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nutomic @lemmy.ml

Lemmy AMA March 2025

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.

462 comments

  • 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?

    • I live in Spain, the cost of living here is much cheaper than Germany or especially the United States. I also dont need luxuries, and have enough money saved to last for a while. If donations are not enough I could always work for some company, and spend less time 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.

    • Lemmy is not for microblogging, so I dont think hashtags make sense.

      • Well they don't have to show up as hashtags to users on Lemmy, they can show up as their own designated tags you add to the post on creation of editing. Just some form of post tags to indicate the category of a post (could even be specific to communities like subreddit flairs) but they would show up as hashtags on Mastodon, similar to how Lemmy already embeds a hashtag of the community into posts.

  • Do you plan on moving away from GitHub to something else like Forgejo?

    • Once its mature, I personally wouldn't be opposed to moving issue tracking off github and into a federated one like forgejo.

    1. What is your opinion on Bluesky being more popular than Mastodone because it is easier for most?
    2. Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?

    thanks

    edit: lemmy dev replies only please

    • What is your opinion on Bluesky being more popular than Mastodone because it is easier for most?

      It shows only that like most open source tools, US media institutes a general conspiracy of silence about platforms like the fediverse, and mastodon (or lemmy). Not because they're not user-friendly enough, but because ultimately it's not something the US can control. Bluesky is really just a rebranded twitter, founded by the same people, but with owners more friendly to the US democratic party, as opposed to musk who is more friendly to republicans. Both are US corporations subject to its laws and beholden to push pro-US foreign policy lines.

      I hope most of the world will choose to escape all these monopolistic US-controlled platforms, and for countries to fund open source, and encourage their own citizens to use community-run alternatives.

      Lemmy won't become bluesky, because we're a community/topic-focused link aggregator, not a person-focused microblogging platform.

    • Afaik Bluesky is a for-profit company with millions in budget and probably a dozen or more fulltime employees. Of course they have much more resources to polish the new user experience, and also have an actual marketing budget. Plus in practice its completely centralized, they dont need to worry about all the difficulties that federation brings. Its only natural that they are more successful than Mastodon in the short term. But sooner or later they will also have problems when the Bluesky admins make decisions that the community doesnt like, and then there may be another migration wave to the Fediverse.

      For the same reasons mentioned above, Lemmy cant become as easy as Bluesky. But the more contributors and donors we have, the closer we can get.

      • thanks . can I ask one more question? what should we be excited for in lemmy 1.0 (for non technical users)?

    • It is easier to use because it doesn't concern itself with federation or decentralization yet.

      Lemmy would also be easy to use if we could only use one instance.

      You're basically comparing a centralized platform with a decentralized one. Of course the centralized one is easier to use.

      • Is that really what people mean by it being easier?

        In Bluesky you are asked to choose a "Hosting provider" when you sign up.. it;'s just that it's set by default to Bluesky and actually trying to set something else makes the experience of signing in much harder.... so actually I feel Bluesky is the one for which the process is harder, if anything.

        I can't even get a direct url to the sign up page of https://bsky.app/ ..but I can link https://lemmy.ml/signup

        Nobody is being forced to seek an alternative Lemmy instance to whichever they found first. In the same way that nobody in Bluesky has to use Bluesky as their hosting provider or even choose to self host their PDS.

    • Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?

      Echoing @Die4Ever@programming.dev, it's hard to comment on something so vague. Of course making things easier for users is an important goal.

    • Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?

      I'm not a Lemmy dev (well I've made a couple of small commits lol), but this type of question can be hard to answer from the inside of a project.

      It would probably be easier to answer a question more like: "Do you plan to implement feature XYZ in order to be easier to use like Bluesky?"

      • Its interesting to have some more general questions, not only about specific features which can be answered with a simple Github link :)

  • What have been the biggest challenges with the project over the years, both in terms of technical and non technical aspects. I'd be interesting to hear a bit of retrospective on how has the stack's been working out, and what surprises you might've run into in terms of scaling and federation. What recommendations you'd make based on that and what you would've done differently knowing what you know now.

    • The stack is great, I wouldnt want to change anything. Postgres is very mature and performant, with a high focus on correctness. It can sometimes be difficult to optimize queries, but there are wizards like @dullbananas@lemmy.ca who know how to do that. Anyway there is no better alternative that I know of. Rust is also great, just like Postgres it is very performant and has a focus on correctness. Unlike most programming languages it is almost impossible to get any runtime crashes, which is very valuable for a webservice.

