Firstly, I just have appreciation for you and nutomic for this amazing platform that you've created. This has become my favorite source of reading discussions and looking at memes. I know it's small, but I love it and want it to succeed. My question is Do you see Lemmy or any other federated platforms reaching the level of audiences that other big Social Media Platforms currently have? Do you want it to grow big like them, or remain as it is, An amazing platform hidden in one corner of the Web?
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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I don't know that we'll ever replace big tech, but none of us can see the future. These giants will likely have a slow decline, whilst open-source and federated services will grow at their expense. But of course in the long term I do want the fediverse to replace the US tech giants, who treat us and our data as commodities to be bought and sold.
Any case where we can draw users away from that exploitation, is a victory.
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For me Lemmy is already extremely huge now. For a long time it was possible to keep up with all new comments in less than half an hour per day of browsing. So I wouldnt mind if it stays small, but anyway its not my choice. On the other hand its also great to see the project finally grow after we put so much work into it. And getting more users is actually necessary in order to get more donations so that we can make a living.
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Any plans to make it easier to interact with links to other instances?
The QoL value to automatically open links to other instances inside my current instance would be enormous.
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How do you plan on improving the onboarding/sign-up process for newcomers, especially when they have little to no understanding about the Fediverse?
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What was your first reaction to the massive exodus from Reddit during the blackout? Was it something you were expecting?
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Thanks for the software!
What is your and others Devs opinion on the pre-emptive de-federation of 20k hexbear users by 120k user instance lemmy.world?
Would you think Ranked Choice voting for admins i.e. with the Schulze method - which Debian 
uses - integrated into the sites would mean that better community supported decisions can be made for both moderation as well as in comments/communities about stuff?
Also: is there a remind me in 2 month of this post option?
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what new feature would Lemmy have in the 1.0.0? I know it's quite a long way to go, but what is the vision you guys have moving toward it?
Edit: bonus question: what does Chat supposed to do?
1.0 is not about features, but stability. It means there wont be any breaking changes to the api or federation for a while, until 2.0. In fact we were thinking to make some breaking changes and then release 1.0 later this year. But then the Reddit migration happened and those plans had to be scrapped.
Chat simply orders the comments in a different way, newest first without any nesting.
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What's your favorite dinosaur?
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The way lemmy instances are organized reminds me of IRC. Was that any part of the inspiration?
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Do you aim for Lemmy to become GDPR-compatible in the future ( see https://gdpr-info.eu/ for details)?
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Do you have any strong opinions on Richard Stallman? Is it good that he's back at the FSF?
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One of the major complaints on Reddit was the mod governance structure, with rank dependent on who showed up first. On the roadmap, do you see implementing other ways to govern mods, maybe something like how a lot of video game guilds govern themselves?
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Why did you choose Rust for the backend and Inferno for the frontend?
P.S. Thank you for your work!
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Why are Lemmy devs so adamantly opposed to a Follow User feature?
This is the one feature that is the biggest hurdle for full federation between Lemmy and all the other fediverse instances. Mastodon (and its forks), Peertube, Pixelfed, and kbin all allow this and federate extremely well together while Lemmy is the worst at federating because its the only one to exclude this feature.
(Please don’t reply with “use kbin if you want to follow users” again as its very dismissive and frustrating)
Here’s my crude write up on a somewhat hacky way this can be implemented as is:
spoiler
When creating an account the backend can automatically create a community thats the same as your username. make you the mod, and enable mod only posts to the community by default. On the update to the new version with the Follow User Feature a script can run to auto create communities with the names of users.
The script can also change any usernames that exist with the same name as a current community and add a U at the end of the user (an extremely small amount of users would be affected and usernames aren’t as important as preserving community names/urls)
Then we just need to follow the community of the same name as the user to follow them. The way mastodon already federates with Lemmy currently would allow you to recurve updates whenever the user posts to their own community since only they (and assigned mods) can post to their community.
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Who are you guys if you don't mind me asking. What's your background?
Im from Germany and studied computer science. Was always very interested in open source and decentralized software. Worked in a couple different companies, but was never happy making profit for someone else. Luckily I found Lemmy shortly after Dessalines started the project, and put a lot of work into it. Then we found the NLnet funding which allowed us to work fulltime on the project.
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Why Unicode usernames aren't supported yet? After all, a big part of the world's population don't use the Latin alphabet in their native languages.
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Will lemmy users be able to interact with Mastodon users in future and is there a roadmap for lemmy?
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How much experience did you have with Rust when you started making Lemmy? What programming languages did you use before?
Just a little, on a few side projects. But lemmy was the one that I used to teach myself rust. Before I was mainly a Java developer.
Having a good idea + learning the new thing to program it in, is one of the best motivators for me, as I'm sure it is for a lot of devs.
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