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:

  1. Featuring posts site-wide
  2. Site-wide taglines
  3. [WIP] Custom emojis

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:

  • wopazoo [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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 .

    • booty [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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

      • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • boboblaw [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Rebuttal: flair*

          But seriously, this sounds like the best way to do it. Hexbear's solution is totally ad hoc. I hadn't thought of the case of federated instances disabling flairs and that sounds like an added bonus.

      • wopazoo [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        read their actual response instead of my summary

        • booty [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          you included their actual response in the comment, which i read. the summary accurately summarized their response, which is still sus.

          • wopazoo [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            both lead devs are communists which makes me inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt

          • jkfjfhkdfgdfb [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            but raising such issues can also be used to get in the way of doing things :shrug-outta-hecks:

        • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah it sounds an awful lot like the arguments that were made by the people who got run out of here way back when pronouns were made mandatory.

          Unfortunately, shitty as their response is, it's their project, so we're just gonna have to find another way to implement it, as mentioned in the OP.

            • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I'm sorry, but English is the primary language of the Internet, so the language argument rings hollow, and the "what if people don't want it" line genuinely is right out of the old struggle session.

              Regardless, I'm not trying to fight them about it or suggest we try to fork the project; we will need to go along with their preferred direction. But I don't have to agree with or like their reasoning.

              Edit: Moreover, have you looked at the user flairs issue? They're essentially dumping a number of difficult choices onto us, and then they can just reject our solution out of hand if they take any issue with it at all. User flairs are apparently going to be a key-value store--but how do they federate? How are they set? Can the user set whatever pronouns (or other flair) they want, or is there some list of choices chosen by admins? What is the default value? (Upstream probably won't like our solution of using "None/Use Name" as the default.) How does that (the set of choices) work with federation? (E.g., do other servers just have to accept whatever another server allows, or do they have to set some kind of whitelist?) How is this displayed? Is it always-on (upstream won't like that, just based on the discussion around user pronouns) or is it something admins have to enable (meaning if we federate with another server, that server can opt not to display our pronouns over there)?

              • boboblaw [he/him, they/them]
                ·
                2 years ago

                I’m sorry, but English is the primary language of the Internet, so the language argument rings hollow

                Okay this is some chauvinistic bullshit. On the day that Chinese-speakers outnumber English-speakers, I expect you to publish a retraction.

                • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  No need to wait that long; you're right. I was frustrated because the languages point feels more like justification than reasoning--gendered pronouns are very much a part of many languages not mentioned, and even in Spanish with pronouns left out, it's totally possible to misgender someone. As I said elsewhere, the response comes off pretty dismissive to me, especially in light of the extensive, carefully-crafted post to which they're responding. So I dismissed that argument out of hand (and in a shitty way), which was unreasonable and, as you say, chauvinistic. I will try to do better in the future.

                  • boboblaw [he/him, they/them]
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    Yeah, I admit I was iffy on their wording there. Like I could have sworn Spanish had gendered pronouns?

                    I can see why they'd want to be language-neutral though. The fediverse seems to be pretty diverse, and inter-accessible.

                    Meanwhile I'm over here trying to watch a Chinese tv show, and I'm baffled when I click on a Chinese url and it doesn't work...

                • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  Ok, but the actual issue posted on Github says none of that. It's an incredibly bare-bones issue, just the basic idea and nothing more. So as it stands, it's a giant roadblock in our way, and they're basically demanding that we do a whole bunch of extra work to build out a preferred feature of theirs, which they don't appear to have fleshed out much at all, in order for us to get back in sync with upstream. I realize they don't have to care about us, but honestly we are the most active and heavily-used lemmy instance that currently exists, so they probably ought to.

                  Also, something about the response comes off as pretty rude to me. TimHexbear posted a comment back in August, no one ever responded to them, and then Nutomic closes the issue yesterday, without saying anything other than another link to the (basically empty, as mentioned above) user flairs issue. That doesn't seem very cordial or polite to me.

                  Edit: Sorry if my tone is bad; your points are good and valid and I just need to stop being grumpy about it lol