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.

  • lgsp@feddit.itEnglish
    22·
    3 days ago

    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!

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      14·
      3 days ago
      • Tags are work in progress
      • Not exactly sure what you mean by “direct messages outside Lemmy”, but in version 1.0 they will be compatible with Mastodon and other platforms
      • Its a known problem with Mastodon because it only renders Note objects properly, which are meant for short texts less than a paragraph. Lemmy uses Page which is meant for longer text. Some platforms like Wordpress (iirc) have an option to federate even long posts as Note so that it gets rendered fully in Mastodon, but that seems like a bad idea to me. In the end its up to Mastodon how to render different types of federated content on their frontend, so it needs to be fixed by them. Here is an entire discussion about this by developers of different Fediverse platforms (including a Mastodon dev).
      • lgsp@feddit.itEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Thank you, great to hear all my points are being addressed! The thing about post rendering, well, I just hope a common solution is found 😊