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.

  • daytonah@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago
    1. 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.
  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    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!!

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    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)

  • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    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.

  • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    7 days 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.

  • land@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    Native push notifications would be awesome for Lemmy! I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

  • pleasegoaway@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Reddit has far more niche communities. There’s the saying that “there’s a subreddit for everything.”

    What do you think the trajectory/timeline looks like for lemmy to develop a more robust array of niche communities (aka niche subreddits)?

  • MemmingenFan923@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    Some companies use Reddit as their main forum or an established way to communicate with customers. Are there any companies that have explored Lemmy and have their community yet?

  • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    How do we avoid defederation through leemy.world and lemmy.ml? What I mean is, there are instances for Canada, or FOSS, or any other inalienable trait. Most can communicate with eachother with exception of porn specific instances. When new people sign up, they look for popular instances and there are no restrictions on what you can join. So, larger instances like .world and .ml will have more foot traffic and more new signups. I think that’s just an immediate path to recreate reddit and I think that needs to be recognised and seriously avoided, at all costs. The whole point is that this is not-for-profit, free of advertisements and already voyager as downloaded for android contains ads. Also, unless specifying only foss software during the building process of app on linux, ads are present there too. I would love to see some community driven livestreams or events, where we could fund the developers ourselves through donations. We’re all refugess from reddit, but that doesn’t mean we have to be “libre reddit.” I think we could easily fund ourselves if we fostered more of a connected sense of community through events and conversations, turn this group of websites into something more than just friendly social media.

    • krolden@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      Any possibility for hash tags to be added? Cross instance topics would be so much easier to browse especially when similar topics are discussed across different community names across difference instances.

      I’d like to be able to browse the federation for tv show discussion with #tvshows or #fringe or something

    • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      Admits should defederate as they wish.

      New users should be able to join a “default instance” that is federated with all instances so people can window shop for the instance they prefer.

      That way they aren’t intimidated by the many choices available right away.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        New users should be able to join a “default instance” that is federated with all instances so people can window shop for the instance they prefer.

        Almost by definition, any default instance is likely to get defederated by some other instances, if that default grows too large. Being default means it’s more likely to attract more people of all sorts. And some of those won’t get along with the federation policies of some stricter instances.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      This is a serious problem, that we didn’t anticipate during the first reddit migration wave. Since then, we added a join dialog to join-lemmy.org, and tried to make its join page sort by random, to spread out users more evenly.

      Unfortunately, the people evangelizing lemmy on other platforms like reddit, continue to link specific popular servers, rather than join-lemmy.org or server pickers that sort by random. And people also tend to just link their own home server as a sign-up, instead of join-lemmy.org, so we’ll likely continue to see centralization problems.

      We’re doing what we can to fight it, but other need to also.

      I would love to see some community driven livestreams or events, where we could fund the developers ourselves through donations. We’re all refugess from reddit, but that doesn’t mean we have to be “libre reddit.” I think we could easily fund ourselves if we fostered more of a connected sense of community through events and conversations, turn this group of websites into something more than just friendly social media.

      @nutomic recently added Donation dialogs, which adds support for wikipedia-style banners (which are annoying, but they work). I think most of lemmy’s problems could be solved if we were able to add a few more full time devs. We currently don’t even have a single dev funded.

      • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        Granted, but that doesn’t answer the question at hand.

        No, it is on voyager too. I built and installed it last night.

          • aeharding@vger.socialEnglish
            0·
            9 days ago

            Yeah, voyager does not have any ads or tracking or anything. It’s truly privacy first. In fact the only “analytics” I get are from Apple App Store and Google Play Store download counts etc which I can’t turn off. But if you use F-droid I have literally 0 usage information even crashes :)

            Also Voyager has reproducible builds which means you don’t have to trust me. You can verify that the APK was built from a specific release of the source code!

  • Bloomcole@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    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.

  • lorty@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Do you feel a recommendation algorithm of some sorts is something lemmy will need for bigger audiences?

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    0·
    9 days 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.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      8 days 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.

      • illpillow@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        Absolutely agree on this point. My first app didn’t fulfill my requirements, so I just tested another one being able to configure it how I like.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      8 days 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.

  • Mallspice@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    Coming from Reddit I feel Lemmy could use a way to sort posts within communities by top posts within a time frame we choose. That without this feature gamers and gooners will default to reddit over Lemmy.