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.

  • egidighsea@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    I am new to Lemmy, so haven’t really looked into if the following is possible but can I create groups of communities with a similar topic across multiple instances?

  • diamat@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    7 hours ago

    Thanks a lot for the work you do! How do you get by with such a limited amount of funds? How sustainable is your financial situation if donations don’t pick up considerably?

  • Lena@gregtech.euEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    Do you have any plans to make it easier to manage the images stored in pictrs? One issue I have is that I used to proxy images, I no longer do that, but now I have like 300GB on backblaze doing nothing. In this post I outlined more precisely what I mean.

  • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.mlEnglish
    24·
    18 hours ago

    No questions right now. Just wanted to say thank you for your hard work.

    I know y’all catch a lot of shit and get hammered with requests/demands, so I wanted to let you know that your work is greatly appreciated.

    Thanks for dedicating your time and energy to making a non-corporate, federated social environment possible.

    Being on Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air.

  • CheeseToastie@lazysoci.alEnglish
    16·
    21 hours ago

    Just wanted to say I LOVE lemmy! It’s a really positive community, the atmosphere is great and I like how it’s unique but also familiar. I really appreciate your work on it. I know this is AMA… what’s your favourite animal?

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    7·
    1 day 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?

  • Bloomcole@lemm.eeEnglish
    102·
    1 day 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.

  • lorty@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    Do you feel a recommendation algorithm of some sorts is something lemmy will need for bigger audiences?

  • pleasegoaway@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    Reddit has far more niche communities. There’s the saying that “there’s a subreddit for everything.”

    What do you think the trajectory/timeline looks like for lemmy to develop a more robust array of niche communities (aka niche subreddits)?

  • Itte@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11·
    1 day ago

    1. What is your opinion on Bluesky being more popular than Mastodone because it is easier for most?

    2. Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?

    thanks

    edit: lemmy dev replies only please

  • GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    23 hours ago

    More customization for site owners. I have an independent instance and there’s a lot of things on there that are confusing for people unfamiliar with the fefiverse or lemmy. It would also be nice to remove the donation beg at the top. I know Lemmy needs funding, but it makes it look like I’m asking for donations.

  • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    54·
    2 days ago

    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.