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.
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
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.
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?
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.
Good luck with !politics@hexbear.net and !politics@lemmy.world
How are you?
Not bad, the swiss chard and spinach I planted recently are sprouting, so that’s got me excited.
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.
Thx! Really appreciate it, and I’m glad someone thinks its worthwhile work we’re doing.
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
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.
That’s a good thing, as a Communist I’m happy we have spaces.
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.
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!
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.
