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·
    4 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·
      4 months ago

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

  • prototype_g2@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    4 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.

  • abobla@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Do you guys have plans to add a spoiler tag? I post a lot of memes about tv shows that I watch, but the users complain that the post isn’t blurred.

    I know I can use the NSFW tag, but this gives the wrong idea and limits the post visibility (since people can hide nsfw posts).

  • GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    More customization for site owners. I have an independent instance and there’s a lot of things on there that are confusing for people unfamiliar with the fefiverse or lemmy. It would also be nice to remove the donation beg at the top. I know Lemmy needs funding, but it makes it look like I’m asking for donations.

  • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    4 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.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Lemmy is not for microblogging, so I dont think hashtags make sense.

      • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        Well they don’t have to show up as hashtags to users on Lemmy, they can show up as their own designated tags you add to the post on creation of editing. Just some form of post tags to indicate the category of a post (could even be specific to communities like subreddit flairs) but they would show up as hashtags on Mastodon, similar to how Lemmy already embeds a hashtag of the community into posts.

        • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          Ah, post tags are currently work in progress. They are also going to be federated.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Not bad, the swiss chard and spinach I planted recently are sprouting, so that’s got me excited.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      A bit tired because my whole family is half sick. Luckily the kids are still okay to go to school.

      Otherwise Im excited for this AMA, because I rarely have such direct conversations with users about Lemmy. The discussions on Github are usually quite technical.

  • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    4 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.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      4 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.

      • Ferk@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        4 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 (but others can subscribe to them… so there can be some community-managed 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.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      4 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·
        4 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.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
      0·
      4 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·
        4 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·
      4 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·
        4 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

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    0·
    4 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.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      0·
      4 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.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      4 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.

  • ex_06@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    4 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

  • Itte@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    1. What is your opinion on Bluesky being more popular than Mastodone because it is easier for most?

    2. Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?

    thanks

    edit: lemmy dev replies only please

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Afaik Bluesky is a for-profit company with millions in budget and probably a dozen or more fulltime employees. Of course they have much more resources to polish the new user experience, and also have an actual marketing budget. Plus in practice its completely centralized, they dont need to worry about all the difficulties that federation brings. Its only natural that they are more successful than Mastodon in the short term. But sooner or later they will also have problems when the Bluesky admins make decisions that the community doesnt like, and then there may be another migration wave to the Fediverse.

      For the same reasons mentioned above, Lemmy cant become as easy as Bluesky. But the more contributors and donors we have, the closer we can get.

      • Itte@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        thanks . can I ask one more question? what should we be excited for in lemmy 1.0 (for non technical users)?

  • lgsp@feddit.it@feddit.itEnglish
    0·
    4 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·
      4 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).
  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    4 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.

    • Vent@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Anyone that wants to scrape Lemmy would have an easier time setting up their own server, federating with everyone, and reading straight from their DB. No web scraping required. Though, web scraping defenses would be useful against general web scrapers/crawlers.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        That would require the authors of these AI scrapers to actually give a f*ck. The problem is that they don’t, and just scrape what ever they can find repeatatly almost like a ddos attack on the open web.

  • MemmingenFan@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    4 months 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?