- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
Highlighting the recent report of users and admins being unable to delete images, and how Trust & Safety tooling is currently lacking.
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I don’t agree with the tone of the Lemmy devs, but they are right: it’s opensource being worked on mostly in the free time of people. Do not treat the devs like they are paid to do your bidding, because they aren’t. If you donated and have expectations, you don’t understand the meaning of a donation.
Imagine if the author had a woodworking workshop on their compound where they made things out of wood; figurines, furniture, tools, sculptures, and so on. Say they opened it up to the public so that guests could have a look, play around, spend some free time there, and maybe even use the equipment there. But then guest started demanding the author buy newer equipment, make sculptures more to the guest’s liking, made the workshop more accessible to invalids, put up the national flag, play the radio, and a host of other things. All the while not footing the bill for anything, not helping clean up, not volunteering to help in any fashion.
Then the author refused and invited the guests to help. But instead, the guests went off and made a blog saying the author was selfish, cold, self-centered, egoistic, rude, and what not.This is what the author of this article and people in that github discussion come over as. If those people came into my workshop and told me how to do things without helping out in any way, I’d rightfully tell them to fuck right off.
Articles like these that are practically demanding change will not and do not improve the dialogue. They are actually bad for opensource as a whole because they give people who don’t understand opensource the feeling that they have the right to complain, the right to demand, the right to expect, the right to be entitled to an opinion and an outcome.
That’s a thumbs down from me dawg.
I have a better example. What if a small company made pills or medical devices. Do they get to be noncompliant with the EU law, and tell their patients “we won’t get a medical license, there is too few of us to do it”? If you aren’t okay with that, you aren’t okay with lemmy being noncompliant GDPR-wise
Beautiful example of a commercial company selling products to customers 👍 My questions to you:
- are the lemmy devs a commercial entity who paying clients are dependent on for making a closed source solution that nobody can modify?
- who is non-compliant for failing to remove personal data form the database and filesystem? the admins who have access to the database and filesystem or the lemmy devs who don’t?
- if the people complaining are so concerned, why do they not contribute the code to fix their perceived issues?
Are lemmy admins handling EU information? Yes. Do they offer services? Yes. It doesn’t matter if free or not. Hosting a lemmy instance that allows EU users is therefore illegal.
Ah, I see. You’re answering your own questions with the answers you like. Do you even need me to agree with yourself?
Let me guess: “no”.
If you want to read your opinion typed by somebody else, I suggest you get a secretary. I’m not here to indulge in your fantasy.
Of course the Lemmy devs aren’t liable for GDPR violations; the admins are. That doesn’t eliminate the problem, though: if the Lemmy devs wish to see their software used as it is now in the long term, they need to introduce GDPR compliance tools. We should consider it gravely concerning that bad actors (e.g., a Reddit employee) can set up Lemmy admins for a massive GDPR suit at any moment.
Edit:
if the people complaining are so concerned, why do they not contribute the code to fix their perceived issues?
I know it’s a stereotype around here, but not everybody on Lemmy is a programmer with free time.
Ah, so now that it is really plainly explained and you have no arguments (since you never did) you start complaining and poisoning the discussion. Good job.
This link has been posted and discussed on Reddit too.
Of course, we shouldn’t care about what people on Reddit think (and I noticed this post by chance since I log on there very rarely now), but some users in the thread genuinely ask about joining Lemmy and so I guess it’s useful to know about possible obstacles to trying it that they may perceive.
That OP has been crying everywhere about the Lemmy devs being mean to him. Saw a few threads of his here on Lemmy.
Ya, reading the GitHub issue sounds entirely like burnt out devs being abused by users. It’s a massive issue in open source.
The Late Night Linux and Linux Dev Time podcasts talked about exactly this in a recent episode. It can be extremely demoralizing to do all this work for free for a project only to be inundated by ungrateful people demanding you fix something or implement a feature they want. Many open source projects have died because of that.
We’re not talking about a user demanding you release a flatpak build targeting their personal linux distribution running in a VM’d WSL, we’re talking about a consumer facing social app that doesn’t include the functionality for a user to delete something they added.
You know what the acronym used for describing the most basic functional web app api is?
CRUD - Create, Read, Update, Delete
we’re talking about a consumer facing social app
What we’re talking about is a complete free and open source project that’s built and maintained completely through volunteer labour.
