In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.

We’d also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What’s something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?

Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @dessalines and @nutomic, turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We’d like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.

We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides @dessalines and @nutomic, other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:

Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.

  • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    131·
    3 days ago

    it’s still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the “proper” path.

    https://phtn.app/signup gives a prepopulated list

    show up in people’s “all” feeds multiple times.

    Which interface do you use? Crossposts only show up once on the default UI

    A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

    You can already export and import your subscriptions between instances (account settings - import/export)

    Posts and comments can’t be migrated, but Mastodon doesn’t allow it either.

    Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.

    https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export

    • Azzu@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      gives a prepopulated list

      The official one also does that. I’m talking about choosing a username, password, and email maybe, and then clicking register, and being done. No thinking involved.

      Crossposts only show up once on the default UI

      False, you get links to the other posts, of which you posted a screenshot, but each post is handled as being completely separate. If you are in the subscribed, local or all feeds, you would see all of these posts separately. Have you really never noticed scrolling by “the same” post multiple times? You have to go to each post manually to get all the comments to the “same” thing.

      but Mastodon doesn’t allow it either […] due to technical limitations

      Yes, I know that. But I’m also a programmer and I know that “technical limitations” is mostly a term for “that’s how we started it and it would be too costly to solve now, so we’ll just dismiss it” and not for actual limitations (i.e. not technically possible). It’d maybe require breaking changes of some kind or some kind of annoying backwards compatibility workaround, but that is why I’m asking. I’m not completely familiar with activity pub, but there’s likely some key used to verify posts/messages are made by a certain user, and there’s currently no way to transfer or change that key to a new account. But it seems very technically possible to me, and also possible without massive security issues. So that was my question, is there any plans to do this or no?

      • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        False, you get links to the other posts, of which you posted a screenshot, but each post is handled as being completely separate. If you are in the subscribed, local or all feeds, you would see all of these posts separately.

        I understand your frustration, however these can be multiple posts but to different communities with varying focuses and moderation styles.

        Simply consolidating all the comments in one introduces its own problems.

        • Azzu@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          That’s why no one suggested “simply consolidating”. I didn’t suggest any solution at all. I’m just posing a question of if this actually pretty big problem is attempted to be handled.

          • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3·
            3 days ago

            I guess it’s just been mentioned too much in the past that it still comes to mind when I hear this. Sorry.

      • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        The official one also does that. I’m talking about choosing a username, password, and email maybe, and then clicking register, and being done. No thinking involved.

        This should probably be handled more by people when they talk about Lemmy. Instead of explaining what Federation is, just point people to https://vger.app/settings/install so that they can install an app.

        Voyager by default suggests Lemm.ee as the instance to register, so no thinking indeed: https://vger.app/profile

        That’s the recommended approach nowadays on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com

        False, you get links to the other posts, of which you posted a screenshot, but each post is handled as being completely separate. If you are in the subscribed, local or all feeds, you would see all of these posts separately.

        I only see them once in my subscribed feed. You may indeed see them multiple times if you are not subscribed to all the communities.

        You have to go to each post manually to get all the comments to the “same” thing.

        This one I agree, and it’s why I generally suggest to consolidate similar communities to solve that issue. !fedigrow@lemm.ee has quite a few examples of successful consolidations.

        I’m not completely familiar with activity pub, but there’s likely some key used to verify posts/messages are made by a certain user, and there’s currently no way to transfer or change that key to a new account.

        You’re looking for https://activitypods.org/ . I haven’t been following their recent progress, not sure how mature their solution is, and how many Fediverse platforms support them.