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.
What is your opinion on Bluesky being more popular than Mastodone because it is easier for most?
Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?
thanks
edit: lemmy dev replies only please
Afaik Bluesky is a for-profit company with millions in budget and probably a dozen or more fulltime employees. Of course they have much more resources to polish the new user experience, and also have an actual marketing budget. Plus in practice its completely centralized, they dont need to worry about all the difficulties that federation brings. Its only natural that they are more successful than Mastodon in the short term. But sooner or later they will also have problems when the Bluesky admins make decisions that the community doesnt like, and then there may be another migration wave to the Fediverse.
For the same reasons mentioned above, Lemmy cant become as easy as Bluesky. But the more contributors and donors we have, the closer we can get.
thanks . can I ask one more question? what should we be excited for in lemmy 1.0 (for non technical users)?
Lots of new features, so many that its hard to keep track of all. The biggest one might be private communities, where only users approved by moderators can browse and post.
nice. looking forward to it
Links to posts that are not tied to an instance, so that everyone can use them
It shows only that like most open source tools, US media institutes a general conspiracy of silence about platforms like the fediverse, and mastodon (or lemmy). Not because they’re not user-friendly enough, but because ultimately it’s not something the US can control. Bluesky is really just a rebranded twitter, founded by the same people, but with owners more friendly to the US democratic party, as opposed to musk who is more friendly to republicans. Both are US corporations subject to its laws and beholden to push pro-US foreign policy lines.
I hope most of the world will choose to escape all these monopolistic US-controlled platforms, and for countries to fund open source, and encourage their own citizens to use community-run alternatives.
Lemmy won’t become bluesky, because we’re a community/topic-focused link aggregator, not a person-focused microblogging platform.
It is easier to use because it doesn’t concern itself with federation or decentralization yet.
Lemmy would also be easy to use if we could only use one instance.
You’re basically comparing a centralized platform with a decentralized one. Of course the centralized one is easier to use.
Is that really what people mean by it being easier?
In Bluesky you are asked to choose a “Hosting provider” when you sign up… it;'s just that it’s set by default to Bluesky and actually trying to set something else makes the experience of signing in much harder… so actually I feel Bluesky is the one for which the process is harder, if anything.
I can’t even get a direct url to the sign up page of https://bsky.app/ …but I can link https://lemmy.ml/signup
Nobody is being forced to seek an alternative Lemmy instance to whichever they found first. In the same way that nobody in Bluesky has to use Bluesky as their hosting provider or even choose to self host their PDS.
Echoing @Die4Ever@programming.dev, it’s hard to comment on something so vague. Of course making things easier for users is an important goal.
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?”
Its interesting to have some more general questions, not only about specific features which can be answered with a simple Github link :)