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's the vision for using lemmy? User should create an account on one server, and use all? Or should create users on multiple servers? The first one seems like the way to go, but it wasn't quite clear for me when I signed up
I'm not sure how we could make this more clear either on https://join-lemmy.org/ , or the docs: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/index.html
This only states the multiple ways of how one can use lemmy, but neither envisions how one should use it. And vision is important for the non technical user, especially when exploring new grounds, because vision makes him go further. Not infinite overwhelming possibilities, technicalities and potential headaches. It's simple or it's complicated.
I still don't follow you. In the very first link, we direct people a page that lets them explore or join a server. You don't need to know anything about federation to use lemmy.
The point is there is no clear path to use lemmy.. Just because there are so many options.
Just like going for the first time to a Starbucks and asking for a coffee. Some people just want a coffee.. Not the whole headache of choosing.
In this regard, probably a paragraph saying :"here, try this server - it's fast because it's not overcrowded (or any other reason, if any), and try this client - find it on your favourite app store"
This offers the user a baseline for his experience. After he gets the hang of it, when he feels prepared to try the other options, he can do it at his own pace. Not needing to figure out too many things before even trying.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really hoping this will overthrow proprietary platforms, but right now this is my two cents on onboarding. Cheers
Have a look at the pinned posts on [email protected]
Good post, but still raises the issue to a new level: above lemmy, there's another choice: which flavor of the fediverse do I want? twitter-like ? reddit-like ? etc
That's not critical. If we post to Reddit, we can already assume the people reading the post are familiar with the Reddit format, so Lemmy makes sense
Definitely not critical. As you said, familiarity can be quite important in a genus-differentia kind of way. For me it definitely was: being familiar to Reddit I could think that Lemmy is just like it but better. Same with Twitter and Mastodon.
And when you get there, you're overwhelmed with options: