I think it’s not really on your side, most likely either just something wrong on kbin.social itself, OR a side-effect of the measures lemmy.world implemented against kbin.social recently.

They are basically local-only communities on lemmy.world at this point, unfortunately. There is no federation to any other instance for any lemmy.world user posts on those communities.

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

Regarding your question:

Lemmy federation basically works by copying stuff from their source instance to all other federated instances. So if I write a comment on lemm.ee, other federated instances will get their own copy of my comment. They will also all know that the “authority” for this comment is lemm.ee.

If an admin on another instance decides to delete their local copy of my comment on lemm.ee, then they are always free to do so (for example, some instances might want to moderate more strictly), but any actions they take like this are limited to their own instance - for the rest of Lemmy, lemm.ee remains the authority for this comment, so individual remote instance admins taking actions won’t have any effect on any other instances.

As for the original topic of modlog federation, basically it just boils down to this: just like with the comment example above, Lemmy instances also save a local copy of incoming federated mod logs. The Lemmy software does not yet have 100% coverage in terms of federating mod logs (for example, there are no federated logs yet for instance admins banning remote users), but this coverage has been increasing, and I expect this will eventually get to 100% (just needs more dev time really).

Also, if some instance admins try to tamper with their mod logs, then other instances can still see the real history, because there is no way for an instance admin to delete copies of their mod log from other instances.

Banning a local user from a local community does actually federate already

Most actions federate, any exceptions which aren’t federated yet are generally just there because the federation logic has not been implemented (but improvements are constantly being worked on).

Generally federating the modlog is mostly just there for informative purposes. As in, we can check what mod actions were taken on instance A through the modlog on instance B (and there is no mechanism in Lemmy for other instances to retroactively remove or hide federated modlog items, btw).

That’s true, it will only show content which has been federated to lemm.ee, so indeed if you want to search for more content than is available on your instance, you would need some additional tools for that.

I’m a simple man:

“What day is it?” asked Pooh.

“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.

“My favorite day,” said Pooh.

incorporated into the UI, rather than a piece of text in the post.

How would other instances (or other ActivityPub software) know about it if it’s not a piece of text in the post?

Should work just fine for posts and comments as well, for example, here’s a search result containing your comment

The built-in search feature is actually quite decent I find, is it not working well for you?

For context I use all of these daily: Linux (servers + handheld gaming), Windows (gaming), Mac OS (work & general purpose). I used one of the first iPhones around 2008, then exclusively Android for 10 years, and then back to iPhones.

Iphone users of Lemmy, people say not to trust you on tech insights.

IMO, these “people” with such takes are the only ones who shouldn’t be trusted on tech insights here :P

I think nearly all big Lemmy instances have in fact defederated, you can check this list: https://fedipact.veganism.social (filter by software: Lemmy)

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

This “ads as posts” thing was one of my two biggest concerns with Threads federation. I really hoped I would turn out to be wrong about it, but at the end of the day, both Facebook itself, as well as big social media influencers, rely on advertising for their profits. For anybody looking to avoid ads on Lemmy, it seems like direct federation with Threads is not a good idea currently. On lemm.ee, “no advertising” has been one of our 4 core instance rules from the start.

My other major concern was Threads having the ability to enforce their feed algorithms on federated instances through sheer number of votes on things they show in their feeds, but judging by what you’re saying about the engagement, at least that concern has not materialized (at least yet).

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)

I think community discovery can (and should) be improved for sure!

Currently it’s true that you can use topic-centered instances for this, I do this myself as well, but I do think it has quite significant downsides in terms of creating pockets of centralization. For example, if you’re a user who is ONLY interested in french cinema (or any specific topic) on Lemmy, and all of the related communities and other invested users are on a single instance, then for you, the experience is absolutely no different from any centralized platform - the french cinema instance admins have 100% control over your Lemmy experience.

IMO, in practical terms, 3 key things should imapct instance choice:

1. Basic instance rules (including things like community creation policy, nsfw allowed, etc)
2. Federation policy
3. Instance infrastructure (hardware & how it’s managed)

Content specialization really shouldn’t matter IMO, because as long as the federation policy is OK for you, then you can participate in any communities, regardless of what instance they are on. In other words, even if you’re super interested in french cinema, there is no need to centralize all users interested in this topic on a single french cinema instance. Thanks to federation, users from all instances (accounting for federation policy) should be able to become fully fledged participants in any french cinema communities.

Of the points I listed above, #1 and #2 are easier to include in an instance introduction, I’m not sure how to properly and reliably reflect #3 in any kind of overview. At the end of the day, I think most users tend to figure out their long-term home instance a while after they first join Lemmy, and quite often, it’s not their original instance, so maybe it’s not that important to emphasize the initial instance choice too much?

Interesting project! Can you explain the vision a bit more - I understand that every instance can have their own version of an article, but how would a user know which version of an article is most relevant to them to read (and maybe even contribute to)?