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.

  • Bloomcole@lemm.eeEnglish
    113·
    4 days ago

    How is it some can mod 15+ comms, like this awful character PugJesus , ban anyone for no reason and then comment stuff like this without consequence:

    Be less of a dick.
    Be less of a moron.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      This is moderator empowerment at work. A structural flaw in lemmy that can only be solved with frictionless user migration, automatic community agglomeration like /c/books and crowd sourced moderation to diffuse tge concentrated power of moderators, that is the only way to prevent abuse and make lemmy more than reddit with extra steps.

      • Bloomcole@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        there is an avalanche of Reddit clowns arriving here, it doesn’t look good

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      26·
      4 days ago

      Im not familiar with that user, turns out he is already banned from lemmy.ml and many other instances. So there are consequences, but as long as lemmy.world admins are okay with him, he can keep posting there. This is a big benefit of Lemmy’s federation compared to Reddit: even if theres a user you dislike, you can join an instance where he is completely insivible, while you can still interact with other users in the network. There is no single person or organization that can decide who can or cannot post on Lemmy, every instance decides for itself.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mlEnglish
      11·
      4 days ago

      Lemmy is federated, there isn’t really a way for people of different instances to police what other instances deem appropriate. If you want to avoid PJ, then avoid interacting with Comms they mod, or block them. You can report or make posts on PTB if you feel especially willing to, but if nothing comes of that then your only choice is to ignore or deal with it.

      This goes both ways, PJ has no power over instances and communities they don’t mod or participate in.