It’s a basic curl command, that shouldn’t be “arcane” if you’re setting up a server.
This is the equivalent of saying that any instance admin needs to know how to use curl while most people have never used a commandline. Not only that but you need machine access to know the api key which I would wager instance admins do not necessarily have.
I think this is the result of not prioritising work that makes moderation possible by non-technically inclined people and it is genuinely a failure of the system.
The priorities of development on Lemmy are decided by developers and the people who are not are simply pushed away. Most community leaders and moderators are not developers. The mental gymnastics to justify this lack of tooling is tiring.
Doing manual curl calls is hardly an alternative for proper GUI, but the way the article is written makes it look like there’s nothing you can do when someone uploads an image to your server. That just isn’t true.
Server administrator can delete media, either by extracting the user delete token from the database or by using the privileged API. That’s not an alternative to a proper moderation API but it’s also not the “uploading is a black box that glues the files to your server” that people pretend it is.
And to be honest, if you’re going to run a server like this and don’t know how to do these tasks, I’m not sure if hosting a publicly accessible service is such a good idea. Not because this stuff is common knowledge, but because web services are complex and come with all kinds of ethical and legal implications that you need to know how to handle. We don’t want the Fediverse to become like email, where 99% of IP-addresses are blocked because it was so easy to just leave an ancient piece of software running with no real understanding of the abuse it could cause, whether that’s an SMTP server or an open MissKey server (see: the Japanese spam wave).
In my opinion, Lemmy’s lack of moderator tooling is a serious deficiency that puts it squarely behind Mastodon and a bunch of other Fediverse tools. However, there’s no way you only discover this stuff months later. The sad fact is that Lemmy is one of the better Threadiverse server implementations despite its many glaring issues.
What I’m seeing around Lemmy is a lot of complaining about priorities but not a lot of community action. Mastodon had the Glitch fork, Kbin had Mbin, but nobody bothered to fork Lemmy to fix the issues they care about. Instead, it’s all about “the two lead devs need to focus on what I find important”. Suggestions to work on the project and fix the issues are deflected by things like “I don’t have time/don’t know Rust”, which are perfectly valid reasons not to help, but also don’t make your problem the devs’ problem. There’s a real sense of entitlement coming from these blog posts for a platform whose top 4 contribution statistics look like this:
I too have too little time to fix the issues I have with Lemmy, but I accept that instead of assuming the issues I’m facing need to be prioritised. If Lemmy’s priorities are that starkly different from mine, I’ll need to migrate to something else. I don’t get to decide what does and doesn’t appear on the roadmap for the next release.
Lemmy should have better mod tools, and they’re coming eventually. I’ll just wait for the devs to get around to implementing them.
This is the equivalent of saying that any instance admin needs to know how to use curl while most people have never used a commandline. Not only that but you need machine access to know the api key which I would wager instance admins do not necessarily have.
I think this is the result of not prioritising work that makes moderation possible by non-technically inclined people and it is genuinely a failure of the system.
The priorities of development on Lemmy are decided by developers and the people who are not are simply pushed away. Most community leaders and moderators are not developers. The mental gymnastics to justify this lack of tooling is tiring.
Doing manual curl calls is hardly an alternative for proper GUI, but the way the article is written makes it look like there’s nothing you can do when someone uploads an image to your server. That just isn’t true.
Server administrator can delete media, either by extracting the user delete token from the database or by using the privileged API. That’s not an alternative to a proper moderation API but it’s also not the “uploading is a black box that glues the files to your server” that people pretend it is.
And to be honest, if you’re going to run a server like this and don’t know how to do these tasks, I’m not sure if hosting a publicly accessible service is such a good idea. Not because this stuff is common knowledge, but because web services are complex and come with all kinds of ethical and legal implications that you need to know how to handle. We don’t want the Fediverse to become like email, where 99% of IP-addresses are blocked because it was so easy to just leave an ancient piece of software running with no real understanding of the abuse it could cause, whether that’s an SMTP server or an open MissKey server (see: the Japanese spam wave).
In my opinion, Lemmy’s lack of moderator tooling is a serious deficiency that puts it squarely behind Mastodon and a bunch of other Fediverse tools. However, there’s no way you only discover this stuff months later. The sad fact is that Lemmy is one of the better Threadiverse server implementations despite its many glaring issues.
What I’m seeing around Lemmy is a lot of complaining about priorities but not a lot of community action. Mastodon had the Glitch fork, Kbin had Mbin, but nobody bothered to fork Lemmy to fix the issues they care about. Instead, it’s all about “the two lead devs need to focus on what I find important”. Suggestions to work on the project and fix the issues are deflected by things like “I don’t have time/don’t know Rust”, which are perfectly valid reasons not to help, but also don’t make your problem the devs’ problem. There’s a real sense of entitlement coming from these blog posts for a platform whose top 4 contribution statistics look like this:
I too have too little time to fix the issues I have with Lemmy, but I accept that instead of assuming the issues I’m facing need to be prioritised. If Lemmy’s priorities are that starkly different from mine, I’ll need to migrate to something else. I don’t get to decide what does and doesn’t appear on the roadmap for the next release.
Lemmy should have better mod tools, and they’re coming eventually. I’ll just wait for the devs to get around to implementing them.