There are zero obligations towards the people actively using the software.
While I agree that the functionality should exist, the devs can literally do whatever they want. Nobody is paying them.
Edit: you’re also seeing only a single instance of a conversation. I can guarantee that the devs have been dealing with asinine and demanding users for a while now. There comes a point where your patience wears thin.
There are zero obligations towards the people actively using the software.
Yes, there are, and that obligation is to not publish something as production ready if it is illegal to use because of how it’s built.
I’m a software developer, I understand exactly how frustrating user demands are, that was still a completely and utterly unacceptable way to respond to a very politely worded request for software that literally just doesn’t break privacy laws to run.
As the commenter pointed out, if you don’t want to fix it, fine, but then you absolutely have a moral, ethical, and professional obligation to document that clearly in your README.md.
Yes, there are, and that obligation is to not publish something as production ready if it is illegal to use because of how it’s built.
No, there really isn’t. Do I feel that project owners should follow good practices for maintaining clean code that also allows users to keep things legal? Absolutely I do.
But that is not the same thing as an obligation. If there was a single cent exchanged between the devs and anyone else (donations do not count) then this conversation would be entirely different.
I don’t agree with the devs’ stance. But it is 100% their prerogative to say no. It’s their project, not ours.
I’m a software developer, I understand exactly how frustrating user demands are
As am I.
that was still a completely and utterly unacceptable way to respond to a very politely worded request
I agree.
As the commenter pointed out, if you don’t want to fix it, fine, but then you absolutely have a moral, ethical, and professional obligation to document that clearly in your README.md.
No, you absolutely do not. Although I do somewhat agree on the professional part, but it’s still not an obligation. It’s completely unprofessional, but that’s different than it being an obligation.
The word obligation is not as narrow as you’re using it:
obligation /ŏb″lĭ-gā′shən/
noun A social, legal, or moral requirement, such as a duty, contract, or promise, that compels one to follow or avoid a particular course of action. “Are you able to meet your obligations?” “I have an obligation to attend their wedding.”
Does he have a contractual obligation? No, no contracts were signed. Does he have a legal obligation? No, the license file in the project absolves him of legal liability.
But he absolutely has a moral, social, and professional obligation to do so.
You seem to know what you are talking about. Have you made a pull request yet?
Have you learned how to program to fix the problem?
It doesn’t seem worth my time to learn Rust just to submit a PR to devs who behave like that, they’ll just reject it and be pithy, like they are when a user asks them to comply with EU privacy law.
It doesn’t seem worth my time to learn Rust just to submit a PR to devs who behave like that
Ya, this is exactly the attitude that burns out devs and kills projects. Congrats for being super entitled towards a free project.
It is not entitled to expect a published project to comply with basic privacy legislation and not be illegal to use.
If your bar for this project is that much below basic consumer expectations, then this project was always going to fail.
Is it entitlement if it’s making using the entire thing illegal everywhere? Since there is no tooling to block traffic from the EU / not federate with instances that don’t comply with GDPR?
What I truly don’t understand is why the negative eggs that you WILL ALWAYS HAVE NO MATTER WHAT, read it again, ALWAYS HAVE NO MATTER WHAT, gets so much mental attention than the many more people who are actively applauding you and saying their thanks and giving you their praises.
I will never understand the focusing on the negative I guess. It’d be easy as fuck for me to ignore people’s assholeishness while still taking their badly typed criticism and improving (if I reasonably can).
Shit, it makes me feel like the fucking champ when some random persons says thanks for something I did, and I laugh and ignore the ones who don’t like what I do.
But hey, if focusing on the few negatives instead of the mountains of praise is what you want to do, it’s all yours.
Imagine you get approval to build a new park and playground for your neighbourhood. You spend hundreds of hours designing the plan and layout and you spend incredible amounts of your own money to get the resources.
You get to work and things are going well. As you near the end of months upon months of work, the park finally opens for families and kids to use.
As you’re standing there proud of your work, some people come over to you. Do they say “thank you!” or “you did amazing work”? No, they come over to complain about things that are missing, tell you what you should have done better, that you didn’t accommodate their each specific needs, etc.
You would very quickly get bitter and demoralized.
Like I mentioned before: this is a massive problem in the open source development world and has killed many great projects. This has nothing to do with “mental attention” and everything to do with users abusing the devs and their time.
