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.

  • daytonah@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    19 hours ago
    1. I have no idea how and which server I joined, is there any manial I can read better yet visually see how servers are connected that are federated? Thx. And when we search something does it search across all servers? Thanks.
  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    22 hours ago

    When will anyone be able to click the following /c/books And see an agglomeration of all “books” communities on all federated server? I don’t mean multireddits Thanks!!

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    22 hours ago

    When will users be able to frictionlessly migrate between instances without losing their posts, their comments, their history, their relationships, their reputation etc? (Without requiring the consent of the exiting instance owner, or that this server still even exists, as they sometimes don’t)

  • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    How would you improve it?

    a way to filter out posts that have no engagement or comments from others would be helpful since the larger instances flood my feed w hundreds/thousands of news links that flood out the discourse on lemmy.

  • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.mlEnglish
    32·
    3 days ago

    No questions right now. Just wanted to say thank you for your hard work.

    I know y’all catch a lot of shit and get hammered with requests/demands, so I wanted to let you know that your work is greatly appreciated.

    Thanks for dedicating your time and energy to making a non-corporate, federated social environment possible.

    Being on Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air.

  • diamat@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    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?

  • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Do you plan to introduce some kind of post tags into Lemmy, preferably something that will behave like Hashtags on Mastodon and other activitypub platforms? I know that Lemmy has been embedding community name as a hashtag for a while now, though having tags that can be populated by users would help discovery greatly.

  • CheeseToastie@lazysoci.alEnglish
    18·
    3 days ago

    Just wanted to say I LOVE lemmy! It’s a really positive community, the atmosphere is great and I like how it’s unique but also familiar. I really appreciate your work on it. I know this is AMA… what’s your favourite animal?

  • egidighsea@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    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?

  • Lena@gregtech.euEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Do you have any plans to make it easier to manage the images stored in pictrs? One issue I have is that I used to proxy images, I no longer do that, but now I have like 300GB on backblaze doing nothing. In this post I outlined more precisely what I mean.

  • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    56·
    4 days ago

    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 !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      27·
      3 days ago

      A bit tired because my whole family is half sick. Luckily the kids are still okay to go to school.

      Otherwise Im excited for this AMA, because I rarely have such direct conversations with users about Lemmy. The discussions on Github are usually quite technical.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      171·
      3 days ago

      Not bad, the swiss chard and spinach I planted recently are sprouting, so that’s got me excited.