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.

  • Itte@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    28 minutes 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

    • flamingos-cant@feddit.ukEnglish
      2·
      12 minutes ago

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

      Echoing @[email protected], it’s hard to comment on something so vague. Of course making things easier for users is an important goal.

    • asudox@lemmy.asudox.devEnglish
      3·
      39 minutes ago

      It is easier to use because it doesn’t concern itself with federation or decentralization yet.

      Lemmy would also be easy to use if we could only use one instance.

      You’re basically comparing a centralized platform with a decentralized one. Of course the centralized one is easier to use.

    • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
      5·
      6 hours ago

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

      I’m not a Lemmy dev (well I’ve made a couple of small commits lol), but this type of question can be hard to answer from the inside of a project.

      It would probably be easier to answer a question more like: “Do you plan to implement feature XYZ in order to be easier to use like Bluesky?”

  • murd0x@lemmy.mlEnglish
    13·
    14 hours ago

    Is there a way to move myself as an user from one server to another?

    • murd0x@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      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

    • PlungeButter@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      12 hours ago

      This is the huge disconnect between what the fediverse is and what the users actually want.

      Users want the convenience of a single entity that floats around the different instances. They want to interact with community A on instance B and also commini X on instance Y.

      But most clients deal with it by letting you log in with multiple users on multiple instances

      • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
        7·
        12 hours ago

        I don’t follow. I’m on AZ, you’re on LW. We can talk to each other right here, in this community on ML.

        Sure, account migration in some form might be nice, but we certainly are able to

        interact with community A on instance B and also commini X on instance Y

            • Ferk@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              1 hour ago

              That’s the problem: the protocol pretty much requires explicit relationships between instances since they are forced to proxy/cache each other’s content. I think there’s too much responsibility on the instance… I feel it would be a moderation nightmare to host an instance with truly open federation (potentially even result in legal trouble!). So I totally understand why so many instances want to be conservative on who they federate with…

              The ideal situation would be to be to be able to interact with third party instances directly (at least when the 2 instances don’t wanna agree on caching each other’s content), instead of having to use your home instance as proxy/cache… so the home instance would not need to have the burden (both legally and in terms of hosting resources) and it would just act as a way to identify the user, not necessarily as the primary content provider.

      • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        12 hours ago

        Users want the convenience of a single entity that floats around the different instances. They want to interact with community A on instance B and also commini X on instance Y.

        I’m not sure I’m following what you’re describing here because I feel like I do have that convenience?

        Disclosure: I have forgotten about my Beehaw account long ago.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
            2·
            12 hours ago

            Frustratingly, @[email protected]’s comment created a hyperlink and yours did not, in lemmy-ui (the default web interface). This is probably one of the frustrations I should have mentioned in my comment about inconsistent UX between web and mobile…

              • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
                2·
                9 hours ago

                In Sync, when you see your comment, does it create a link you can click to go to murd0x’s profile? If so, nice! Sync is doing the right thing in this context. I know already that Jerboa, the app from the main Lemmy devs, does this correctly.

                But lemmy-ui, the interface you’ll see on most instances if you open it up in your web browser, that is not clickable, but the /u/username is clickable. It’s an obvious bug/shortcoming in lemmy-ui.

                • Undearius@lemmy.caEnglish
                  2·
                  1 hour ago

                  I think I know where in the code this could be happening for the web UI.

                  I’m not one of the devs but I’ll look into this a bit, I’ll update this comment when I get more info.

  • Jehuty@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    11 hours ago

    To chime in on the user creation thing:

    I think it’s a natural part of decentralization that it’s harder for a single instance to get big enough to be the “go-to” for general users.

    Having said that, I also think this will naturally happen over time. As long as the mechanical aspects of sign up are simple, it’s just a matter of users of a given instance to promote their instance.

    World events also always play a role in encouraging a move to freer waters. Look at what happened with Mastodon and Bluesky (though Bluesky imo is just a big snooze button on a blaring alarm)

  • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    16 hours 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
      1·
      2 hours 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
        2·
        1 hour 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 grouping).

        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.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
      6·
      12 hours 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
        1·
        7 hours 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
      4·
      15 hours 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
        5·
        14 hours 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

  • P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.brEnglish
    3·
    11 hours ago

    • 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.
  • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    14 hours ago

    When a instance goes permanently offline, does the content vanish? If so, could there possibly be a way for another instance to “adopt” the content on their instance so those posts aren’t lost to time?

    I think it might help reassure people to pick smaller instances.

    • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      12 hours ago

      Edit: I suppose I shouldn’t be answering this. Kinda forgot the thread I’m in. I guess I asked something as well.

      If your instance was federated with it when it existed then your instance automatically has its own backup of it is as far as I understand things. I would like clarity on this however. My instance is a few days older than this account. Therefore the smaller instances that have already died are already duplicated locally here at sh.itjust.works. I can still view vlemmy, waveform.social, lemmy.film, (etc.) communities/posts as essentially an archive.

      What I’d like to know is if I linked a sh.itjust.works link to one of those threads could a user of a more recent instance load the content?

      I’m not sure what point it would ultimately serve as with the host instance being offline nothing could federate out between us anyway.

      • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
        2·
        46 minutes ago

        This, content is already mirrored to federated instances and stored forever (though media may not be included).

        What I’d like to know is if I linked a sh.itjust.works link to one of those threads could a user of a more recent instance load the content?

        Lemmy only loads content from the original instance where it was created, otherwise it would be possible to impersonate users. So it is not possible to load that.