In your analogy, the park didn’t follow any safety guidelines and people are dying on the rides and falling into a lake with piranhas.
the park didn’t follow any safety guidelines and people are dying on the rides and falling into a lake with piranhas.
In my analogy it’s a park with trees, bushes, rocks, and slides. I said “park in your neighbourhood” not “mega-extreme rollercoaster park”. I also said “you got approval” which is generally from the city or other governing municipal/county/regional body. And that also requires a plan to be submitted before approval is stamped.
So no, what you did is make up a bunch of crap to strawman my argument and try to make what I said wrong in some way.
Nice try.
They by definition didn’t “get permission” if they are noncompliant with GDPR.
No space for muh centrism
lol
The fact that Lemmy’s core team is taking a fairly laissez faire position on moderation, user safety, and tooling is problematic, and could be a serious blocker for communities currently hosted on Lemmy.
At this point, most of the solutions the ecosystem has relied on have been third-party tools, such as db0’s fantastic Fediseer and Fedi-Safety initiatives. While I’m sure many people are glad these tools exist, the fact that instances have to rely on third-party solutions is downright baffling.
Honestly, what? Why would be baffling to have third party tools in this ecosystem? It would be baffling if that was the case for Facebook. Also the devs did work on some moderation features, but they probably have tons of other stuff to work on, all for an amount of money which is a low salary for one developer.
That’s not the argument being made. What’s baffling is to pretty much only rely on the efforts of third party devs to fill in the missing gaps. It’s a profoundly bad strategy.
It’s like with Bethesda releases a shitty half-finished game, and leans on the modding community to actually put in half the things that would actually make it in any way fun to play. Except Bethesda actually makes money, and the community works for peanuts. Here, Lemmy makes some money, but a huge chunk of the user community shoulders the cost out of pocket. A big chunk of the Fediverse is actually unpaid labor that brings in negative dollars month over month.
The devs have a vested interest in ensuring their project continues to grow, they continue to get funded for their work, and features on their own roadmap get planned and developed. They can’t do that if the tooling is too brittle, shitty, or threadbare to actually handle the deeply fucking intense problem of managing and maintaining a server and community on the open Internet, where literally anything and everything goes. Factor in a myriad of local jurisdictions and laws about data and content, and a lot of these things end up becoming severe liabilities.
Look at it this way: with federation, a handful of volunteers themselves are doing labor for free, for the devs, by propping up their platform, client ecosystem, and reputation in the space. If this gets bad enough, people will literally say “fuck it” and walk away.
That’s not the argument being made. What’s baffling is to pretty much only rely on the efforts of third party devs to fill in the missing gaps. It’s a profoundly bad strategy.
I literally quoted the article:
At this point, most of the solutions the ecosystem
I mean, there are some moderation features in Lemmy, for sure with gaps, but there are many gaps on other aspects as well, and if people can’t run the instances due to other technical issues, there is also nothing to moderate, so obviously prioritization is complex when resources available (dev) are so limited.
That said, I really don’t see the problem of third parties. We rely on third parties for one of the most fundamental features, which is community discovery (lemmyverse.net), for example. What’s the problem with that? I think that’s literally one of the benefits of making an open platform, where other people can build other tools in the ecosystem. We are not purchasing a service, we are not talking about an organization who has a substantial revenue and tons of people and can’t deal with basic functionalities. We are talking about a project with a team that is smaller than the team that in Facebook deals with which colors to make buttons, and it’s “paid” 1/20th of that. So I still don’t understand, what is “baffling”? Because from where I stand, all things considered, it’s totally normal that a project with these resources and that gained popularity less than a year ago has still tons of gaps and a long roadmap, and that tools in the ecosystem address some of these gaps.
It’s like with Bethesda releases a shitty half-finished game
No it’s not. Bethesda is company that sells you a proprietary product while having a revenue in the order of hundreds of millions. The relationship between Bethesda customers and Lemmy users has absolutely nothing in common.
Here, Lemmy makes some money
Lemmy makes no money. Considered the opportunity cost, Lemmy loses money. A single dev with a full time job can easily double the amount that Lemmy devS earn. Not to talk about the fact that the money they make are donations, without a contract bounding them to anything and also not granting them anything (tomorrow everyone could cancel donations and the income would disappear).
