Lemmy AMA March 2025
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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.
Will there be any way to block users from certain instances to hide their comments?
I dont think theres an issue for this yet, feel free to open one. It could be a checkbox for "Blocked Instances" setting, eg "Also block users".
What are the plans the improve discoverability?
There is an issue for easier discovery of federated communities which is part of our roadmap. Piefed recently implemented a similar feature which we will take inspiration from. It also helps if you block communities that you dont want to see. Are there any other ideas you are thinking of?
Will there be any type of word filtering?
This is work in progress.
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There was some discussion of this not long ago: https://feddit.uk/post/24412286
@nutomic@lemmy.ml linked this GitHub issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2345
It shouldn't be too difficult. A move is essentially a cross-post but it keeps the OP as the poster (rather than the cross-poster). You'd then want to lock the original post, and either hide it or add a message directing people to the new post. That's all current forum software does.
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Yeah I used pgtune as a base and found more memory needed to be assigned to certain spots especially to keep federation with bigger instances, otherwise timeouts would occur resulting in my instance being constantly behind.
That said I read postgres 17 is much more memory efficient, though I have yet to move my lemmy database to it yet since its the largest haha.
Maybe your disk is too slow, or latency between Lemmy and Postgres is too high?
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Maybe your disk is too slow, or latency between Lemmy and Postgres is too high?
It is a k8s cluster and using ceph for all of my storage so the latency from that I bet is the largest reason and upping the memory offsets the disk writes. i also have another postgres DB syncing as a fallback for high availability. Fortunately after tuning the database and giving it enough RAM my instance has been running pretty stable for over a year without any changes.
I am also using less powerful computers for the entire infrastructure (not server grade) which brings to the point of having horizontal scaling on database I imagine will be a growing need with growing instances, communities, and users since it can be cheaper to run multiple smaller spec servers rather than a single with the added benefit of high availability.
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It shouldn't be too difficult. A move is essentially a cross-post but it keeps the OP as the poster (rather than the cross-poster). You'd then want to lock the original post, and either hide it or add a message directing people to the new post. That's all current forum software does.
The main question is how this can work in terms of federation. When creating a new post it directly references the community url. If the user and community are on different instances then the community instance cannot rewrite the post to reference a different community. So it would have to tell the post creator to (automatically) resubmit the post to the new community. Same for all comments, they would have to be recreated by the respective author's instance in the new post. Seems quite complex to implement.
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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.
Youre right, I also noticed some other problems while testing registrations:
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Is there a way to move myself as an user from one server to another?
You can export your settings, community follows etc and import them in another instance. Moving your existing posts and comments doesnt work well with federation.
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Some companies use Reddit as their main forum or an established way to communicate with customers. Are there any companies that have explored Lemmy and have their community yet?
Not that I know of, only some open source projects as mentioned by others.
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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.
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. -
How are you?
A bit tired because my whole family is half sick. Luckily the kids are still okay to go to school.
Otherwise Im excited for this AMA, because I rarely have such direct conversations with users about Lemmy. The discussions on Github are usually quite technical.
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I'm just a user and don't follow the project super closely so please forgive me if this has already been addressed somewhere.
Is there any sort of JavaScript-less interface that would work properly on the Tor network with strict settings enabled? And could you set up instances only with a .onion domain? That way you don't have to pay for a domain and you're not at risk of having your domain yanked by ICANN, etc.
If I remember correctly, there was a mastodon instance that was using like a Pakistan domain or something like that and they yanked it.
Also, Federation between Onion and Standard Domains that way tor users would not be isolated.
My main reason for asking is that in my worldview, governments want to break encryption and break freedom of speech, if at all possible, and so the dark web is going to be more and more necessary as time goes on.
Edit: The more standard traffic we add onto the Tor network, the less able it is to be blocked or surveilled as to why somebody is using the Tor network. As an example, I send all of my signal traffic through Tor and download apps from fdroid through Tor and chat on SimpleX through Tor and quite a number of other things. Not because I need the Tor network, but just simply to be yet another person using it for standard activity
There is documentation for running a Lemmy instance over Tor, and one of the many frontends probably works without JS. If not someone could implement it with the API. Anyway there doesnt seem to be much interest in practice, because the clearnet works good enough for now.
