Lemmy AMA March 2025
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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
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thanks . can I ask one more question? what should we be excited for in lemmy 1.0 (for non technical users)?
Lots of new features, so many that its hard to keep track of all. The biggest one might be private communities, where only users approved by moderators can browse and post.
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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 textspoiler? 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.
Regarding the markdown point for lemmy-ui, I think part of the issue is that we don't use a markdown parser tailored to our purposes. We use
markdown-it, and our custom (non-common mark, so stuff like the spoiler blocks) stuff uses plugins for it like this one. One of these days I'd like to make a markdown parser specifically for Lemmy. -
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.
Federation uses standard HTTP so it shouldnt require any specific support. If you want to send outgoing federation over Tor you can set a proxy via environment. Youre welcome to test these things and update the documentation with your results.
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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.
The upload function is mainly meant for images, like others said its better to use external sites for video uploads. Integrating upload to those remote sites seems like a lot of work for little benefit though.
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Are you disappointed with the way things are growing with people trying to marginalise the likes of ML and Grad?
It seems some people simply need some target to hate on. Hopefully they will learn to accept different opinions when they arent being manipulated by for-profit social media anymore.
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I see. Would the spoiler tag also blur the thumbnail?
The only thing that concerns me about handling spoilers is how the third party apps handle them. Do you think it would be a good idea to also blur the entire image (not only the thumbnail) and remove the blur only when the user clicks the image?
Not sure, we would have to see whenever we get around to implementing that.
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Regarding the markdown point for lemmy-ui, I think part of the issue is that we don't use a markdown parser tailored to our purposes. We use
markdown-it, and our custom (non-common mark, so stuff like the spoiler blocks) stuff uses plugins for it like this one. One of these days I'd like to make a markdown parser specifically for Lemmy.The plugin architecture for markdown makes a lot of sense, because it allows other projects to mix and match markdown rules for their specific use case. I also used some of your Rust markdown plugins for Ibis.
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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.
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)?
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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)?
It'll likely continue to happen organically: niche communities on reddit will keep getting fed up with the changes, and migrate to lemmy.
I don't know if we'll ever reach a tipping point, because redditors have shown that there's almost nothing they won't tolerate, but its also likely they still don't know that alternatives exist. There's a general conspiracy of silence about most fediverse software. Even with all this recent reddit drama, not a single article bothered to mention lemmy or other alternatives. The info is out there, but interested people have to go out of their way to find it.
We've also added a scaled sort to boost posts from smaller / less active communities, so that should help some with discovery. It'd also be nice for instances to use the sidebar, pinned posts, or site taglines to highlight smaller communities to help them grow.
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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.
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.
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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.
What Is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
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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.
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?
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What Is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
African or European swallow?
