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.

  • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Thx! Really appreciate it, and I’m glad someone thinks its worthwhile work we’re doing.

  • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Lemmy is not for microblogging, so I dont think hashtags make sense.

      • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Ah, post tags are currently work in progress. They are also going to be federated.

  • ex_06@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Hi! As you might remember, i’ve been pushing for this platform for quite some time so i’ll just dump ideas in a pretty annoying way, hope you’ll spare me :3

    • do you realize that the power of the threadiverse is that a forum can even fully exist alone and the federation between them is a plus while for microblogging it’s kinda a shit to not have the big reach? basically, are you going to bring lemmy in a ‘‘more forum’’ direction or a ‘‘more social’’ direction?
    • will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes? it’s clear that the reddit effect is already here and people are not incentivized to read the article and comment on point or discuss less agreable stuff just because posts gets downvoted?
    • if on my instance downvotes are deactivated, do they still influence my home when I browse subs from other instances that have downvotes?
    • more UI mod tools! they are never enough because a community manager has not to be also a sysadmin or a linux poweruser just to take care of the community; stuff like subscribing to blocklists and allowlists, stuff like deleting cached media and so on
    • how is the plugin stuff going?
    • wouldn’t it be better to drop the android client and the federated wiki to fully focus on making lemmy the best federated threadiverse software? now that nodebb has federation the competition is existent (mbin and piefed were never enough e.e) and other frontends are generally cooler (voyager basically brought me back on being active here)
    • can we have a lemmy-first approach regarding comunication and contributions? basically i don’t want to make a github account to push some opinions and it seems like they kinda get ignored when on the lemmy community about lemmy
    • ability to merge communities having them mirrored in a basic way i guess it’s already on his way
    • would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv)
    • would be cool to have lists to be able to browse lemmy from lemmy in a more rss way: for example there are communities i want to check once in a while but totally don’t want em in my home and having lists would help
    • changing ‘‘favorite’’ posts into ‘‘bookmarks’’/‘‘saved’’
    • would be cool to have the possibility to have a favorite users list to check what your friends are up to
    • any other suggestion would basically be ‘‘can this thing that forums have also be ported to lemmy?’’, i just think that lemmy has to evolve into a forum first with a link aggregator ui; it’s kinda easy to use discourse as a bug tracker and feature request tracker for example (observation made because of the previous question of using lemmy instead of github for non code stuff)
    • would be nice to have word filters and user notes
    • also lobste.rs invite tree would be nice
    • have you taken into account that maybe offering a service of lemmy hosting managed by you could help?
    • dulcis in fundo, always about empowering non tech people, what about having lemmy on yunohost as one of the curated methods by the devs?

    alright i think it’s enough lol; now one very big appreciation: thank you for the rss first approach, having rss for basically everything like it was on reddit (well still miss some query rss but i understand it’s harder to do) it’s really so fucking useful and cool and i really hope that lemmy will make niche communities shine again

  • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Communities should be more unified across servers, especially for niche ones. I want to see an active Metroid community, I don’t give a crap what instance is hosting it (or if it’s a mostly-opaque medley of instances) so long as I’m federated with it. This is probably the biggest UX misunderstanding new users have.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Having distinct communities is a feature, not a bug. If two cities set up their own lemmy instances, say lemmy.sao_luis.br, and lemmy.lagos.ng, they can each have a news community, without them overlapping.

      Do a search for metroid, and subscribe to whichever ones you like.

      • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        It would still be a huge benefit, especially for more niche topics, if we had something like a federation-wide comm like /f/niche_hobby that you could subscribe to instead of 20 different /c/niche_hobby communities.

        Maybe comms could opt in/out of behavior to avoid the issue you described.

        This would also benefit smaller instances because few people will subscribe to their comms because they are too inactive, making it so their content never gets traction.

        My biggest complaint with Lemmy is that it is too hard to group & categorize content. Sometimes I want politics, sometimes I want nerd shit, but my only three options are subscribed, local, and all, which doesn’t have any categorization unless you are on an active, niche server.

        Multireddits are pretty much the only thing I miss from reddit.

          • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            Interesting, is this all manually curated like multireddits? Would also be nice to have automatic ones (with include/exclude overrides)

            The problem with it just being Piefed is that Lemmy clients probably won’t bother to support it unless it becomes standard.

            Is this a frontend specific thing or does it also require the Piefed backend on your instance too? If it is just frontend, I would definitely use it for desktop browsing.

            Dope seeing implementation diversity resulting in experimentation and innovation. Would love to see this adopted in other Lemmy implementations too

            • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              Interesting, is this all manually curated like multireddits? Would also be nice to have automatic ones (with include/exclude overrides)

              They have both

              • user defined feeds, public or private
              • admin defined “topics”

              It’s a whole different software, backend and frontend

              • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.mlEnglish
                0·
                2 months ago

                They have both

                Awesome!

                It’s a whole different software, backend and frontend

                I know Piefed is both a frontend and backend, but does this behavior require the backend? Like can it be used with a regular Lemmy backend and/or database without backwards-incompatible changes?

  • Jehuty@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    To chime in on the user creation thing:

    I think it’s a natural part of decentralization that it’s harder for a single instance to get big enough to be the “go-to” for general users.

    Having said that, I also think this will naturally happen over time. As long as the mechanical aspects of sign up are simple, it’s just a matter of users of a given instance to promote their instance.

    World events also always play a role in encouraging a move to freer waters. Look at what happened with Mastodon and Bluesky (though Bluesky imo is just a big snooze button on a blaring alarm)

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Exactly, the more time goes by the better Lemmy will get. For sites like Reddit or now Digg its much easier to do marketing and get a quick user growth, but when they have problems then users will move to Lemmy.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    What have been the biggest challenges with the project over the years, both in terms of technical and non technical aspects. I’d be interesting to hear a bit of retrospective on how has the stack’s been working out, and what surprises you might’ve run into in terms of scaling and federation. What recommendations you’d make based on that and what you would’ve done differently knowing what you know now.

  • murd0x@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    What’s the vision for using lemmy? User should create an account on one server, and use all? Or should create users on multiple servers? The first one seems like the way to go, but it wasn’t quite clear for me when I signed up

  • uberstar@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Random general question, how do you feel about file hosting? When posting, I tend to avoid uploading media larger than like, 5MB, just cause I know that the cost of storing said media can get exorbitant very quickly and I wouldn’t want to be part of the burden… I’m not able to donate just yet. Knowing this, I am currently on the fence on whether I should create a “gaming clips” community.

    That said, it’s nice to be able to embed media from other sources (despite it potentially not working natively for mobile platforms if I’m not mistaken?), which got me thinking: it’d be nice to have some sort of preference list of image/video hosting hosts that users can add to or remove from, and uploading directly from the comment/create post view would use the first working file hosting domain from the list… Just spitballing here.