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Why are Lemmy devs so adamantly opposed to a Follow User feature?

This is the one feature that is the biggest hurdle for full federation between Lemmy and all the other fediverse instances. Mastodon (and its forks), Peertube, Pixelfed, and kbin all allow this and federate extremely well together while Lemmy is the worst at federating because its the only one to exclude this feature.

(Please don’t reply with “use kbin if you want to follow users” again as its very dismissive and frustrating)

Here’s my crude write up on a somewhat hacky way this can be implemented as is:

Do you have any strong opinions on Richard Stallman? Is it good that he's back at the FSF?

Why did you choose Rust for the backend and Inferno for the frontend?

P.S. Thank you for your work!

Sorry, no question, only: Thank you for your hard work :)

1. What's your favorite dinosaur?

2. The way lemmy instances are organized reminds me of IRC. Was that any part of the inspiration?

So, is the official term for AMAs on Lemmy "Ask Us Anything" (AUA)? Or shall we call it "Lemmy Ask U"?

Will an AMA comment sort type be added? Would be convenient to scroll by new replies from OP so we can easily keep up with AMAs

Who are you guys if you don't mind me asking. What's your background?

How much experience did you have with Rust when you started making Lemmy? What programming languages did you use before?

Will lemmy users be able to interact with Mastodon users in future and is there a roadmap for lemmy?

I have heard some respectable communities, namely r/AskHistorians, express hesitance at coming to Lemmy in part over fears of appearing biased due to the overt political stance of Lemmy's creators. In other words, it's hard to be a neutral body in affiliation with anything that has an overt political stance.

I wonder what the devs of Lemmy think of this hesitance. Is it unreasonable and itself biased? Or do you see any potential for finding a way to facilitate a platform that would allow for a more neutral space?

For me the whole point of fediverse is not depending on a single party for your socials/subs. But the current climate in each instance forces users to have accounts in multiple instances.

As a Lemmy user I believe account migration should be a default Lemmy feature which enables true federation for end users. Any plans for this feature in the near future?

With instances already disappearing (eg. vlemmy), content is being lost. Are you considering a lemmy archive?

Why Unicode usernames aren't supported yet? After all, a big part of the world's population don't use the Latin alphabet in their native languages.

Why isn't there a feature to allow individuals to block whole instances?

Any thoughts on overhauling cross-posting, to allow more interaction with the source interaction?

As far as I'm aware: currently when you cross-post, only the recipient instance gets all interactions (comments, upvotes), instead of duplicating to or having the origin solely receive those.

The current implementation hampers the growth of smaller instances when reposting something to a bigger one. Discoverability is still there due to seeing from which instance the post originates from, but that's arguably not enough.

Thank you a lot for building such an awesome platform! Here are my questions:

How did you get into communism? Were there any events that had an influence on you becoming communists and what personally motivates you to keep working on lemmy even though you could earn much more as developers working on proprietary software?

Why are Lemmy devs so opposed to a Follow Thread feature? (The feature request is always immediately closed on github with the message: not planned)

Users being able to opt in to receive updates whenever a thread receives an edit to the post, a new comment, or a reply to a comment thread would be extremely useful.

will uploading audio files become a thing? as a musician i need it

• Is there a plan to improve search and federating communities between instances? My biggest hurdle joining and using Lemmy was without a doubt the search functionality and subscribing to a community on my own instance, it was severely off-putting. Let me walk you through it: you find a community you like, say !vinyl@sopuli.xyz. You paste it into the search of your instance, as instructed. It immediately tells you "No results". If you don't click off, sometimes it changes it's mind within a few seconds. Sometimes it never loads. You try manually creating the URL by going to example.com/c/vinyl@sopuli.xyz but it gives you an error. If you're lucky it works the next day, if you're not then I don't actually know the next step. Not to mention the lack of feedback on subscribing to communities. I have "subscribed" to communities before then realised a week later that despite appearing in my list of subs it didn't actually work and I have to redo, the only feedback you get is "pending". This is the #1 issue that stops me from recommending Lemmy, or at least smaller instances that haven't federated with much yet. Is the search a priority?

• I know you've been asked about splitting NSFW already, but is there any chance of a specific NSFL tag or a generic spoiler/blur tag? Gore and nudity are such different topics they really don't deserve to be under the same banner.

• Are proper inline previews something on the roadmap? What I mean is items like YouTube videos, Streamable links, and just about anything that isn't a Lemmy image is not expandable and requires leaving the website. It's one of my most missed features from old Reddit with RES.

I read as much of the thread as possible, so hopefully these are new questions. Hope I didn't come across too negative here as I've been enjoying my time overall and I know y'all have been swamped these months and never expected this popularity.

Something that trips me up a bit about federation and instances is the overlap of identical communities from different instances.

So for example, I'm an atheist, but it's be years since that was a part of my identity that moved me to care about atheist memes or patting myself on the back for not being religious, which (sorry guys), is what I feel like happens in those communities. So I get them out of my feed by blocking them the way I block plenty of other communities I'm not interested in. In Apollo I was spoiled by the 'hide subreddit' feature that I don't believe existed in Reddit itself, but which was crucial to my enjoyment of that particular app. But since there are multiple instances hosting a version of any given community, I must've blocked at least three 'atheist' and two or three 'atheistmemes' communities, which look the same to me, but are hosted on different instances.

Is my All feed destined to continue having different instance versions of all the topics I don't want to see, no matter how many times I block them, as long as there are more and more instances hosting those communities? I don't want to sound unimpressed by this new technology or ungrateful for the amazing service you all are building, but this feels like either a pretty big flaw in the federated user experience or a pretty big gap in my knowledge of how to work the platform. I'm entirely receptive to the idea I may just be doing something wrong.

Just curious. Thank you for everything you do.