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
    0·
    9 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
      0·
      9 months ago

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

  • uberstar@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 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.

  • ex_06@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    9 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

    • krolden@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      They did managed hosting before but everyone freaked out that the communist devs were controlling the narrative or some shit. It was a mess, I think they stopped doing it now that there are more instances.

      Down votes should remain. It expresses dissatisfaction with peoples cringe bad takes

      • ex_06@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        It expresses dissatisfaction with peoples cringe bad takes

        I wish this was real. In those cases the right button should be the report button anyway…

        Having one vote to incentivize hive mind and another to punish a different opinion is just much more polarizing than having just the incentive only

        It’s not rare to see people downvoting someone who wants an honest discussion and bringing their ideas to the table. (to be clear I’m not talking about people wanting to justify their racism or shit like that lol)

        everyone freaked out that the communist devs were controlling the narrative or some shit

        I must have forgotten 🫨

      • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        We offered free instance hosting for some time, in order to encourage the creation of new instances. That was before the Reddit migration when lemmy.ml was still by far the largest instance. It was a success because numerous instances like slrpnk.net and aussie.zone were started that way. But after the migration there was no need for it anymore as plenty of instances were created without our help.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      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?

      Im not a fan of microblogging, so for me Lemmy should definitely be more like a forum.

      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?

      As mentioned by others, downvotes can already disabled by the instance, so that local users cannot downvote and federated downvotes are ignored. Lemmy 1.0 will also add per-community downvote settings.

      if on my instance downvotes are deactivated, do they still influence my home when I browse subs from other instances that have downvotes?

      Yes

      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

      I only work on the backend, lemmy-ui and other frontends could definitely use more contributors to work on these things. Im not familiar with all the different apps but they are probably missing many features that already exist in the backend. That said subscribing to blocklists and allowlists seems a bit risky, as you can end up with most instances subscribing to the same list, giving the creator a lot of power. I believe Mastodon or Twitter had some drama like that. Anyway this could be implemented with the API.

      how is the plugin stuff going?

      Practically finished, you can already start developing plugins.

      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)

      Lemmy is not a company with a boss ordering the workers what to do. Everyone including me and Dessalines are volunteers, and chooses for himself what he wants to work on. As its all open source its not really competition, more users on NodeBB is also good for Lemmy as it means more user choice and activity.

      One reason Im working on Ibis is because I waited for a long time for someone to start a federated wiki project. Its a major thing thats missing from the Fediverse. As no one else did, I have to do it myself. The other reason is to have something different that Lemmy to code on. Working on Lemmy can be quite exhausting because the project is already very mature, so every new change needs to pass tests, be approved by other maintainers and work with the existing features. Ibis is still in early stages and under my control alone, so I can do whatever I want.

      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

      I checked your profile and it looks like you received adequate replies for all the latest posts.

      ability to merge communities having them mirrored in a basic way i guess it’s already on his way

      There are open issues for these, but developer time is very limited so we need to set priorities.

      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)

      Theres an open pull request for post tags.

      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

      A lot of things would be nice to have, but with the very limited resources we have there is only so much we can do. So we need to focus on the main functionality, its basically the unix philosophy: “Do one thing and do it well”.

      have you taken into account that maybe offering a service of lemmy hosting managed by you could help?

      Yes, but in the end I dont think the profit would be enough to justify the workload.

      dulcis in fundo, always about empowering non tech people, what about having lemmy on yunohost as one of the curated methods by the devs?

      We dont have time to manage yet another installation method, but anyone can help out and contribute there.

      Wow these were a lot of questions :D

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      No seriously he’s retired and cooks his brain watching fox news all day. If he got off that drug for even a month he’d return to being a sweet and caring person.

  • prototype_g2@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Some Lemmy clients offer the option to auto-hide posts and comments which contain certain keywords of the choice of the user. Are there any plans to implement this feature into the stock Lemmy experience?

    I know it is possible to do some hacky stuff with UblockOrigin to do the same, but that is not something most know about and are willing to do.

  • m_‮f@discuss.onlineEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Not really a question, but something to think about is being more strict about backwards compatibility so that people don’t get burnt out on having stuff break. Coming from this post by the Tesseract dev, who did not like the breaking changes to the v3 API in 1.0: https://dubvee.org/post/2904152

    To formulate that into an actual question, do you think the changes are still worth it and you’d make the same decision to break backwards compatibility?

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      This is all a matter of dev resources. If we had maybe 6 full-time devs, we could handle things like backwards compatibility.

      People forget that lemmy, like other open source hobby projects, don’t have the resources that large corporations do. People understandably get frustrated when there’s breaking changes, but they also need to not put enterprise-level expectations on a small number of people.

      If someone wanted to work on that, of course we wouldn’t be opposed, but you should know how monumental a task that would be.

