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.
Who is your daddy and what does he do?
Kindergarten cop right?
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.
Wait, I thought you’re French, dad sniffing the Fox from France?
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.
the apps! the app support is really great for Lemmy
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Thank you!
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.
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’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.
Youre right, I also noticed some other problems while testing registrations:
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5547
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5548#issue-2949361836
For the email validation it could also make sense to send out another email saying “your email has been validated”, so its not only shown on the website.
Thanks!
I’d need more detail here. If registration emails aren’t being sent out correctly, we need to handle that.
These two posts should provide more details
This generally goes against security best practices as it can be used for attempted user enumeration. A better version would be “we’ll send you an email with your account status if this user exists” but obviously that results in a fair amount more complexity (and cost) to implement
Enumerating users is not a security problem. It’s platform obscurantism to even suggest that it is.
I think I’ll trust owasp and my own over 20 years of experience building commercial software but you do you
the password/cookie should still work even when awaiting validation, password is set before the email is sent
I am not suggesting users being able to enumerate other users, just that the unique link that is currently used for email verification would be more explicit than just the one time toastify notification
Old user, haven’t been active recently. Where’d all this growth come from?? Another reddit refugee situation?
Thought you meant pre-2023 by old user
[email protected] started to ban people based on upvotes
Blaze means the website Reddit, not the community they linked
Oh indeed, giving the community can help people read more about it.
Native push notifications would be awesome for Lemmy! I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Unified Push support would be great.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2631
It’s coming in the next release
Thanks for the info! It looks like we’re almost there - 81% completion means the final release of 1.0 update is just around the corner!
Let’s go! No more email notifications
There is an issue open requesting this… I been following it for a while.
Are you disappointed with the way things are growing with people trying to marginalise the likes of ML and Grad?
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.
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.
I get a chuckle out of the “Tankie Triad” talking point some people keep using. It sounds like a villain organization from a Saturday morning cartoon.
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.
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.
<3 I appreciate your work, comrades!
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?
We are seeing an influx of new users, but what’s happening to older users? Are they still active? What’s the average lifetime of Lemmy users nowadays? I’m kinda curious about the user retention in general
I’ve been here for almost two years and don’t think I can go back to anything else. I like the freedom of information that this idea brought to us.
The best data we have on that is probably https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Not sure how to get the user retention from that, though
but what’s happening to older users? Are they still active?
There are certainly names still around who I remember from my first year on the site. Like Blaze said, I’m also not sure how to get some concrete numbers.
Every server and community has monthly active users stats. Best way to see them would be a tool like this that keeps track of history: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
We don’t do any tracking of user retention, but overall lemmy has been fairly steady at ~50k users for a year now.
I believe they are still active. User numbers have been stable for a long time, and there are some names that I recognize from the very early days 5 years ago.
Probably not at the top of anyone’s list, and a little bit old, but do you have any thoughts about the following?:
If the Reddit mascot’s name is “Snoo,” then the Lemmy mascot’s name is . . . ?
Its a Lemming!
Lemming:
Probably depends on the instance
Different instances have their own logo, but there is the official Lemmy logo:
#/media/File:Lemmy_logo.svg)
edit: looks like Lemmy doesn’t like escaping URLs? It literally converted my backslashes into forward slashes… anyway, here’s the URL of the image I tried to embed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)#/media/File:Lemmy_logo.svg
let me try
#/media/File:Lemmy_logo.svg)
yeah, it didn’t workedWait, I just realised that what I posted…isn’t an actual image. It ends in .svg, but it isn’t an svg file. This is, and it has no brackets:
To test how URL escaping works, here’s a different (non-image) link with brackets in it.
I use Reddit many years and don’t know that the logo has a name.
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.
+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! 💙
Is there a way to move myself as an user from one server to another?
I was thinking this cold prove necessary in the context of different servers policies. Got example, if my server would change policies to something I am not willing to agree, then it would be nice to migrate to another server
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.
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.
You could find a peertube instance and upload links to peertube videos.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html#torrents
Torrents should be used, as it entirely solves the static data distribution problem, and keeps servers from having to shoulder potentially enormous hosting costs.
I’ve even added a lot of torrent-support related features to lemmy-ui and jerboa, that will come in 1.0
Great!
The upload function is mainly meant for images, like others said its better to use external sites for video uploads. Integrating upload to those remote sites seems like a lot of work for little benefit though.
Shouldn’t torrents be used for large files?
This is correct. Torrents should be used.
i’m clueless about torrents and Lemmy, can you embed them in posts/comments somehow? The closest thing I could think of is using a Framatube instance, but I don’t think you can embed them
You can just use magnet links. I wrote a guide for how to use them here
Like here’s a Joan Crawford movie I like: Sudden Fear 1952 . A super-beginner way, is to install stremio and click that link. Boom, you’re now watching the movie.
I was hoping it could be embedded, but this is a nice-to-know, thanks!
depends on instance they all set hard limits of their own lemmee is 5mb which is lowaf
What would you upload that’s larger than 5mb???
damn near every single image on my phone fails to meet the requirements so I host my own instance lol, I tried compressing butchered the quality this is 1080p too
