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.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
    22·
    5 days 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
      6·
      5 days 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.

        • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          Interesting, is this all manually curated like multireddits? Would also be nice to have automatic ones (with include/exclude overrides)

          The problem with it just being Piefed is that Lemmy clients probably won’t bother to support it unless it becomes standard.

          Is this a frontend specific thing or does it also require the Piefed backend on your instance too? If it is just frontend, I would definitely use it for desktop browsing.

          Dope seeing implementation diversity resulting in experimentation and innovation. Would love to see this adopted in other Lemmy implementations too

          • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            4·
            5 days ago

            Interesting, is this all manually curated like multireddits? Would also be nice to have automatic ones (with include/exclude overrides)

            They have both

            • user defined feeds, public or private
            • admin defined “topics”

            It’s a whole different software, backend and frontend

            • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.mlEnglish
              2·
              5 days ago

              They have both

              Awesome!

              It’s a whole different software, backend and frontend

              I know Piefed is both a frontend and backend, but does this behavior require the backend? Like can it be used with a regular Lemmy backend and/or database without backwards-incompatible changes?

    • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      5 days ago

      Look, this is just my take – I think this is bad UX. I’m not saying federation isn’t a good idea – on the contrary, I like the idea that many different posts in the same community are all hosted on different instances. Sure, for a community like news it doesn’t make as much sense – fixes for this would be that some communities don’t have the behaviour I’m suggesting, or the convention is to call it sao_luis_news or something.

        • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          It’s a good question. Perhaps nobody needs to control it. Users of c/foo post on their own instance (or choose an instance to post on). Mods are responsible for posts on their own instances (as before). The difference is that when viewing c/foo, you see posts from all federated instances.

          For news, politics, etc, which might cause trouble if combined, here’s a solution: Perhaps if your instance’s c/foo community has the “keep separated” flag enabled, then users on your instance browsing c/foo won’t see posts from other instances, and users on federated instances won’t see your instance’s c/foo posts when browsing c/foo.