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 have no idea how and which server I joined, is there any manial I can read better yet visually see how servers are connected that are federated? Thx. And when we search something does it search across all servers? Thanks.
When will anyone be able to click the following /c/books And see an agglomeration of all “books” communities on all federated server? I don’t mean multireddits Thanks!!
When will users be able to frictionlessly migrate between instances without losing their posts, their comments, their history, their relationships, their reputation etc? (Without requiring the consent of the exiting instance owner, or that this server still even exists, as they sometimes don’t)
How would you improve it?
a way to filter out posts that have no engagement or comments from others would be helpful since the larger instances flood my feed w hundreds/thousands of news links that flood out the discourse on lemmy.
Do you plan to introduce some kind of post tags into Lemmy, preferably something that will behave like Hashtags on Mastodon and other activitypub platforms? I know that Lemmy has been embedding community name as a hashtag for a while now, though having tags that can be populated by users would help discovery greatly.
Do you plan on moving away from GitHub to something else like Forgejo?
I am new to Lemmy, so haven’t really looked into if the following is possible but can I create groups of communities with a similar topic across multiple instances?
Thanks a lot for the work you do! How do you get by with such a limited amount of funds? How sustainable is your financial situation if donations don’t pick up considerably?
Do you have any plans to make it easier to manage the images stored in pictrs? One issue I have is that I used to proxy images, I no longer do that, but now I have like 300GB on backblaze doing nothing. In this post I outlined more precisely what I mean.
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?
One of the biggest issue at this point is probably the registration experience. There are quite a few occurrences on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com of users not sure whether their email has been validated or not, and at the moment they really need to look out for the toastify notification on their first try, later attempts won’t show it.
Most recent example: https://lemmy.ml/post/27607055?scrollToComments=true
If there could be a way to inform a user saying “your email address has been validated, please wait for an administrator to activate your account, you can reach out to them at xxx”, that would be great.
Youre right, I also noticed some other problems while testing registrations:
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5547
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5548#issue-2949361836
For the email validation it could also make sense to send out another email saying “your email has been validated”, so its not only shown on the website.
Thanks!
I’d need more detail here. If registration emails aren’t being sent out correctly, we need to handle that.
These two posts should provide more details
This generally goes against security best practices as it can be used for attempted user enumeration. A better version would be “we’ll send you an email with your account status if this user exists” but obviously that results in a fair amount more complexity (and cost) to implement
Enumerating users is not a security problem. It’s platform obscurantism to even suggest that it is.
I think I’ll trust owasp and my own over 20 years of experience building commercial software but you do you
I am not suggesting users being able to enumerate other users, just that the unique link that is currently used for email verification would be more explicit than just the one time toastify notification
the password/cookie should still work even when awaiting validation, password is set before the email is sent
We are seeing an influx of new users, but what’s happening to older users? Are they still active? What’s the average lifetime of Lemmy users nowadays? I’m kinda curious about the user retention in general
I’ve been here for almost two years and don’t think I can go back to anything else. I like the freedom of information that this idea brought to us.
The best data we have on that is probably https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Not sure how to get the user retention from that, though
Every server and community has monthly active users stats. Best way to see them would be a tool like this that keeps track of history: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
We don’t do any tracking of user retention, but overall lemmy has been fairly steady at ~50k users for a year now.
but what’s happening to older users? Are they still active?
There are certainly names still around who I remember from my first year on the site. Like Blaze said, I’m also not sure how to get some concrete numbers.
I believe they are still active. User numbers have been stable for a long time, and there are some names that I recognize from the very early days 5 years ago.
Will we ever get the ability to mute posts?
Thanks
You can hide them (three dots menu - hide post) is muting different?
If I create a post and then a bunch of annoying people from LW start flooding my inbox, I’d like to be able to prevent new replies from taking over my inbox, but still be able to access the post should I decide I have the energy to tackle the LW hoard.
Not sure where this falls on lemmy’s roadmap or if there is a github issue for it, but you can turn off notifications in piefed per post or comment. You can also enable notifications for posts/comments that aren’t your own if there is a thread you want to keep tabs on.
I see
Probably not at the top of anyone’s list, and a little bit old, but do you have any thoughts about the following?:
If the Reddit mascot’s name is “Snoo,” then the Lemmy mascot’s name is . . . ?
Probably depends on the instance
Different instances have their own logo, but there is the official Lemmy logo:
#/media/File:Lemmy_logo.svg)
edit: looks like Lemmy doesn’t like escaping URLs? It literally converted my backslashes into forward slashes… anyway, here’s the URL of the image I tried to embed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)#/media/File:Lemmy_logo.svg
let me try
#/media/File:Lemmy_logo.svg)
yeah, it didn’t workedWait, I just realised that what I posted…isn’t an actual image. It ends in .svg, but it isn’t an svg file. This is, and it has no brackets:
To test how URL escaping works, here’s a different (non-image) link with brackets in it.
I use Reddit many years and don’t know that the logo has a name.
Its a Lemming!
Lemming:
Native push notifications would be awesome for Lemmy! I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Unified Push support would be great.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2631
It’s coming in the next release
Thanks for the info! It looks like we’re almost there - 81% completion means the final release of 1.0 update is just around the corner!
Let’s go! No more email notifications
There is an issue open requesting this… I been following it for a while.
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.
