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

    Hello,

    Thank you for organizing this AMA!

    Starting with a quite expected question: when do you think you’ll be able to release Lemmy 1.0?

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      With the rate ppl are adding issues (and we’re finding more), is sometimes feels like it keeps getting farther away than nearer, but we’ll get there in some months.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Its hard to say because these things always take longer than expected. Now we are finally getting to the point where all the breaking database and api changes are almost finished. After that it will take some months to update lemmy-ui for all the backend changes and new features, and the same for all other apps. Then a testing period to fix all the problems that come up. So maybe around autumn for the final release, although lemmy.ml and some other instances may upgrade some months before already.

  • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    9 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.

  • Bloomcole@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    9 months 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.

  • murd0x@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 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

  • Mallspice@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    9 months 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.

  • murd0x@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Is there a way to move myself as an user from one server to another?

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      You can export your settings, community follows etc and import them in another instance. Moving your existing posts and comments doesnt work well with federation.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 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·
      9 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·
        9 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·
            9 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·
              9 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·
                9 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?

      • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Look, this is just my take – I think this is bad UX. I’m not saying federation isn’t a good idea – on the contrary, I like the idea that many different posts in the same community are all hosted on different instances. Sure, for a community like news it doesn’t make as much sense – fixes for this would be that some communities don’t have the behaviour I’m suggesting, or the convention is to call it sao_luis_news or something.

          • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            It’s a good question. Perhaps nobody needs to control it. Users of c/foo post on their own instance (or choose an instance to post on). Mods are responsible for posts on their own instances (as before). The difference is that when viewing c/foo, you see posts from all federated instances.

            For news, politics, etc, which might cause trouble if combined, here’s a solution: Perhaps if your instance’s c/foo community has the “keep separated” flag enabled, then users on your instance browsing c/foo won’t see posts from other instances, and users on federated instances won’t see your instance’s c/foo posts when browsing c/foo.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      To be totally honest, a lot of communities aren’t big enough yet to really necessitate splitting into niche communities yet. I don’t know if gaming/Metroid is an example of one that does or doesn’t meet that. It’s just an observation.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      What exactly is it you’re asking for, though? A change in user behaviour towards consolidation? Some new feature of the platform similar to multi-reddits? How exactly do you suggest that should work?

      • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Not a change in user behaviour. How about: communities on different instances with the same name appear as one community essentially. As in, all instances’ version of that community appear in your feed if subscribed, and when viewing posts in a community, all instances versions of that community are visible.

        Perhaps the user can restrict to just one instance’s community or just the local instance’s community with a button (like local/all), if that’s their preference.

    • murd0x@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      This should be among the first priorities. It would really help kick things off. Not only niche communities, but bigger ones as well. They represent topics of interest. I think I’ve seen a thing like macro community in one of the clients?! Could that be it?

      • murd0x@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Eternity Android client allows grouping communities into a multi community, but it only helps on getting consolidated feed, not necessarily reaching the same people

      • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        How would two communities named news, work for say, a server about star trek, and another located in a city.

        • murd0x@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          Well, what is each meant to represent? Should communities be constructed around the concept of topics, or should there be a server for each topic?

          And please don’t use any variant of “everybody can do it whichever they want”, because this just avoids the responsibility of offering a personal answer and shifts it to them.

          Personally I think the first (communities=topics)., while servers should provide voluntary redundancy for each other in case one of the servers has an inconvenient change of policies or circumstances for the users.

          But I am not on the creative team of Lemmy, so my vision might differ from theirs. Also, I’m willing to change my belief if more solid arguments are presented.

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

      Consolidation isn’t always a good thing, communities on different instances will have different styles and trends, and that’s a good thing. The benefit of federated social media is just as much in local instances as it is in federation, unique niches are going to have unique comments even if the post is the exact same.

      • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        I think the benefit of federation is that nobody controls the whole ecosystem. The downside of federation is splintering.

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

          Less that nobody can control the whole thing, more that you can have full control of your own thing. Basically the same thing you said, but I think it’s important to note that many niche communities thrive on Lemmy.

          • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            Many more niche communities languish because they can never get enough traction to be seen.

            If I subscribe to /c/dubstep, chances are I don’t care if it is lemmy.ml/c/dubstep or lemmy.world/c/dubstep, but neither community is likely to be active because one comm on one instance needs to be the popular one for other users to sub and want to post there. What I really want is /f/dubstep

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

              I disagree, actually. The issue here is relying on communities to be active, rather than instances with a healthy size and sorting by new rather than active. Hexbear has a bunch of communities, but people sort by New so any post will have some traction.

              Lemmy works best when instances rely on themselves, and not federation. Federation is a bonus, not the point itself. Thinking of this massive fediverse as a single entity would mean it’s probably better to use Reddit, anyways.

              • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
                0·
                9 months ago

                Federation should be the point. I didn’t join Lemmy to join yet another reddit-like service but with far fewer users. I joined it because I want to be on something like reddit but which no one group controls. Otherwise I’d use threads, bluesky, etc.

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

                  Federation is one side of the equation, the fact that no one person controls it relies upon the fact that it isn’t centralized into few communities. It’s a double-edged sword, the same benefit is also potentially a drawback for others.

      • Ferk@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        It does not have to be something mandatory…

        I mean, there could be some form of “metacommunities”, something like being able to group multiple communities together in a “view” that shows them to you visually as if they were a single community despite being separated. Bonus points if everyone can make their own custom groupings.

        In theory you could have multiple “metacommunities” for the same topic still… but at least they could be sharing the same posts if they share communities. I feel grouping like this would be helpful because small communities feel even smaller when they are split.

        I think reddit has something similar to that, multireddits or something I think they are called.

  • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 months 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.

    • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      9 months 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 months 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.

    • krolden@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      9 months 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

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      9 months 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 months 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 months 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!

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 months 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!!

  • 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 [email protected] 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.