this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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Announcements

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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

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Thanks a lot for the work you do! How do you get by with such a limited amount of funds? How sustainable is your financial situation if donations don't pick up considerably?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)
  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?
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Hello,

Thank you for organizing this AMA!

Starting with a quite expected question: when do you think you'll be able to release Lemmy 1.0?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

Are there any plans to deal with the most common annoyances regarding Lemmy? In my opinion these are all based on federation:

  1. Some completely automated way for users to join Lemmy. Yeah, it's not hard to select a server and it's a "good thing to do", but it's still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the "proper" path. Maybe some kind of system where instances sign up for this general, convenience way of signing up, and the registered users just get automatically distributed evenly across those instances.
  2. Duplicate post aggregation. The nature of federation will always make it make sense to have duplicate communities, but this will also make posts with the same links, same images, same videos, etc show up in people's "all" feeds multiple times. It is technically possible to algorithmically detect these duplicates and offer users a UI option (not actual backend merge) to merge them all visually into one post.
  3. A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Multispam is one of the things that is genuinely a threat to Lemmy's usability. If you follow certain topics, you start seeing 2-5 copies of every post. It's a genuine spam problem and "just block" or "just scroll" is as much of a non solution as it is with other spam.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (5 children)

it’s still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the “proper” path.

https://phtn.app/signup gives a prepopulated list

show up in people’s “all” feeds multiple times.

Which interface do you use? Crossposts only show up once on the default UI

A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

You can already export and import your subscriptions between instances (account settings - import/export)

Posts and comments can't be migrated, but Mastodon doesn't allow it either.

Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Reddit has far more niche communities. There’s the saying that “there’s a subreddit for everything.”

What do you think the trajectory/timeline looks like for lemmy to develop a more robust array of niche communities (aka niche subreddits)?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

It'll likely continue to happen organically: niche communities on reddit will keep getting fed up with the changes, and migrate to lemmy.

I don't know if we'll ever reach a tipping point, because redditors have shown that there's almost nothing they won't tolerate, but its also likely they still don't know that alternatives exist. There's a general conspiracy of silence about most fediverse software. Even with all this recent reddit drama, not a single article bothered to mention lemmy or other alternatives. The info is out there, but interested people have to go out of their way to find it.

We've also added a scaled sort to boost posts from smaller / less active communities, so that should help some with discovery. It'd also be nice for instances to use the sidebar, pinned posts, or site taglines to highlight smaller communities to help them grow.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

What Is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (6 children)

What are your thoughts on blocking AI scraper access? Any attempts to improve that on the side of Lemmy? Basic things like allowing to customize the robots.txt easily would already help.

I also recently tried this new AI block tool called Anubis with Lemmy, but for some reason it fails with Lemmy-ui. Might be interesting to investigate further.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Anyone that wants to scrape Lemmy would have an easier time setting up their own server, federating with everyone, and reading straight from their DB. No web scraping required. Though, web scraping defenses would be useful against general web scrapers/crawlers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That would require the authors of these AI scrapers to actually give a f*ck. The problem is that they don't, and just scrape what ever they can find repeatatly almost like a ddos attack on the open web.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Yup, same as they could clone git repos in one shot, but they instead crawl every single page.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago
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