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.
- I have no idea how and which server I joined, is there any manial I can read better yet visually see how servers are connected that are federated? Thx. And when we search something does it search across all servers? Thanks.
When will anyone be able to click the following /c/books And see an agglomeration of all “books” communities on all federated server? I don’t mean multireddits Thanks!!
You mean like a list of all communities named “books” or “books…”? And then you could choose to visit individual communities by clicking on them?
When will users be able to frictionlessly migrate between instances without losing their posts, their comments, their history, their relationships, their reputation etc? (Without requiring the consent of the exiting instance owner, or that this server still even exists, as they sometimes don’t)
How would you improve it?
a way to filter out posts that have no engagement or comments from others would be helpful since the larger instances flood my feed w hundreds/thousands of news links that flood out the discourse on lemmy.
That would means the disappearance of /new once enabled. It should be a smarter algorithm that gives you just a few of them to vote on and do your part on sorting. But that also means your feed is no longer strictly chronological.
/scaled already seems to this and it helps with the posts themselves and, yes, shows posts out of chronological order; but helps a lot with seeing posts that would ordinarily get drowned out with /new.
i was proposing the same thing as /scaled, but with comments and/or votes instead of just the posts themselves since /scaled doesn’t seem to work with the comments feed.
There is the “new comments” sort which makes it sort chronological by the time of the last comment under a post
a /scaled version of new comments is what i’m looking for.
Thanks a lot for the work you do! How do you get by with such a limited amount of funds? How sustainable is your financial situation if donations don’t pick up considerably?
Do you plan on moving away from GitHub to something else like Forgejo?
Once its mature, I personally wouldn’t be opposed to moving issue tracking off github and into a federated one like forgejo.
No questions right now. Just wanted to say thank you for your hard work.
I know y’all catch a lot of shit and get hammered with requests/demands, so I wanted to let you know that your work is greatly appreciated.
Thanks for dedicating your time and energy to making a non-corporate, federated social environment possible.
Being on Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air.
Do you plan to introduce some kind of post tags into Lemmy, preferably something that will behave like Hashtags on Mastodon and other activitypub platforms? I know that Lemmy has been embedding community name as a hashtag for a while now, though having tags that can be populated by users would help discovery greatly.
Lemmy is not for microblogging, so I dont think hashtags make sense.
Well they don’t have to show up as hashtags to users on Lemmy, they can show up as their own designated tags you add to the post on creation of editing. Just some form of post tags to indicate the category of a post (could even be specific to communities like subreddit flairs) but they would show up as hashtags on Mastodon, similar to how Lemmy already embeds a hashtag of the community into posts.
Ah, post tags are currently work in progress. They are also going to be federated.
I am new to Lemmy, so haven’t really looked into if the following is possible but can I create groups of communities with a similar topic across multiple instances?
Just wanted to say I LOVE lemmy! It’s a really positive community, the atmosphere is great and I like how it’s unique but also familiar. I really appreciate your work on it. I know this is AMA… what’s your favourite animal?
Do you have any plans to make it easier to manage the images stored in pictrs? One issue I have is that I used to proxy images, I no longer do that, but now I have like 300GB on backblaze doing nothing. In this post I outlined more precisely what I mean.
What Is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
+1 on registration experience being the #1 issue.
Would also be cool if we could stop 404/500ing deleted posts and instead display some indication it has been deleted. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment.
Thanks for Lemmy! 💙
Dunno if I’m too late, but here goes. My question is about federation between instances.
On PeerTube an instance follows another instance and then federates every channel and videos available.
On Lemmy, the user can follow a specific community and then that community will federate with the users instance.
How about being able to, either as the instance itself or a user, to follow an entire instance and have it federate everything?
An example. I have a user on Lemmy.wtf, but I am also very interested in the communities at Feddit.dk. I never know when new communities have been created on Feddit.dk, unless I go directly to Feddit.dk and look. If I could subscribe my instance to Feddit.dk, then all future communities would be visible to me automatically.
If something like that isn’t possible, then what about being able to browse other instance’s communities from my own instance?
How is it some can mod 15+ comms, like this awful character PugJesus , ban anyone for no reason and then comment stuff like this without consequence:
Be less of a dick.
Be less of a moron.
