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.
Multispam is one of the things that is genuinely a threat to Lemmy’s usability. If you follow certain topics, you start seeing 2-5 copies of every post. It’s a genuine spam problem and “just block” or “just scroll” is as much of a non solution as it is with other spam.
Some users use it as an ideological war on instances they don’t like, which is extremely funny.
Personally when I want to share something to multiple communities, I deliberately space out the posts in time. It has the slight downside of potentially showing up for a person repeatedly for days, but I think this is outweighed by the upside of them not seeing the same post multiple times within a few minutes, which is really annoying. And it has the added advantage of being more likely to be seen by people who weren’t online at the right time to see it the first time.
Sometimes. But other times the instance/moderation vibes of each post will be different. Sometimes I enjoy seeing how different groups respond.