Lemmy AMA March 2025

[abobla@lemm.ee]

Do you guys have plans to add a spoiler tag? I post a lot of memes about tv shows that I watch, but the users complain that the post isn't blurred.

I know I can use the NSFW tag, but this gives the wrong idea and limits the post visibility (since people can hide nsfw posts).

[lgsp@feddit.it]

Hi, I think that Lemmy is great thank you for your hard work

I actually think that given the ads and other distorsions, and thanks to federation, Lemmy is overall actually better than reddit!

Some features I miss are:

• tags
• direct messages outside Lemmy (even if not encrypted)
• better rendering of posts on mastodon (something beyond the title only). Not sure what side is responsible for this, tho!

Keep up the good work guys!

[morrowind@lemmy.ml]

You can put spoilers in the body

::: spoiler spoiler
Helloooo
:::

[zagorath@aussie.zone]

What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it?

There are some more obvious things, like mod tooling, but I'm gonna concentrate on smaller, niche UX issues that I think arise from how it is designed already, because I think there are probably already enough voices who will speak up for the bigger things.

• Inconsistent language UX between lemmy-ui and Jerboa. Specifically, that Jerboa provides no way to specify the language of a post or comment.
• Inconsistent parsing of markdown between lemmy-ui and Jerboa. Specifically. ^Superscript^ and ~subscript~ work fine on single words, but ^multiple words in superscript^ ~or in subscript~ do not display correctly in lemmy-ui. They do in Jerboa.

It's bad enough that third-party apps do these things (and others, like spoiler text) without following the spec consistently. But can they really be blamed when even the two main first-party UIs don't do it right? The post/comment language feature is awesome, as is the fact that you can do such a wide variety of syntax including subscript. But if users are not getting a consistent experience with these across platforms, it leads to confusion.

• Spoiler text syntax is clumsy. I like the idea of having collapsible text, but ::: spoiler [display text] is an insanely wordy way of doing it. In what other context is markdown do anything similar to requiring the literal text spoiler? It would be great if (a) an inline spoiler text syntax could be implemented, similar to >!Reddit's!< or ||Discord's||, and (b) if a more elegant collapsible text syntax could be created.
• Lemmy has a nasty habit of transforming user input. I just found out it converts your backslashes into forward slashes (see this comment), but a while ago I noticed that it completely removes text posted between angle brackets <like this text>, which is annoying when trying to write pseudo-XML. {does it allow braces?} [square brackets?]. It feels to me like a relatively lazy attempt to sanitise user inputs, and it creates a poor UX, especially since I'm sure prepared statements and other safe data handling is employed. In my opinion any time you're changing what a user wrote, that's an anti-pattern. If you can't just leave it how it is, it's better to just block posting with a clear error message explaining why

Basically, I'd just like to see an overall focus on the user experience and how it all fits together as a system.

Also my little pet feature: keyboard navigation. Back on that other site, before the redesign, there was incredible keyboard navigation thanks to the Enhancement Suite. j/k to navigate up/down through comments. Enter to collapse. a/z to up/downvote. Etc. It's a delight to use, and is a big part of the reason I could never move to the redesign, before I came over here. Not having that is a big drawback IMO.

edit: looks like the angle brackets thing was <fixed> . Still need the backslash thing fixed.

edit 2: I was just reminded of another example of the lemmy-ui vs Jerboa confusion, as well as another example of well-intentioned by ultimately anti-patternesque transformation of user text: how user and Community mentions are handled.

@nutomic@lemmy.ml will not be a hyperlink for viewers in lemmy-ui, but /u/nutomic@lemmy.ml will be...despite the latter being generally not the preferred way to do it. lemmy-ui also does this awkward thing where if you use the autofill suggestions when typing a name, it wraps them in a hard-instanced URL instead of the better UX of taking someone to their profile on your instance: @dessalines@lemmy.ml.

Communities are even weirder. Allowing the autofill of !announcements@lemmy.ml will create a hard-instanced URL ([!community@domain](https://domain/c/community)), but then the parser ignores this and creates a URL to the user's instance. If, instead, URLs went where the user's text input says they go, but the autofill would default to naked Community mentions such as !announcements@lemmy.ml, this would be a much better experience.

