Hi everyone.
A while back, we announced our intention to move Hexbear back to Lemmy. This post will serve as our second transparency report on our progress.
We’re happy to share two more features have been successfully ported upstream, with a third very close to completion:
Last time, I mentioned we had some work to do porting Hexbear’s database schema back to Lemmy’s. I’m very happy to announce that, as of three hours ago, we successfully ported a recent database backup from Hexbear to Lemmy’s schema for the first time. We have used this to start up a local Lemmy instance running with the past two and a half years of of Hexbear data on it. Here’s a sneak peak!
None of this would have been possible without the volunteer developers. In particular, I want to again give a massive shout out to @makotech222 - he has been doing the bulk of this work and we cannot thank him enough. :stalin-heart:
Progress continues to be made, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us. Whilst we are at the stage where our core features have been ported over, there are some features we’d lose. For example, upstream are not interested in explicit pronoun support. We have a workaround for this which allows for pronouns to be set and displayed as is shown in the screenshot above, however, with more volunteers we could work on a better solution that upstream are interested in: user flairs. So please, if you are a developer who wants to help port over the last couple features upstream, reach out to either me, CARCOSA, or layla.
That’s all for today. We hope this was useful and answered some of your questions. If you have more, some of the team will be in the comments for a while so please feel free to ask. Thanks, and viva la Hexbear! :hexbear-static-logo:
HEXBEAR 2 :lets-fucking-go:
upstream are not interested in explicit pronoun support
sus
Their response is here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2383#issuecomment-1201537622
In summary:
- gendered pronouns are too specific to the English language to be added as an explicit feature in Lemmy
- some people may not be comfortable giving out their gender on a public forum
- they want to implement user flairs as an alternative as it is a solution that has more uses than just pronouns
Nutomic:
I think this feature would be way too specific to integrate in a general-purpose software like Lemmy. For example, east Asian languages like Chinese dont even have gendered pronouns as far as i know. Even in German or Spanish i have rarely if ever seen it. As you say, its only really a phenomenon on the English language internet, and thats not the only target group for Lemmy.
That said, it makes sense to me to have a more general feature for tagging users in different ways. #1456 is one possibility for that, though i am unsure how it would work in detail, including over federation. Could users freely write their tag, or only select from an admin-approved list? And how to handle different instances which use the tag feature for different attributes? (pronouns, operating system, favourite color, etc). It would be helpful if you could comment there with more details on how youd expect it to work from a user/admin perspective.
#246 could potentially be another way to implement this, though im not sure how to show it on each comment. Maybe it could be visible on mouseover of username?
Gonna close this one as wontfix, please comment on the two issues above.
Dessalines:
Re-opening just for discussions sakes.
I don’t think we should have forced / opt-out pronouns, because of the reasons nutomic mentioned ( lots of languages don’t use them ), and the fact that a lot of people don’t feel comfortable providing their gender / sexual identity.
Currently as you mentioned, the best way to add pronouns, is to add my name (pronouns here) as your display name. This field is already federated too, so pronouns should display next to your name all over the fediverse.
The other option is to use your bio. Its a click away, but its there, and it seems to be where most twitter / masto ppl put pronouns.
Long term, user flair #1456 would probably be the best way to do it, while also accounting for the diversity necessary for this. And it would work for a lot of other applications too ( political affiliations, religion, or things like musical tastes (IE a metalhead flair on a music community)).
Also thanks for repping Simplevote lol, seems like something I need to rewrite in rust laughing .
gendered pronouns are too specific to the English language to be added as an explicit feature in Lemmy
just make it so that if someone doesnt select pronouns then the box isn’t displayed
some people may not be comfortable giving out their gender on a public forum
see above
they want to implement user flairs as an alternative as it is a solution that has more uses than just pronouns
they could do that and also pronouns
I remain feeling that this is a sus response
Dessalines is a comrade and extremely based.
they could do that and also pronouns
Pronouns will likely be implemented as user flairs, so a separate implementation is redundant the moment user flairs roll out.
Given federation requires Lemmy to maintain compatibility between tons of configurations, forks, & versions, I see a number of reasons why implementing pronouns as user flair is a better architectural decision:
- Avoids technical debt of adding another element to the API.
- Avoids future version/instance incompatibilities from changes to the API.
- Avoids maintaining localization code that must handle boatloads of edge cases for pronoun quirks in various languages.
- Avoids instances removing pronouns from content on federated instances if the instance disables pronouns on their server. Pronouns as flare prevents removing them without also removing flair entirely…which will prevent a lot of misgendering.
- Avoids spending dev time debating a one-size-fits-all implementation that works for all languages & satisfies most instances.
- Allows instances to set defaults for provided pronoun options & their grouping, sorting, labeling, & display.
- Allows even more granularity if individual comms can override & extend instance default flair/behavior.
- Allows sharing code with other types of flare.
- Allows features added for user flare to automatically apply to pronouns (e.g. flare colors/icons/abbreviations/expansions, flare-based comment filtering & restricting comments on post to users with specific flare)
Thesis: Pronouns via flare would provide a better experience and be easier to maintain than as a standalone implementation.
I’ve recently taken up responding to every comment that needlessly attacks me by typing “ok boomer”.
So.
Ok boomer.
if this site is so transparent why is the background black instead of the wall behind my monitor?
Anyway, everyone who volunteers their time to work on this site, and other open software, is cool.
A lot of this sort of thing is over my head and I can’t be much help but just wanted to pop into the thread and thank all the devs and everyone else that helped build this place, keep it going, and move it forward. :order-of-lenin:
:rat-salute-2:
Can’t be overstated how much of a pain porting is. Salute to our brave developers