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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)
Exactly, the more time goes by the better Lemmy will get. For sites like Reddit or now Digg its much easier to do marketing and get a quick user growth, but when they have problems then users will move to Lemmy.
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There is documentation for running a Lemmy instance over Tor, and one of the many frontends probably works without JS. If not someone could implement it with the API. Anyway there doesnt seem to be much interest in practice, because the clearnet works good enough for now.
Okay, that shows how to make the interfaces available over the network. But is there planned functionality for making Federation work? Even if you don't federate to clearnet domains, you could have several onion instances that could federate with each other and have a network of onion instances.
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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.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.
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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
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.
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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?"
Its interesting to have some more general questions, not only about specific features which can be answered with a simple Github link
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It is a k8s cluster and using ceph for all of my storage so the latency from that I bet is the largest reason and upping the memory offsets the disk writes. i also have another postgres DB syncing as a fallback for high availability. Fortunately after tuning the database and giving it enough RAM my instance has been running pretty stable for over a year without any changes.
I am also using less powerful computers for the entire infrastructure (not server grade) which brings to the point of having horizontal scaling on database I imagine will be a growing need with growing instances, communities, and users since it can be cheaper to run multiple smaller spec servers rather than a single with the added benefit of high availability.
Postgres supports sharding which should work without any changes in Lemmy. But so far not even lemmy.world needs that. There are also read replicas which would require support directly in Lemmy afaik. Such a feature will surely be added as instances grow bigger over time and need more resources.
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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)?
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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!
We have gone back and forth a few times on how deleted content is returned by the API, its very tricky to get right.
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Hi! As you might remember, i've been pushing for this platform for quite some time so i'll just dump ideas in a pretty annoying way, hope you'll spare me :3
- do you realize that the power of the threadiverse is that a forum can even fully exist alone and the federation between them is a plus while for microblogging it's kinda a shit to not have the big reach? basically, are you going to bring lemmy in a ''more forum'' direction or a ''more social'' direction?
- will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes? it's clear that the reddit effect is already here and people are not incentivized to read the article and comment on point or discuss less agreable stuff just because posts gets downvoted?
- if on my instance downvotes are deactivated, do they still influence my home when I browse subs from other instances that have downvotes?
- more UI mod tools! they are never enough because a community manager has not to be also a sysadmin or a linux poweruser just to take care of the community; stuff like subscribing to blocklists and allowlists, stuff like deleting cached media and so on
- how is the plugin stuff going?
- wouldn't it be better to drop the android client and the federated wiki to fully focus on making lemmy the best federated threadiverse software? now that nodebb has federation the competition is existent (mbin and piefed were never enough e.e) and other frontends are generally cooler (voyager basically brought me back on being active here)
- can we have a lemmy-first approach regarding comunication and contributions? basically i don't want to make a github account to push some opinions and it seems like they kinda get ignored when on the lemmy community about lemmy
- ability to merge communities having them mirrored in a basic way i guess it's already on his way
- would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv)
- would be cool to have lists to be able to browse lemmy from lemmy in a more rss way: for example there are communities i want to check once in a while but totally don't want em in my home and having lists would help
- changing ''favorite'' posts into ''bookmarks''/''saved''
- would be cool to have the possibility to have a favorite users list to check what your friends are up to
- any other suggestion would basically be ''can this thing that forums have also be ported to lemmy?'', i just think that lemmy has to evolve into a forum first with a link aggregator ui; it's kinda easy to use discourse as a bug tracker and feature request tracker for example (observation made because of the previous question of using lemmy instead of github for non code stuff)
- would be nice to have word filters and user notes
- also lobste.rs invite tree would be nice
- have you taken into account that maybe offering a service of lemmy hosting managed by you could help?
