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dessalines@lemmy.ml

nutomic@lemmy.ml

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Lemmy AMA March 2025 (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by nutomic@lemmy.ml to c/announcements@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Dunno if I’m too late, but here goes. My question is about federation between instances.

On PeerTube an instance follows another instance and then federates every channel and videos available.

On Lemmy, the user can follow a specific community and then that community will federate with the users instance.

How about being able to, either as the instance itself or a user, to follow an entire instance and have it federate everything?

An example. I have a user on Lemmy.wtf, but I am also very interested in the communities at Feddit.dk. I never know when new communities have been created on Feddit.dk, unless I go directly to Feddit.dk and look. If I could subscribe my instance to Feddit.dk, then all future communities would be visible to me automatically.

If something like that isn’t possible, then what about being able to browse other instance’s communities from my own instance?

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[–] lorty@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Do you feel a recommendation algorithm of some sorts is something lemmy will need for bigger audiences?

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Lemmy already uses recommendation algorithms for most of its sorts.

As far as a "personalized" one that isn't the communities you explicitly subscribed to, I don't think its really necessary, but it wouldn't be impossible to add (someone could probably come up with some good adjacent-community queries based on the most partipipated communities of users who you've liked comments and posts of. Make an issue for this on the lemmy github if you would like.

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[–] pleasegoaway@lemm.ee 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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)?

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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.

[–] pleasegoaway@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago

Thanks! I heard about lemmy in Reddit comments, during discussions of frustration with Reddit.

So, going forward, hopefully Reddit comments that mention lemmy won’t get banned lol.

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