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    I think the greatest strength is that it is so compatible with other Threadyverse software like PieFed and Mbin. This brings a lot of freedom to the users.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Yes this is a major benefit of an open network. Lemmy is a very large project already, so it takes a lot of effort to implement new features, because they have to meet high standards for quality and performance and also work together with all the existing features. A project like Piefed is much smaller and can implement new features more quickly. This allows for more experimentation, and successful features can later be added to Lemmy.

      Also users who are not happy with Lemmy for any reason can switch to a different platform while still interacting with those on Lemmy. So if Piefed and Mbin grow that is also a benefit for Lemmy.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Yes I’m very excited about the growth of other fediverse software, and a lot of the cool new features they’re adding. Its a great eco-system where we can experiment, be creative, and learn from each other.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    What are your thoughts on blocking AI scraper access? Any attempts to improve that on the side of Lemmy? Basic things like allowing to customize the robots.txt easily would already help.

    I also recently tried this new AI block tool called Anubis with Lemmy, but for some reason it fails with Lemmy-ui. Might be interesting to investigate further.

  • lgsp@feddit.it@feddit.itEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Hi, I think that Lemmy is great thank you for your hard work

    I actually think that given the ads and other distorsions, and thanks to federation, Lemmy is overall actually better than reddit!

    Some features I miss are:

    • tags
    • direct messages outside Lemmy (even if not encrypted)
    • better rendering of posts on mastodon (something beyond the title only). Not sure what side is responsible for this, tho!

    Keep up the good work guys!

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago
      • Tags are work in progress
      • Not exactly sure what you mean by “direct messages outside Lemmy”, but in version 1.0 they will be compatible with Mastodon and other platforms
      • Its a known problem with Mastodon because it only renders Note objects properly, which are meant for short texts less than a paragraph. Lemmy uses Page which is meant for longer text. Some platforms like Wordpress (iirc) have an option to federate even long posts as Note so that it gets rendered fully in Mastodon, but that seems like a bad idea to me. In the end its up to Mastodon how to render different types of federated content on their frontend, so it needs to be fixed by them. Here is an entire discussion about this by developers of different Fediverse platforms (including a Mastodon dev).
      • lgsp@feddit.it@feddit.itEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Thank you, great to hear all my points are being addressed! The thing about post rendering, well, I just hope a common solution is found 😊

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Are you disappointed with the way things are growing with people trying to marginalise the likes of ML and Grad?

    • KimBongUn420@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Communities that go against hegemonic capitalist/imperialist discourse will always get marginalised. Not being able to take down those communities easily like on Reddit is a huge win by itself for Lemmy. The software offers a valuable savehaven for e.g ex r/chapotraphouse, r/genzedong etc.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Yep, the fact that Communists can build their own platform and networks free from any outside censorship on corporatized platforms is itself the strategy for building leftist spaces. The goal isn’t hurt by more non-Communists being on the overall Lemmy platform because these non-Communists can’t actually do much to shut the Communists out.

        That’s a good thing, as a Communist I’m happy we have spaces.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      The anti-communist witch-hunters are extremely peeved that they can’t remove our communities like they can on reddit. Overall it doesn’t bother me because I don’t work for them, and they can always go back to reddit where their views are already dominant.

      Anyone trying to make the world a better place, will always be hated and hunted by some people; it’s a fact of life, and the sooner we accept it, the better.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      It seems some people simply need some target to hate on. Hopefully they will learn to accept different opinions when they arent being manipulated by for-profit social media anymore.

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

    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?

    One of the biggest issue at this point is probably the registration experience. There are quite a few occurrences on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com of users not sure whether their email has been validated or not, and at the moment they really need to look out for the toastify notification on their first try, later attempts won’t show it.

    Most recent example: https://lemmy.ml/post/27607055?scrollToComments=true

    If there could be a way to inform a user saying “your email address has been validated, please wait for an administrator to activate your account, you can reach out to them at xxx”, that would be great.

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    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?

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago
    1. From a code architecture perspective, how close is Lemmy/ActivityPub to reaching its maximum capacity for posts/comments per second? Are there any ways to 10x the load ActivityPub can handle?
    2. With Nicole in everyone’s DMs, what does the future of spam filtering look like on Lemmy?
    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago
      1. There is no specific maximum capacity, in theory it can scale indefinitely with horizontal scaling. Also see my reply here regarding scaling.
      2. 0.19.10 already includes a fix to remove private messages when a user gets banned which should help a lot. There is an issue about disabling private messages by default, but Im not sure if that will be necessary. Also 1.0 will include a plugin system, so other devs and instance admins can write their own checks. That way spam waves can be fought in a more flexible way, without having to get a change merged into Lemmy and then waiting for a new release.