the fediverse, the “answer” at this critical point might be to find a way to give back somehow … to organise, build communities, run fund-raising campaigns, think of ideas for more sustainable funding, find devs who can help etc etc. It’s perhaps onerous and annoying, even to read perhaps … but this is likely the tradeoff we have to make for a place like this.
I fully understand that, and I explained it in my reply to nutomic. It’s not that I wanted to just pile on, but rather at an emergency like that, an all-stop would have been justified in my opinion, to stop all work and go into emergency “What can we all do to stop this and prevent it”. All other issues were secondary in that moment compared to stopping CSAM, and it didn’t feel that way. They added it to the pile of issues, and I’m glad to see changes came out, but in that moment I didn’t see much if any support from them
I hear you for sure on this.
I personally appreciate the push the core devs make for a “less demanding” relationship between users and open source devs. I think they have a point and it’s good for long term sustainability and I’ll probably find myself defending it.
But I like you’re framing, and in retrospect it seems (as is usually the case) that some people organising was what was missing just to get everyone helping each out as much and efficiently as possible. While any member of the community can (and should) do that, at some point it makes sense for the core devs to take on a task like that, I agree.