      The high performance means that less hardware is required to host a given number of users, compared to something like NodeJS or PHP. For example when kbin.social was popular, I remember it had to run on multiple beefy servers. Meanwhile lemmy.ml is still running on a single dedicated server, with much more active users. Or Mastodon having to handle incoming federation activities in background tasks which makes the code more complicated, while Lemmy can process them directly in the HTTP handler.

      Nevertheless, scaling for more users always has its surprises. I remember very early in development, Lemmy wasnt able to handle more than a dozen requests per second. Turns out we only used a single database connection instead of a connection pool, so each db query was running after that last one was finished, which of course is very slow. It seems obvious in retrospect, but you never notice this problem until there are a dozen or so users active at the same time.

      With the Reddit migration two years ago a lot of performance problems came up, as active users on Lemmy suddenly grew around 70 times. You can see some of that in the 0.18.x release announcements. One part of the solution was to add missing database indexes. Another was to remove websocket support, which was keeping a connection open for each user. That works fine with 100 users, but completely breaks down with 1000 or more.

      After all there is nothing I would do different really. It would have been good to know about these scaling problems earlier, but thats impossible. In fact for my project Ibis (federated wiki) Im using the exact same architecture as Lemmy.

      • It's great to hear things mostly worked out. Stuff like scaling bottlenecks is definitely tricky to catch until you have serious loads on the system, but sounds like the fixes very mostly trivial validating overall design. It also looks like you managed to get a way with a fairly simple stack by leveraging Postgres and Rust. I've had really good experience with using pg myself, and really don't see a point in using anything else now. You can use it both as a relation db and a document store, so it's extremely flexible on top of being highly performant. Keeping the stack simple tends to be underappreciated, and projects often just keep adding moving pieces which end up adding a lot of overhead and complexity in the end.

    • 2nding @nutomic, that I'm really happy with the stack.

      The one that seems really magical to me, is diesel. With it we get a compile-time-checked database, that's tightly integrated to the rust objects / code.

      Every single join, select, insert, etc is checked before lemmy is even run, and it eliminates a whole category of errors resulting from mismaps.

      Its made adding columns, and changing our data structures so much less error-prone than when I lived in the java-world.

      Whenever we find that we'd want to do things differently, we usually do a refactor ASAP so as not to keep rolling spaghetti code. We've had to do this many times for the federation and DB code, and even have 2 major refactors that also add features ongoing. But luckily we've been able to stay in the rust eco-system for that.

      As for UI, leptos didn't exist when I built lemmy-ui, so I went with a fast react-like alternative, inferno. Its showing its age now, so @sleepless1917 is working on lemmy-ui-leptos, which hopefully will supercede lemmy-ui.

      • I briefly worked with Hasura which does this sort of magic to produce GraphQL API on top of Postgres. Incidentally, also written in Rust. I do like Leptos approach, it sounds similar to HTMX approach where you just treat the DOM as a dumb terminal.

    • The stack is overall amazing, but not perfect. Waiting for the Rust code to compile is sometimes very annoying, but I wouldn't want to use a different language. And we had to implement somewhat complicated things that existing Rust libraries did not do. For example, I made the "i_love_jesus" library so Lemmy could have cursor pagination that uses indexes well and allows bringing back the "back" button, we have a few custom QueryFragment impls because of diesel's limitations, and we have a custom migration runner to do fancy stuff (see crates/db_schema/src/schema_setup.rs).

    1. From a code architecture perspective, how close is Lemmy/ActivityPub to reaching its maximum capacity for posts/comments per second? Are there any ways to 10x the load ActivityPub can handle?
    2. With Nicole in everyone's DMs, what does the future of spam filtering look like on Lemmy?
      1. There is no specific maximum capacity, in theory it can scale indefinitely with horizontal scaling. Also see my reply here regarding scaling.
      2. 0.19.10 already includes a fix to remove private messages when a user gets banned which should help a lot. There is an issue about disabling private messages by default, but Im not sure if that will be necessary. Also 1.0 will include a plugin system, so other devs and instance admins can write their own checks. That way spam waves can be fought in a more flexible way, without having to get a change merged into Lemmy and then waiting for a new release.

    • I can answer the first point.
      We've already tackled part of that problem with the Parallel Sending feature that can be enabled on instances with a tremendous amount of traffic. Currently the only instance that makes sense to enable that is LemmyWorld and the only reason is so servers in geographical far away can get more than 3-4 activities/second.

      With that feature, servers that eventually house and generate the biggest amounts of traffic will be able to successfully communicate all of those activities to everyone else who needs them.

