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.

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    7·
    4 days ago

    Dunno if I’m too late, but here goes. My question is about federation between instances.

    On PeerTube an instance follows another instance and then federates every channel and videos available.

    On Lemmy, the user can follow a specific community and then that community will federate with the users instance.

    How about being able to, either as the instance itself or a user, to follow an entire instance and have it federate everything?

    An example. I have a user on Lemmy.wtf, but I am also very interested in the communities at Feddit.dk. I never know when new communities have been created on Feddit.dk, unless I go directly to Feddit.dk and look. If I could subscribe my instance to Feddit.dk, then all future communities would be visible to me automatically.

    If something like that isn’t possible, then what about being able to browse other instance’s communities from my own instance?

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      6·
      4 days ago

      We have an issue discussing non-local community discovery here.

      My vote there is to extend our lemmy-stats-crawler to crawl communities also, host that file somewhere, and build in a scheduled job to refetch and populate missing communities periodically. Its centralized, but if that file is unavailable, it wouldn’t break anything.