They can’t do that if the tooling is too brittle, shitty, or threadbare to actually handle the deeply fucking intense problem of managing and maintaining a server and community on the open Internet, where literally anything and everything goes. Factor in a myriad of local jurisdictions and laws about data and content, and a lot of these things end up becoming severe liabilities.
Sure, but again, if those were the only problems and the devs would be sipping cocktails in Hawaii splurging on those 4k/month, I would agree with you. If they think priorities are elsewhere, or are also elsewhere, they might have their reasons. In fact, in the article there is a complaint about them answering in a “hostile” manner, but I also understand that the issue in question is probably the 100th issue in a week/month in which other people tell them what they should do. This is a regular problem in OSS (See https://mastodon.uno/@bagder@mastodon.social - the maintainer of curl - for plenty of examples). After they understood better what’s the problem, their stance changed as well, which is also reasonable.
Look at it this way: with federation, a handful of volunteers themselves are doing labor for free, for the devs, by propping up their platform, client ecosystem, and reputation in the space. If this gets bad enough, people will literally say “fuck it” and walk away.
I don’t look at it in this way at all. I think the devs made it extremely clear (even given the political stance of both) that despite the happiness of seeing their project flourish, they have no interest in growth as an end. In fact, I would say that nobody is doing work for the devs. But I see that we have a fundamentally different perception on the dynamics in Lemmy, so I see no reconciliation between our opinions.
Yeah it’s open source, 3rd party tools existing is kinda the point really. If these people care so much then they should be working on making tools to address the issue, or funding someone to do so.
Lemmy devs being man children when confronted with GDPR compliance.
And if Lemmy if supposed to better Reddit in basic fucking decency then GDPR is absolutely crucial.
how are you supposed to do gdpr compliance on a federated system though?
- By defining all information that is processed and why.
- By not processing and storing any personal identifiable information (an IP address is PII for example) without a clearly defined need.
- When stored ONLY using data for the defined purposes. This also means shielding data that should be shielded.
- By implementing the mechanics for someone to be forgotten (delete my account, should delete all info, especially PII).
- Making sure the mechanics to federate these changes/deletions exist.
You can’t and this is a shit article…the GDPR doesn’t apply to instance outside of the EU…
The GDPR even applies if no financial transaction occurs if the US company sells or markets products via the Internet to EU residents and accepts the currency of an EU country, has a domain suffix for an EU country, offers shipping services to an EU country, provides translation in the language of an EU country, markets in the language of an EU country, etc.
Literally people using the GDPR like it’s some gotcha thing for admins. If nothing is sold or offered to be sold and their is no financial gain it’s not going to apply. On top of that good luck suing a FOSS dev.
Edit: that downvote button does jack shit on Lemmy people. If you think I’m wrong why not prove that I’m wrong…and why a bunch of law firms are wrong as well.
deleted by creator
GDPR applies to any entity that processes personal data. That includes instance owners. In fact of you look up GDPR enforcements you can that it’s also enforced against private persons.
deleted by creator
Maybe you should reread what you wrote? You said there’s no way GDPR would ever apply. I said it does. You said there are no enforceable actions, there are. the part you thought makes you right is the “criminal charges” part but that makes zero sense to begin with because GDPR, as an EU wide regulation, imposes only fines and no criminal charges.
deleted by creator
GDPR absolutely applies to Lemmy, it’s just that nobody has looked at it / there wasn’t a complaint. When that happens, lemmy will be in trouble.
deleted by creator
There will be enforcement if one asshole reports instances. Are you certain nobody will get disgruntled and report it?
deleted by creator
Yeah uh huh, I sure do suck mr random person on the internet. The only thing you are saying is “these people won’t audit lemmy because they don’t want to”. You think that in some magical way, lemmy will be immune. Guess what, it won’t. The fines aren’t simply because people aren’t cooperating (and the devs themselves said that they don’t care about GDPR outright). You don’t know how it works, all you do is wishful thinking and insulting others.
Hey everyone, I just wanted to thank you for the lively conversation and thought-provoking insights. We don’t have to agree on every point (or at all), but I’ve decided to synthesize a lot of thoughts and ideas from these conversations into a blog post: https://deadsuperhero.com/2024/03/economic-musings-on-federated-networks/
