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.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
    10·
    5 days ago

    Yeah, it’s not hard to select a server and it’s a “good thing to do”, but it’s still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the “proper” path.

    We could add a “fast join” button to the signup dialog on join-lemmy.org , where it takes you to a random instance’s signup page.

    Overall though, we should ignore the “advice” from reddit that tells us that people are too stupid to sign up for anything now. People did this for every forum and every other site all until ~2005 when US tech gobbled up most services, and ppl continue to show us that yes, they do know how to type in a username, password, and email to sign up for something.

    Duplicate post aggregation. The nature of federation will always make it make sense to have duplicate communities, but this will also make posts with the same links, same images, same videos, etc show up in people’s “all” feeds multiple times.

    In lemmy-ui we have a post-deduplicator for feeds, but unfortunately not a lot of other apps (including jerboa, that’s my bad) have added something similar.

    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.

    Settings export already exists. Copying historical content and rewriting history isn’t possible in a federated system, but we do have an open issue for data export.

    • Azzu@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      5 days ago

      we should ignore the “advice” from reddit that tells us that people are too stupid to sign up for anything

      Definitely agree. The problem is just when someone in the past said “you should join <forum x>!”, you were always able to just immediately go to forum x’s signup page and sign up. But if someone hears of Lemmy, and goes to join-lemmy.org, there is no way to go to a signup page directly. They have to first learn about the multiple servers, and choose one. I think a “fast join” button like you say should be fine, and immediately next to it something to catch all the advanced actually curious users with something like a “advanced sign-up”

      In lemmy-ui we have a post-deduplicator for feeds

      That’s weird, because that’s exactly from where I’m coming from, I’m always using the lemm.ee website directly on all my devices, and I constantly see duplicate posts.

      Copying historical content and rewriting history isn’t possible in a federated system

      I have less knowledge of this topic so I’ll defer to you, but I have the feeling this may not be true. You might of course not be able to ensure consistency between all instances, ensure that it’s been changed everywhere, but I really can’t see why this is any different than “editing” a comment’s content or a post title, which is already possible. Why wouldn’t it be possible to “edit” the comment/post author in exactly the same way?

      Thanks for your response and all you’re doing!

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

        That’s weird, because that’s exactly from where I’m coming from, I’m always using the lemm.ee website directly on all my devices, and I constantly see duplicate posts.

        I was thinking about what you were saying yesterday and I had another look.

        • on the subscribed feed, using “New Comments”, crossposts seem to indeed aggregate
        • on the All feed, using “Top of the Day”, crossposts would indeed appear multiple times, depending on their respective scores
          • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            5 days ago

            Then that’s where the issue comes from. I guess you might open an issue on the Lemmy GitHub so that crossposts are grouped in the Top views too rather than separated by their own upvote scores

      • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
        12·
        5 days ago

        The problem is just when someone in the past said “you should join <forum x>!”, you were always able to just immediately go to forum x’s signup page and sign up. But if someone hears of Lemmy, and goes to join-lemmy.org, there is no way to go to a signup page directly.

        People should probably stop saying “join Lemmy”, and instead link directly to the site/instance they suggest