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.

  • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
    381·
    12 days ago

    there was a discussion about this same post before, I’ll just copy paste my comment…

    That post complains about not being able to view/manage images hosted by your instance, but v0.19.4 already fixed that last week? So that kinda disproves them saying the Lemmy developers didn’t want it to be possible. Also the post complains about the amount of storage used by caching images but that was also fixed/improved in v0.19.4

    • xantoxis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      211·
      12 days ago

      I’d really love it if people stop saying “it’s by design” when they can’t point to any motivation for that design. When the quoted admin says “thinking this is by design” this is equivalent to saying “Lemmy developers prefer that there be no image moderation tools.”

      Like, what. Why would they want that. They clearly don’t want that. They’re working on changing that.

      • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
        21·
        12 days ago

        It’s very hard for people to accept that there are other things that may need to be worked on before their requested fix/feature. Every big project has a huge backlog of issues/feature requests, you can’t do them all in 1 day or even 1 year. Especially with low funding lol.

        • h3ndrik@feddit.deEnglish
          25·
          11 days ago

          Though Lemmy has funding for full-time developers.

          And it’s not like other features get implemented in the meantime. Progress is really slow here, even compared to hobby projects.

          Edit: Lol, thanks for downvoting.

          • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
            4·
            12 days ago

            Though Lemmy has funding for full-time developers.

            barely, edited it to say low funding

            I hope the plugin system will attract more contributors, especially since it supports a variety of languages

            • h3ndrik@feddit.deEnglish
              2·
              11 days ago

              I’m not sure about the numbers but it should be like 6,600€ a month?! join-lemmy.org shows 3,656€ per month from donations, plus ~750€ a week they said in their last AMA from the NLnet fund.

              I’m not sure if I’d consider that low… Sure it’s not much compared to the revenue of a commercial platform. But still, you can build something with like 2x40h weeks. (plus a community)

              Maybe they already factored in the 3k from NLnet and it’s just 3.6k in total, I don’t really know. But they’re always talking about two full-time developers plus one more they’d like to pay… So that makes me think it’s probably 6.5k€. Maybe someone can fact-check it.

          • Blaze@reddthat.comEnglish
            3·
            12 days ago

            Funding isn’t that high, they launched a funding drive in October:

            Before the Reddit migration, our income was almost exclusively made up of generous donations from the NLnet foundation. This funding was based on getting paid for implementing new features, specified in advance.

            We’ve known that this funding could not last indefinitely, and that after several years of funding, NLnet’s resources are better spent getting other projects up and running. Additionally, much of our time is spent on other equally important work: reviewing changes from community contributors, fixing bugs, doing support, and various organizational tasks.

            That is why we are launching our first annual funding drive. The goal is to increase monthly, recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

            https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-10-31_-_Join-Lemmy_Redesign_and_Funding_Drive

            I couldn’t find the details of the current status of the NLnet funding at the moment, maybe if someone has that number?

            The donation pages shows 3600€ for the both of them: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

              • Blaze@reddthat.comEnglish
                2·
                11 days ago

                Should be paying them an additional 3.000€ a month?!

                How much do you think a full time Rust developer makes?

                • h3ndrik@feddit.deEnglish
                  1·
                  11 days ago

                  Kinda depends on productivity. I’d say 45k to 60k€ is alright for an average coding job in some company. I don’t know the details here. For self-employed people that varies a lot and developing Lemmy propapbly doesn’t compare to a salaried job at all.

                  • Blaze@reddthat.comEnglish
                    2·
                    11 days ago

                    For self-employed people that varies a lot and developing Lemmy propapbly doesn’t compare to a salaried job at all.

                    It’s more about opportunity cost. Most of the devs are indeed company employed and don’t want to code on their free time. Having a regular salary would encourage an additional full time dev to join.

        • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
          48·
          12 days ago

          It also is true that ideologically-motivated-coding is an actual thing.

          Imagine someone hating that their propaganda gets deleted by moderators, so they make it difficult for moderators to function that way…

          while they, themselves, just so a SELECT on their DB to see the images, to delete all the ones they don’t want…

          Remember, it isn’t only corporations who are committed to enforcing the Enshittocene, ideologues do, too.

          Those comments are proven false by the dot-4 release of Lemmy, but I’m not accusing the Lemmy devs of being the way those post-quoted comments said.

          I AM stating, bluntly, that deliberate torque on the use of ANY aspect of an app, is a thing, now, and need be considered as ONE of the possibilities.

          _ /\ _