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.

    • abobla@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      but then the user might not realize that there’s an image in the post, which will also limit it’s reach.

        • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
          31·
          3 days ago

          Even that isn’t too necessary, since you can already put images in spoiler markdown blocks.

        • abobla@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          I see. Would the spoiler tag also blur the thumbnail?

          The only thing that concerns me about handling spoilers is how the third party apps handle them. Do you think it would be a good idea to also blur the entire image (not only the thumbnail) and remove the blur only when the user clicks the image?

          • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
            5·
            3 days ago

            Not sure, we would have to see whenever we get around to implementing that.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
        3·
        4 days ago

        Yeah a lot of former Reddit apps that switched to Lemmy did a really lazy job of it and haven’t implemented all of the Lemmy text parsing syntax properly. Spoilers are one of the most common issues, but so are subscript (including ~multiple word subscript~) and superscript (and ^multiple words of it^).

        If your app doesn’t parse text correctly 2 years later, it may be time to consider switching.