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.
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.
And when you get there, you're overwhelmed with options: