this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
305 points (98.4% liked)

Announcements

24042 readers
1 users here now

Official announcements from the Lemmy project. Subscribe to this community or add it to your RSS reader in order to be notified about new releases and important updates.

You can also find major news on join-lemmy.org

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

(page 6) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (12 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week 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.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

User should create an account on one server

Mostly this. Some people might want a few accounts but those would be hardcore users.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (8 children)

I'm not sure how we could make this more clear either on https://join-lemmy.org/ , or the docs: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/index.html

load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (6 children)
  • Will there be any way to block users from certain instances to hide their comments?

  • What are the plans the improve discoverability?

I'm quite discontent with how few options there is to explore Lemmy. And it doesn't helps that the top posts are always related to politics.

  • Will there be any type of word filtering?

We should have community unifying.

  • I know people have already said it many times, but the joining experience could be simpler and less confusing.
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I'm quite discontent with how few options there is to explore Lemmy. And it doesn't helps that the top posts are always related to politics.

Make sure to sort by Scaled sometimes too.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Do you feel a recommendation algorithm of some sorts is something lemmy will need for bigger audiences?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is something which should be handled by external tools, for example lemmy-thumbnail-cleaner.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I am new to Lemmy, so haven’t really looked into if the following is possible but can I create groups of communities with a similar topic across multiple instances?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (4 children)

How would you improve it?

a way to filter out posts that have no engagement or comments from others would be helpful since the larger instances flood my feed w hundreds/thousands of news links that flood out the discourse on lemmy.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›