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
    10·
    5 days ago

    Editing posts - the main issue is misleading titles

    Moving posts to different communities

    You can read over the discussion here, but we will never allow mods or admins to act as / impersonate users, or edit their content.

    We also can’t rewrite history in the fediverse (unlike a forum) so “moving” a post would also entail deleting and recreating content other people made.

    Splitting comments into separate posts

    Merging posts

    These ones sound really strange, but its similar, I don’t want mods to be able to rewrite user history or move it.

    IP check

    We don’t store IPs so that’d be impossible.

    • flamingos-cant@feddit.ukEnglish
      5·
      5 days ago

      You can read over the discussion here, but we will never allow mods or admins to act as / impersonate users, or edit their content.

      I really don’t get this. Why is editing user content with slur_filter or modifying URLs accepted but allowing mods/admins to change the NSFW toggle isn’t? It also ignores that savvy-enough admins can edit user content with SQL queries.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        I think slur filters, tracking param removals, and local link rewriting are acceptable, because (with the exception of the slur filter) they’re non-moderation actions, and also applied uniformly regardless of who made them.

        It also ignores that savvy-enough admins can edit user content with SQL queries.

        That’s unavoidable of course, anyone with DB access ultimately can edit things. But if people catch on, I doubt your server would gain many users or last that long. Most importantly, we shouldn’t allow that to happen via the API.

        You’re free to start a “Should mods be able to edit user’s data?” discussion, but I doubt it would get much support, especially from reddit allowing this and it souring everyone to it.

        • flamingos-cant@feddit.ukEnglish
          3·
          5 days ago

          Most importantly, we shouldn’t allow that to happen via the API.

          My view is that not adding this to the API will only encourage admins who want this to do it through less transparent means, like injecting fake activities into the sent_activity table. Most admins are reasonable people, and have good relations with their users, so if admins explained themselves then I think most users would be pretty accepting.

          You’re free to start a “Should mods be able to edit user’s data?” discussion, but I doubt it would get much support, especially from reddit allowing this and it souring everyone to it.

          I mean there’s been like 3 or 4 GitHub issues opened about this, so there’s clearly some demand for it. Should I make a post in [email protected]? So users not on GitHub can chime in.