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.
The introduction of a plugin system seems interesting here, though it’s still alpha and basically looking for feedback from would-be plugin developers
AFAICT, there’s no established way for a plugin to surface affect the UI, which would be a somewhat unwieldy problem anyway due to the apps and frontends ecosystem. Probably the best path for any plugin that provides a UI would be to have a system for aggregating links to plugin UIs.
With something like that in place, plugins and other services that just use the DB/API, could really go a long way to filling these holes, if they haven’t already.
So it seems that the work needed here is perhaps “distribution” work … where there’s a more “plug and play” Lemmy distribution with plugins etc bundled?
This is what excites me the most. There are huge potentials for plugins, and I think it’ll ease some of the strain from the core engineers. Most of the “ideas” I see posted really could be plugins. Things like badges on posts, verification of links, etc etc could all be plugins that individuals could make. The problem with developing against the core repo is that you have to learn and understand the core repo, so you don’t fuck up something else in some other place accidentally. Plugins are a neat way where we can say “I’m a function that does one thing, just do the thing here, and then do what you need to with that data”
Absolutely!
The bit I’m conceptually stuck on (not know much at all about how a good plugin architecture would work) is how a plugin can surface or affect the UI, especially in an ecosystem with multiple UIs/Apps/Frontends, and, a federated ecosystem at that.
Given the apps, I figure it’s not possible without a convention of plugins providing APIs which apps can then implement against when available, which adds a good amount of complexity but should be viable for popular/useful plugins. Though, tangentially, this does affirm for me that the whole native mobile app expectation is a bit of a trap for a social system like the fedi (as webUIs are naturally more universal and maleable).
So, for immediate results, I can see only two options:
Is there something I’m missing about how a plugin system could work?