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

founded 5 years ago
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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] 1 points 2 weeks ago (13 children)

Hi! As you might remember, i've been pushing for this platform for quite some time so i'll just dump ideas in a pretty annoying way, hope you'll spare me :3

  • do you realize that the power of the threadiverse is that a forum can even fully exist alone and the federation between them is a plus while for microblogging it's kinda a shit to not have the big reach? basically, are you going to bring lemmy in a ''more forum'' direction or a ''more social'' direction?
  • will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes? it's clear that the reddit effect is already here and people are not incentivized to read the article and comment on point or discuss less agreable stuff just because posts gets downvoted?
  • if on my instance downvotes are deactivated, do they still influence my home when I browse subs from other instances that have downvotes?
  • more UI mod tools! they are never enough because a community manager has not to be also a sysadmin or a linux poweruser just to take care of the community; stuff like subscribing to blocklists and allowlists, stuff like deleting cached media and so on
  • how is the plugin stuff going?
  • wouldn't it be better to drop the android client and the federated wiki to fully focus on making lemmy the best federated threadiverse software? now that nodebb has federation the competition is existent (mbin and piefed were never enough e.e) and other frontends are generally cooler (voyager basically brought me back on being active here)
  • can we have a lemmy-first approach regarding comunication and contributions? basically i don't want to make a github account to push some opinions and it seems like they kinda get ignored when on the lemmy community about lemmy
  • ability to merge communities having them mirrored in a basic way i guess it's already on his way
  • would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv)
  • would be cool to have lists to be able to browse lemmy from lemmy in a more rss way: for example there are communities i want to check once in a while but totally don't want em in my home and having lists would help
  • changing ''favorite'' posts into ''bookmarks''/''saved''
  • would be cool to have the possibility to have a favorite users list to check what your friends are up to
  • any other suggestion would basically be ''can this thing that forums have also be ported to lemmy?'', i just think that lemmy has to evolve into a forum first with a link aggregator ui; it's kinda easy to use discourse as a bug tracker and feature request tracker for example (observation made because of the previous question of using lemmy instead of github for non code stuff)
  • would be nice to have word filters and user notes
  • also lobste.rs invite tree would be nice
  • have you taken into account that maybe offering a service of lemmy hosting managed by you could help?
  • dulcis in fundo, always about empowering non tech people, what about having lemmy on yunohost as one of the curated methods by the devs?

alright i think it's enough lol; now one very big appreciation: thank you for the rss first approach, having rss for basically everything like it was on reddit (well still miss some query rss but i understand it's harder to do) it's really so fucking useful and cool and i really hope that lemmy will make niche communities shine again

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Probably not at the top of anyone's list, and a little bit old, but do you have any thoughts about the following?:

If the Reddit mascot's name is "Snoo," then the Lemmy mascot's name is . . . ?

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

Probably depends on the instance

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)
  • 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.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

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.

Make sure to sort by Scaled sometimes too.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

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.

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

I am new to Lemmy, so haven’t really looked into if the following is possible but can I create groups of communities with a similar topic across multiple instances?

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

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)

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