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.
It shows only that like most open source tools, US media institutes a general conspiracy of silence about platforms like the fediverse, and mastodon (or lemmy). Not because they’re not user-friendly enough, but because ultimately it’s not something the US can control. Bluesky is really just a rebranded twitter, founded by the same people, but with owners more friendly to the US democratic party, as opposed to musk who is more friendly to republicans. Both are US corporations subject to its laws and beholden to push pro-US foreign policy lines.
I hope most of the world will choose to escape all these monopolistic US-controlled platforms, and for countries to fund open source, and encourage their own citizens to use community-run alternatives.
Lemmy won’t become bluesky, because we’re a community/topic-focused link aggregator, not a person-focused microblogging platform.