Meanwhile, Jerboa doesn't have an autofill capability for users or Communities. Users who are mentioned with /u/ are not linked, while users who are linked with @ get a link that is handled within the user's instance, regardless of whether it's a hard-instanced link or a naked mention. Communities are also always handled within the user's instance.

[m_f@discuss.online]

Not really a question, but something to think about is being more strict about backwards compatibility so that people don't get burnt out on having stuff break. Coming from this post by the Tesseract dev, who did not like the breaking changes to the v3 API in 1.0: https://dubvee.org/post/2904152

To formulate that into an actual question, do you think the changes are still worth it and you'd make the same decision to break backwards compatibility?

[shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip]

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

[abobla@lemm.ee]

but then the user might not realize that there's an image in the post, which will also limit it's reach.

[ex_06@slrpnk.net]

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

[yogthos@lemmy.ml]

What have been the biggest challenges with the project over the years, both in terms of technical and non technical aspects. I'd be interesting to hear a bit of retrospective on how has the stack's been working out, and what surprises you might've run into in terms of scaling and federation. What recommendations you'd make based on that and what you would've done differently knowing what you know now.

[osrsneedsf2p@lemmy.ml]

1. From a code architecture perspective, how close is Lemmy/ActivityPub to reaching its maximum capacity for posts/comments per second? Are there any ways to 10x the load ActivityPub can handle?
2. With Nicole in everyone's DMs, what does the future of spam filtering look like on Lemmy?

[krolden@lemmy.ml]

They did managed hosting before but everyone freaked out that the communist devs were controlling the narrative or some shit. It was a mess, I think they stopped doing it now that there are more instances.

Down votes should remain. It expresses dissatisfaction with peoples cringe bad takes

[emperor@feddit.uk]

From my perspective we need better Mod and Admin tools. Forum software has a lot of them but Lemmy is lacking in this department.

The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities. You'll often get reports of posts not being appropriate for a community but there is no way to actually move it.

[prototype_g2@lemmy.ml]

Some Lemmy clients offer the option to auto-hide posts and comments which contain certain keywords of the choice of the user. Are there any plans to implement this feature into the stock Lemmy experience?

I know it is possible to do some hacky stuff with UblockOrigin to do the same, but that is not something most know about and are willing to do.

[uberstar@lemmy.ml]

Random general question, how do you feel about file hosting? When posting, I tend to avoid uploading media larger than like, 5MB, just cause I know that the cost of storing said media can get exorbitant very quickly and I wouldn't want to be part of the burden.. I'm not able to donate just yet. Knowing this, I am currently on the fence on whether I should create a "gaming clips" community.

That said, it's nice to be able to embed media from other sources (despite it potentially not working natively for mobile platforms if I'm not mistaken?), which got me thinking: it'd be nice to have some sort of preference list of image/video hosting hosts that users can add to or remove from, and uploading directly from the comment/create post view would use the first working file hosting domain from the list.. Just spitballing here.

[murd0x@lemmy.ml]

Is there a way to move myself as an user from one server to another?

[gazby@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

+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!

[ultragigagigantic@lemmy.ml]

When a instance goes permanently offline, does the content vanish? If so, could there possibly be a way for another instance to "adopt" the content on their instance so those posts aren't lost to time?

I think it might help reassure people to pick smaller instances.

[can@sh.itjust.works]

Edit: I suppose I shouldn't be answering this. Kinda forgot the thread I'm in. I guess I asked something as well.

---

If your instance was federated with it when it existed then your instance automatically has its own backup of it is as far as I understand things. I would like clarity on this however. My instance is a few days older than this account. Therefore the smaller instances that have already died are already duplicated locally here at sh.itjust.works. I can still view vlemmy, waveform.social, lemmy.film, (etc.) communities/posts as essentially an archive.

What I'd like to know is if I linked a sh.itjust.works link to one of those threads could a user of a more recent instance load the content?

I'm not sure what point it would ultimately serve as with the host instance being offline nothing could federate out between us anyway.

[p4ulin_kbana@lemmy.eco.br]

• Will there be any way to block users from certain instances to hide their comments?

• 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.

[jehuty@lemmy.ml]

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)