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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What is your opinion on Bluesky being more popular than Mastodone because it is easier for most?
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Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?
thanks
Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?
I’m not a Lemmy dev (well I’ve made a couple of small commits lol), but this type of question can be hard to answer from the inside of a project.
It would probably be easier to answer a question more like: “Do you plan to implement feature XYZ in order to be easier to use like Bluesky?”
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+1 on registration experience being the #1 issue.
Would also be cool if we could stop 404/500ing deleted posts and instead display some indication it has been deleted. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment.
Thanks for Lemmy! 💙
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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Will there be any way to block users from certain instances to hide their comments?
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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.
unpopular opinion
Lemmy should have some sort of recommendation alhorithm.
Lemmy should have some sort of recommendation alhorithm.
https://quiblr.com/ is a Lemmy frontend that does this
https://quiblr.com/understanding_your_private_personalized_feed
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Is there a way to move myself as an user from one server to another?
i need to know this too
No, but you can export your data/subscriptions through your settings, sign up on another instance and import it. But moving posts/comments over, no.
I think tagging here works like this: @murd0x@lemmy.ml
Frustratingly, @Madbrad200@sh.itjust.works’s comment created a hyperlink and yours did not, in lemmy-ui (the default web interface). This is probably one of the frustrations I should have mentioned in my comment about inconsistent UX between web and mobile…
I’m using Sync. I have no idea what’s going on 🤷♂️
In Sync, when you see your comment, does it create a link you can click to go to murd0x’s profile? If so, nice! Sync is doing the right thing in this context. I know already that Jerboa, the app from the main Lemmy devs, does this correctly.
But lemmy-ui, the interface you’ll see on most instances if you open it up in your web browser, that is not clickable, but the /u/username is clickable. It’s an obvious bug/shortcoming in lemmy-ui.
This is the huge disconnect between what the fediverse is and what the users actually want.
Users want the convenience of a single entity that floats around the different instances. They want to interact with community A on instance B and also commini X on instance Y.
But most clients deal with it by letting you log in with multiple users on multiple instances
I don’t follow. I’m on AZ, you’re on LW. We can talk to each other right here, in this community on ML.
Sure, account migration in some form might be nice, but we certainly are able to
interact with community A on instance B and also commini X on instance Y
Users want the convenience of a single entity that floats around the different instances. They want to interact with community A on instance B and also commini X on instance Y.
I’m not sure I’m following what you’re describing here because I feel like I do have that convenience?
Disclosure: I have forgotten about my Beehaw account long ago.
Communities should be more unified across servers, especially for niche ones. I want to see an active Metroid community, I don’t give a crap what instance is hosting it (or if it’s a mostly-opaque medley of instances) so long as I’m federated with it. This is probably the biggest UX misunderstanding new users have.
What exactly is it you’re asking for, though? A change in user behaviour towards consolidation? Some new feature of the platform similar to multi-reddits? How exactly do you suggest that should work?
Not a change in user behaviour. How about: communities on different instances with the same name appear as one community essentially. As in, all instances’ version of that community appear in your feed if subscribed, and when viewing posts in a community, all instances versions of that community are visible.
Perhaps the user can restrict to just one instance’s community or just the local instance’s community with a button (like local/all), if that’s their preference.
That’s gonna be fun for cases like c/trees. Someone somewhere will get the joke, someone somewhere won’t.
Being able to view “all” communities with the same name across all instances would be so nice.
!fedigrow@lemm.ee has several examples of consolidation
This should be among the first priorities. It would really help kick things off. Not only niche communities, but bigger ones as well. They represent topics of interest. I think I’ve seen a thing like macro community in one of the clients?! Could that be it?
Eternity Android client allows grouping communities into a multi community, but it only helps on getting consolidated feed, not necessarily reaching the same people
the Summit app does it too
When a instance goes permanently offline, does the content vanish? If so, could there possibly be a way for another instance to “adopt” the content on their instance so those posts aren’t lost to time?
I think it might help reassure people to pick smaller instances.
Edit: I suppose I shouldn’t be answering this. Kinda forgot the thread I’m in. I guess I asked something as well.
If your instance was federated with it when it existed then your instance automatically has its own backup of it is as far as I understand things. I would like clarity on this however. My instance is a few days older than this account. Therefore the smaller instances that have already died are already duplicated locally here at sh.itjust.works. I can still view vlemmy, waveform.social, lemmy.film, (etc.) communities/posts as essentially an archive.
What I’d like to know is if I linked a sh.itjust.works link to one of those threads could a user of a more recent instance load the content?
I’m not sure what point it would ultimately serve as with the host instance being offline nothing could federate out between us anyway.
Coming from Reddit I feel Lemmy could use a way to sort posts within communities by top posts within a time frame we choose. That without this feature gamers and gooners will default to reddit over Lemmy.
maybe I’m misreading what you’re saying, but we already have this, works the same way as Reddit
Don’t we already have that feature? I can choose to see the top posts of a community by hour, six hours, 12 hours, day, week, month, and so on, up to a year by clicking the sort type drop down menu on any community.
Do you mean be able to see the top posts between two different times, like top posts between 2022 and 2023?
I am on voyager and I do not have access to this feature.
Voyager thankfully does also have this feature. If you go to a community and press on the little icon at the top right, next to the 3 little dots, you’ll open the ‘sort by’ menu. If you press the ‘Top’ option, it will then let you choose between those different time options.
Ah I see now. Thanks!
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.
Shouldn’t torrents be used for large files?
i’m clueless about torrents and Lemmy, can you embed them in posts/comments somehow? The closest thing I could think of is using a Framatube instance, but I don’t think you can embed them
depends on instance they all set hard limits of their own lemmee is 5mb which is lowaf
What would you upload that’s larger than 5mb???
damn near every single image on my phone fails to meet the requirements so I host my own instance lol, I tried compressing butchered the quality this is 1080p too
I think I’ve uploaded images bigger than that, before.
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.
What have been the biggest challenges with the project over the years, both in terms of technical and non technical aspects. I’d be interesting to hear a bit of retrospective on how has the stack’s been working out, and what surprises you might’ve run into in terms of scaling and federation. What recommendations you’d make based on that and what you would’ve done differently knowing what you know now.
- 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?
- With Nicole in everyone’s DMs, what does the future of spam filtering look like on Lemmy?
From my perspective we need better Mod and Admin tools. Forum software has a lot of them but Lemmy is lacking in this department.
The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities. You’ll often get reports of posts not being appropriate for a community but there is no way to actually move it.
What’s the vision for using lemmy? User should create an account on one server, and use all? Or should create users on multiple servers? The first one seems like the way to go, but it wasn’t quite clear for me when I signed up
User should create an account on one server
Mostly this. Some people might want a few accounts but those would be hardcore users.
one with alts if you need or want them because of instanve specific rules
Personally I only have alts on other instances because you can’t create Communities on instances other than your home one, and my home instance was not an appropriate one for the Communities I wanted to create.
thats a good reason too, I make communities on the bigger ones for more visibility
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.
This generally goes against security best practices as it can be used for attempted user enumeration. A better version would be “we’ll send you an email with your account status if this user exists” but obviously that results in a fair amount more complexity (and cost) to implement
the password/cookie should still work even when awaiting validation, password is set before the email is sent
I am not suggesting users being able to enumerate other users, just that the unique link that is currently used for email verification would be more explicit than just the one time toastify notification
