IMHO you might be overthinking things a bit, while missing some other parts.
First, Lemmy is a NLnet project funded by the EU. The lead devs don’t work for free, and proposing “bug bounties” could be seen as competition and/or not in their personal interest.
Second, Lemmy is two layers in a tech stack:
ActivityPub
Mastodon
Lemmy server
Lemmy client
The focus of Lemmy devs is on the server side, with the rest basically a MVP to keep ongoing funding (NLnet funding is tricky on its own, the main two devs have little room to do anything they didn’t get pre-approved for, if they want to get paid).
There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it means they are not “project leads” or “community leads”, and they won’t care about it either.
What Beehaw seems to need, is one or two additional layers to the stack:
Mod tools
Community building (current mods seem to work fine for Beehaw)
Community features (seems to be a good number of bots out there)
Extra features
This is not something the Lemmy devs are able or willing to do, so Beehaw and similar projects will need to add them, or find them somewhere else.
I would suggest starting bug/feature bounties for whatever is needed, on a forked repo of Lemmy; take from upstream whatever works, and leave Lemmy devs to run their own show. Maybe call it “Beemy” or something.
The focus of Lemmy devs is on the server side, with the rest basically a MVP to keep ongoing funding (NLnet funding is tricky on its own, the main two devs have little room to do anything they didn’t get pre-approved for, if they want to get paid).
That’s not actually true. You can discuss with NLNet and change your tasks midway.
You can discuss it, NLnet is under no obligation to approve any changes. Their philosophy is one of “we’d sooner return the funds to the EU rather than waste them on low return projects/tasks”.
I’ve done some research about projects NLnet funded (considering to apply myself), and some of the postmortem read like horror stories. People would ask NLnet to change tasks as a project evolved, NLnet would refuse, meanwhile people would spend their time on what they thought was best for the project, only to later find out NLnet considered some of the tasks unfinished and refused payment, ending up with people effectively carrying a project with extras, only to get paid for half of the original tasks and none of the extras.
If I were to work with NLnet funding, you can bet I would focus strictly on approved tasks and be wary of changing any of them.
I am already working with NLNet myself and have been able to add new tasks. I am in the process of asking them to change some of them as well and onboarding more members. Let’s see.
IMHO you might be overthinking things a bit, while missing some other parts.
First, Lemmy is a NLnet project funded by the EU. The lead devs don’t work for free, and proposing “bug bounties” could be seen as competition and/or not in their personal interest.
Second, Lemmy is two layers in a tech stack:
The focus of Lemmy devs is on the server side, with the rest basically a MVP to keep ongoing funding (NLnet funding is tricky on its own, the main two devs have little room to do anything they didn’t get pre-approved for, if they want to get paid).
There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it means they are not “project leads” or “community leads”, and they won’t care about it either.
What Beehaw seems to need, is one or two additional layers to the stack:
This is not something the Lemmy devs are able or willing to do, so Beehaw and similar projects will need to add them, or find them somewhere else.
I would suggest starting bug/feature bounties for whatever is needed, on a forked repo of Lemmy; take from upstream whatever works, and leave Lemmy devs to run their own show. Maybe call it “Beemy” or something.
That’s not actually true. You can discuss with NLNet and change your tasks midway.
You can discuss it, NLnet is under no obligation to approve any changes. Their philosophy is one of “we’d sooner return the funds to the EU rather than waste them on low return projects/tasks”.
I’ve done some research about projects NLnet funded (considering to apply myself), and some of the postmortem read like horror stories. People would ask NLnet to change tasks as a project evolved, NLnet would refuse, meanwhile people would spend their time on what they thought was best for the project, only to later find out NLnet considered some of the tasks unfinished and refused payment, ending up with people effectively carrying a project with extras, only to get paid for half of the original tasks and none of the extras.
If I were to work with NLnet funding, you can bet I would focus strictly on approved tasks and be wary of changing any of them.
I am already working with NLNet myself and have been able to add new tasks. I am in the process of asking them to change some of them as well and onboarding more members. Let’s see.
Yeah, I saw that, you’re part of why I considered applying myself, keep up the good work! 👍
From what I’ve read, the final results may not be clear until the end of the funding cycle, but maybe those were just some mismanaged projects.