  • Mallspice@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    14 hours ago

    Coming from Reddit I feel Lemmy could use a way to sort posts within communities by top posts within a time frame we choose. That without this feature gamers and gooners will default to reddit over Lemmy.

    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
      8·
      12 hours ago

      Don’t we already have that feature? I can choose to see the top posts of a community by hour, six hours, 12 hours, day, week, month, and so on, up to a year by clicking the sort type drop down menu on any community.

      Do you mean be able to see the top posts between two different times, like top posts between 2022 and 2023?

        • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
          3·
          11 hours ago

          Voyager thankfully does also have this feature. If you go to a community and press on the little icon at the top right, next to the 3 little dots, you’ll open the ‘sort by’ menu. If you press the ‘Top’ option, it will then let you choose between those different time options.

  • uberstar@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    15 hours ago

    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.

      • uberstar@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        15 hours ago

        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

    • 3DMVR@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      13 hours ago

      depends on instance they all set hard limits of their own lemmee is 5mb which is lowaf

        • 3DMVR@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          9 hours ago

          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

  • prototype_g2@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8·
    16 hours 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.

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
    8·
    17 hours ago

    From my perspective we need better Mod and Admin tools. Forum software has a lot of them but Lemmy is lacking in this department.

    The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities. You’ll often get reports of posts not being appropriate for a community but there is no way to actually move it.

      • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        33 minutes ago

        It shouldn’t be too difficult. A move is essentially a cross-post but it keeps the OP as the poster (rather than the cross-poster). You’d then want to lock the original post, and either hide it or add a message directing people to the new post. That’s all current forum software does.

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
          1·
          4 minutes ago

          The main question is how this can work in terms of federation. When creating a new post it directly references the community url. If the user and community are on different instances then the community instance cannot rewrite the post to reference a different community. So it would have to tell the post creator to (automatically) resubmit the post to the new community. Same for all comments, they would have to be recreated by the respective author’s instance in the new post. Seems quite complex to implement.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlEnglish
    22·
    21 hours ago

    What have been the biggest challenges with the project over the years, both in terms of technical and non technical aspects. I’d be interesting to hear a bit of retrospective on how has the stack’s been working out, and what surprises you might’ve run into in terms of scaling and federation. What recommendations you’d make based on that and what you would’ve done differently knowing what you know now.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      5·
      56 minutes ago

      The stack is great, I wouldnt want to change anything. Postgres is very mature and performant, with a high focus on correctness. It can sometimes be difficult to optimize queries, but there are wizards like @[email protected] who know how to do that. Anyway there is no better alternative that I know of. Rust is also great, just like Postgres it is very performant and has a focus on correctness. Unlike most programming languages it is almost impossible to get any runtime crashes, which is very valuable for a webservice.

      The high performance means that less hardware is required to host a given number of users, compared to something like NodeJS or PHP. For example when kbin.social was popular, I remember it had to run on multiple beefy servers. Meanwhile lemmy.ml is still running on a single dedicated server, with much more active users. Or Mastodon having to handle incoming federation activities in background tasks which makes the code more complicated, while Lemmy can process them directly in the HTTP handler.

      Nevertheless, scaling for more users always has its surprises. I remember very early in development, Lemmy wasnt able to handle more than a dozen requests per second. Turns out we only used a single database connection instead of a connection pool, so each db query was running after that last one was finished, which of course is very slow. It seems obvious in retrospect, but you never notice this problem until there are a dozen or so users active at the same time.

      With the Reddit migration two years ago a lot of performance problems came up, as active users on Lemmy suddenly grew around 70 times. You can see some of that in the 0.18.x release announcements. One part of the solution was to add missing database indexes. Another was to remove websocket support, which was keeping a connection open for each user. That works fine with 100 users, but completely breaks down with 1000 or more.

      After all there is nothing I would do different really. It would have been good to know about these scaling problems earlier, but thats impossible. In fact for my project Ibis (federated wiki) Im using the exact same architecture as Lemmy.

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
    20·
    21 hours ago
    1. From a code architecture perspective, how close is Lemmy/ActivityPub to reaching its maximum capacity for posts/comments per second? Are there any ways to 10x the load ActivityPub can handle?
    2. With Nicole in everyone’s DMs, what does the future of spam filtering look like on Lemmy?
    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      7·
      55 minutes ago
      1. There is no specific maximum capacity, in theory it can scale indefinitely with horizontal scaling. Also see my reply here regarding scaling.
      2. 0.19.10 already includes a fix to remove private messages when a user gets banned which should help a lot. There is an issue about disabling private messages by default, but Im not sure if that will be necessary. Also 1.0 will include a plugin system, so other devs and instance admins can write their own checks. That way spam waves can be fought in a more flexible way, without having to get a change merged into Lemmy and then waiting for a new release.
    • Tiff@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      I can answer the first point.
      We’ve already tackled part of that problem with the Parallel Sending feature that can be enabled on instances with a tremendous amount of traffic. Currently the only instance that makes sense to enable that is LemmyWorld and the only reason is so servers in geographical far away can get more than 3-4 activities/second.

      With that feature, servers that eventually house and generate the biggest amounts of traffic will be able to successfully communicate all of those activities to everyone else who needs them.

      I predict a 10x increase is well in our grasp of easily accessible by all of our current systems. 1000x? That’s a different story which I don’t have the answers too.

  • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    44·
    1 day ago

    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.