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.

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    Youre right about lemmy-ui, unfortunately it doesnt have enough contributors. I dont know why that is, you’d think a project written in a popular language like Typescript would easily find contributors.

    Random thoughts:

    • Is it obvious enough that one can contribute to the UI separately from the backend and that it’s a Typescript SPA style UI?
      • If not, maybe a bit of a “dev recruitment campaign” could help … let people people know and what sorts of issues could really do with new contributors lending a hand? Maybe even a bit of a “Inferno isn’t that different from all of the other SPA frameworks/libraries spiel?”
    • Is the use of Inferno as oppose to one of the big 3 React/Vue/Svelte a repellent? (perhaps a downside to the “diversity” of frontend frameworks?)
    • Are would-be UI contributors more inclined to make their own front-end or app than contribute to the default webUI?

    More generally:

    • Would a server side rendered webUI be welcome?
      • Then the contributions would mainly be on templates and their “simpler” logic, which might be more attractive or easier to get started on?
      • Plus, it might be more efficient? The current UI feels to me like it would suit server side rendering well.
      • Is this where the new leptos UI is heading … more server side rendering (I don’t know much about leptos)
    • Do you have a sense of usage numbers for the different apps and frontends? Obviously you only run lemmy.ml, but do you have a sense of how much the front-end gets hit versus the API directly?
      • I ask, because If the default WebUI is really the main interface, then it makes sense to try to organise some more contributors (It’s certainly my main, nearly exclusive interface, as much as I’ve like some of the alt front ends or apps)