I think there are two separate things I want to address here:

First, agile isn’t a project management methodology, it’s just a set of 4 abstract priorities and 12 abstract principles. It’s very short, you can check it out here:

https://agilemanifesto.org/

Nothing here says that you’re not allowed to write documentation, write down requirements, etc. In fact, the principles encourage you yourself as a software team to create the exact processes and documentation that you need in order to meet your goals.

“Working software over comprehensive documentation” does not mean you aren’t allowed to have documentation, it just means that you should only write documentation if it helps you build working software, rather than writing documentation for the sake of bureaucracy.

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” does not mean that you should have no processes, it just means that the individuals in your team should be empowered to collaboratively create whatever processes you need to deliver good software.

Secondly, in terms of practical advice:

1. Talk about this problem with your team. Is it hard for others to figure out where requirements came from? Maybe they already have a good method and can share it with you. If it’s hard for everybody, then propose improvements to your process, for example, propose some type of design document process as part of building any new features
2. There are no perfect answers to the question of “how do I safely make non-trivial changes to systems”, but the general approach is to ensure that:

a. You have metrics about how your system is used.

b. You have automated tests covering any requirements, so that you can feel confident when making changes to one part of the system that it isn’t violating any unrelated requirements.

c. You actually document any confusing parts in the code itself using comments. The most important thing to cover in comments is “why is this logic necessary?” - whenever something is confusing, you need to answer this question with a comment. Otherwise, the system becomes very annoying to change later on.

If you are missing any of the above, then propose to your team that you start doing it ASAP

3. At the end of the day, somebody is responsible for making product decisions. Is it your team? Or maybe some separate product owner? Sometimes, you just need to communicate with whoever is responsible to figure out if any requirements are still relevant, or if they are now safe to change.

It’s not really a bug, it’s just a case where app developers need to update their code to support a small change in the Lemmy API. More details here: https://lemm.ee/post/34259050/12479585

It’s the first option in the dropdown:

Big thanks to all maintainers and contributors!

The sad fact is that some people keep constantly spreading false rumors about Lemmy devs not working on mod tools. Anybody can just take a few minutes and go through the past Lemmy updates in this community to see that moderation improvements are basically worked on constantly (and this is not some recent change either). But there are plenty of users who never bother to actually check this, and so the rumors keep spreading.

Obviously being instance-banned won’t prevent you from commenting on their posts, it just won’t get federated to that instance

I am actually working on fixing this right now, so that in the future, users would be prevented from commenting in this situation

Awesome work!

Do you have an idea yet for the timeline of the 0.19.4 release?

Just a hunch, but is it possible you missed the --recursive flag when cloning the repo?

On 0.19.3, you can:

1. Limit the file upload size for local users through nginx configuration
2. Disable incoming federated images through Lemmy configuration: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/config/defaults.hjson#L49 (set this to false)

If I have several backends that more or less depend on each other anyway (for example: Lemmy + pict-rs), then I will create separate databases for them within a single postgres - reason being, if something bad happens to the database for one of them, then it affects the other one as well anyway, so there isn’t much to gain from isolating the databases.

Conversely, for completely unrelated services, I will always set up separate postgres instances, for full isolation.

On Lemmy 0.19.3, reports go to:

• Community mods
• Admins of the instance where the community is hosted
• Admins of the instance of the reported user
• Admins of the instance of the reporter

They specifically called it “child abuse content”, not “child abuse”. This seems perfectly valid, no?

By the way, just because these are digital renderings does not mean that there is no harm. Seeing such content can still be harmful to past victims. Just try to put yourself in this situation: imagine just playing some video game online, and suddenly being exposed to people recreating traumatic experiences from your past. Not only that - you also discover that the creators of the video game are involved & actively enabling such content. Seems completely messed up to me.

I think separate report inboxes are needed for the report reasons approach as well. This RFC doesn’t prevent having report reasons, rather I think it brings us closer to that goal.

Thanks for the thoughts!

Why not take this approach to simplify it then?

Yeah, the wording can be changed, I’m adding a note about it to the RFC

But I should be able to mark a report complete if I have dealt with it. Otherwise I’m just going to go to the post and sort it out anyway, so its just adding complexity. Barriers/extra steps to administration is not the way forward here.

I think in this particular case, some barriers are crucial. At the very least, I think we need to have warnings/extra confirmations when an admin wants to resolve a mod report.

I mean, if an admin handles it to the point where mods can’t take any further actions anyway (ban + content removal), then the report is automatically resolved already, so there is no need to manually resolve. OTOH, if an admin handles it in a way that a mod might still want to take additional action (for example, the admin just removes a comment), a mod might still want to take further action (for example, ban the offending user from their community), but if the admin marks the mod report as resolved, the mod will most likely end up never seeing it.

I am legally on the hook for content on my instance, not the moderators, and proposing changes that make it harder to be an admin is a touch annoying.

Btw, I don’t think any admin actions should be made harder, I am only talking about adding barriers to resolving reports which are in mod inboxes, and when I say “resolving reports”, I am literally just talking about marking the report as resolved (this shouldn’t really be a common action for admins - it’s akin to marking DMs as read for other users IMO). I don’t want to limit admins in any way from banning/removing content/anything like that.

No. This is a step backwards in transparency and moderation efforts. Granularity and more options is not always a good thing. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of using Meta’s report functionality you’ll know how overly complex and frustrating their report system is to use with all their “granularity”.

Agreed, I think that’s in line with why I proposed not going that path in the RFC as well.

To add: I would suggest thinking about expanding this to notify the user a report has been dealt with/resolved, optionally including rationale, because that feedback element can sometimes be lacking.

I think that would a good additional feature, but orthogonal to this particular RFC (I mean, neither feature depends on each other)

Thanks for the comment! I think I generally agree with your points, will try to incorporate them into the RFC soon.

While I don’t think admins should be removing things that were reported to the community, they should be able to remove things outside of reports (even without being a mod). Sometimes spam might get reported to the mods, but the admins need to take action. Could the ‘read only’ view add a little warning before action is taken?

To be clear, admins are always able to do that anyway, I’m not proposing any changes to this. I am only proposing to limit the actual “mark as resolved” action, in order to prevent admins from accidentally hiding reports from mods. But I think it makes sense to even not limit this completely, and rather just show a warning when an admin does it - I have updated the RFC.

Btw, for this one:

Sometimes spam might get reported to the mods, but the admins need to take action.

I think it will mostly be OK as long as we allow mods to escalate reports to admins. But still, maybe it is indeed necessary to allow admins to directly resolve mod reports (with an extra UI confirmation step) as well.

Or do you mean reports on content now go to the user’s home instance as well?

Yes, exactly.

Also, there’s no way to report a user to their home instance so long as they don’t post anything in a community on their home instance.

This has been fixed in 0.19 thankfully. But for instances running older versions, what you said is still true.

I kind of get where you’re coming from, but to me it sounds like you’re looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like “books”), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you’re interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.

I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, “ownerless” topics, instead, it’s built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.

IMO it’s totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it’s totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn’t really seem like a useful feature, but that’s kind of analogous to what you’re suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.

It’s OK to post questions here:

Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.

Do you think Lemmy is decentralized enough right now, or are you worried about some of the bigger instances growing too much?