- dulcis in fundo, always about empowering non tech people, what about having lemmy on yunohost as one of the curated methods by the devs?
alright i think it's enough lol; now one very big appreciation: thank you for the rss first approach, having rss for basically everything like it was on reddit (well still miss some query rss but i understand it's harder to do) it's really so fucking useful and cool and i really hope that lemmy will make niche communities shine again
do you realize that the power of the threadiverse is that a forum can even fully exist alone and the federation between them is a plus while for microblogging it’s kinda a shit to not have the big reach? basically, are you going to bring lemmy in a ‘‘more forum’’ direction or a ‘‘more social’’ direction?
Im not a fan of microblogging, so for me Lemmy should definitely be more like a forum.
will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes? it’s clear that the reddit effect is already here and people are not incentivized to read the article and comment on point or discuss less agreable stuff just because posts gets downvoted?
As mentioned by others, downvotes can already disabled by the instance, so that local users cannot downvote and federated downvotes are ignored. Lemmy 1.0 will also add per-community downvote settings.
if on my instance downvotes are deactivated, do they still influence my home when I browse subs from other instances that have downvotes?
Yes
more UI mod tools! they are never enough because a community manager has not to be also a sysadmin or a linux poweruser just to take care of the community; stuff like subscribing to blocklists and allowlists, stuff like deleting cached media and so on
I only work on the backend, lemmy-ui and other frontends could definitely use more contributors to work on these things. Im not familiar with all the different apps but they are probably missing many features that already exist in the backend. That said subscribing to blocklists and allowlists seems a bit risky, as you can end up with most instances subscribing to the same list, giving the creator a lot of power. I believe Mastodon or Twitter had some drama like that. Anyway this could be implemented with the API.
how is the plugin stuff going?
Practically finished, you can already start developing plugins.
wouldn’t it be better to drop the android client and the federated wiki to fully focus on making lemmy the best federated threadiverse software? now that nodebb has federation the competition is existent (mbin and piefed were never enough e.e) and other frontends are generally cooler (voyager basically brought me back on being active here)
Lemmy is not a company with a boss ordering the workers what to do. Everyone including me and Dessalines are volunteers, and chooses for himself what he wants to work on. As its all open source its not really competition, more users on NodeBB is also good for Lemmy as it means more user choice and activity.
One reason Im working on Ibis is because I waited for a long time for someone to start a federated wiki project. Its a major thing thats missing from the Fediverse. As no one else did, I have to do it myself. The other reason is to have something different that Lemmy to code on. Working on Lemmy can be quite exhausting because the project is already very mature, so every new change needs to pass tests, be approved by other maintainers and work with the existing features. Ibis is still in early stages and under my control alone, so I can do whatever I want.
can we have a lemmy-first approach regarding comunication and contributions? basically i don’t want to make a github account to push some opinions and it seems like they kinda get ignored when on the lemmy community about lemmy
I checked your profile and it looks like you received adequate replies for all the latest posts.
ability to merge communities having them mirrored in a basic way i guess it’s already on his way
There are open issues for these, but developer time is very limited so we need to set priorities.
would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv)
Theres an open pull request for post tags.
would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv)
would be cool to have lists to be able to browse lemmy from lemmy in a more rss way: for example there are communities i want to check once in a while but totally don’t want em in my home and having lists would help
changing ‘‘favorite’’ posts into ‘‘bookmarks’’/‘‘saved’’
would be cool to have the possibility to have a favorite users list to check what your friends are up to
any other suggestion would basically be ‘‘can this thing that forums have also be ported to lemmy?’’, i just think that lemmy has to evolve into a forum first with a link aggregator ui; it’s kinda easy to use discourse as a bug tracker and feature request tracker for example (observation made because of the previous question of using lemmy instead of github for non code stuff)
would be nice to have word filters and user notes
also lobste.rs invite tree would be niceA lot of things would be nice to have, but with the very limited resources we have there is only so much we can do. So we need to focus on the main functionality, its basically the unix philosophy: "Do one thing and do it well".
have you taken into account that maybe offering a service of lemmy hosting managed by you could help?
Yes, but in the end I dont think the profit would be enough to justify the workload.
dulcis in fundo, always about empowering non tech people, what about having lemmy on yunohost as one of the curated methods by the devs?
We dont have time to manage yet another installation method, but anyone can help out and contribute there.
Wow these were a lot of questions