      I predict a 10x increase is well in our grasp of easily accessible by all of our current systems. 1000x? That's a different story which I don't have the answers too.

  • Are there any plans to deal with the most common annoyances regarding Lemmy? In my opinion these are all based on federation:

    1. Some completely automated way for users to join Lemmy. Yeah, it's not hard to select a server and it's a "good thing to do", but it's still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the "proper" path. Maybe some kind of system where instances sign up for this general, convenience way of signing up, and the registered users just get automatically distributed evenly across those instances.
    2. Duplicate post aggregation. The nature of federation will always make it make sense to have duplicate communities, but this will also make posts with the same links, same images, same videos, etc show up in people's "all" feeds multiple times. It is technically possible to algorithmically detect these duplicates and offer users a UI option (not actual backend merge) to merge them all visually into one post.
    3. A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

    • Yeah, it's not hard to select a server and it's a "good thing to do", but it's still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the "proper" path.

      We could add a "fast join" button to the signup dialog on join-lemmy.org , where it takes you to a random instance's signup page.

      Overall though, we should ignore the "advice" from reddit that tells us that people are too stupid to sign up for anything now. People did this for every forum and every other site all until ~2005 when US tech gobbled up most services, and ppl continue to show us that yes, they do know how to type in a username, password, and email to sign up for something.

      Duplicate post aggregation. The nature of federation will always make it make sense to have duplicate communities, but this will also make posts with the same links, same images, same videos, etc show up in people's "all" feeds multiple times.

      In lemmy-ui we have a post-deduplicator for feeds, but unfortunately not a lot of other apps (including jerboa, that's my bad) have added something similar.

      A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

      Settings export already exists. Copying historical content and rewriting history isn't possible in a federated system, but we do have an open issue for data export.

      • we should ignore the “advice” from reddit that tells us that people are too stupid to sign up for anything

        Definitely agree. The problem is just when someone in the past said "you should join

        <forum x>

        !", you were always able to just immediately go to forum x's signup page and sign up. But if someone hears of Lemmy, and goes to join-lemmy.org, there is no way to go to a signup page directly. They have to first learn about the multiple servers, and choose one. I think a "fast join" button like you say should be fine, and immediately next to it something to catch all the advanced actually curious users with something like a "advanced sign-up"

        In lemmy-ui we have a post-deduplicator for feeds

        That's weird, because that's exactly from where I'm coming from, I'm always using the lemm.ee website directly on all my devices, and I constantly see duplicate posts.

        Copying historical content and rewriting history isn’t possible in a federated system

        I have less knowledge of this topic so I'll defer to you, but I have the feeling this may not be true. You might of course not be able to ensure consistency between all instances, ensure that it's been changed everywhere, but I really can't see why this is any different than "editing" a comment's content or a post title, which is already possible. Why wouldn't it be possible to "edit" the comment/post author in exactly the same way?

        Thanks for your response and all you're doing!

    • it’s still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the “proper” path.

      https://phtn.app/signup gives a prepopulated list

      show up in people’s “all” feeds multiple times.

      Which interface do you use? Crossposts only show up once on the default UI

      A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

      You can already export and import your subscriptions between instances (account settings - import/export)

      Posts and comments can't be migrated, but Mastodon doesn't allow it either.

      Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.

      https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export

      • gives a prepopulated list

        The official one also does that. I'm talking about choosing a username, password, and email maybe, and then clicking register, and being done. No thinking involved.

        Crossposts only show up once on the default UI

        False, you get links to the other posts, of which you posted a screenshot, but each post is handled as being completely separate. If you are in the subscribed, local or all feeds, you would see all of these posts separately. Have you really never noticed scrolling by "the same" post multiple times? You have to go to each post manually to get all the comments to the "same" thing.

        but Mastodon doesn’t allow it either [...] due to technical limitations

        Yes, I know that. But I'm also a programmer and I know that "technical limitations" is mostly a term for "that's how we started it and it would be too costly to solve now, so we'll just dismiss it" and not for actual limitations (i.e. not technically possible). It'd maybe require breaking changes of some kind or some kind of annoying backwards compatibility workaround, but that is why I'm asking. I'm not completely familiar with activity pub, but there's likely some key used to verify posts/messages are made by a certain user, and there's currently no way to transfer or change that key to a new account. But it seems very technically possible to me, and also possible without massive security issues. So that was my question, is there any plans to do this or no?

    • Multispam is one of the things that is genuinely a threat to Lemmy's usability. If you follow certain topics, you start seeing 2-5 copies of every post. It's a genuine spam problem and "just block" or "just scroll" is as much of a non solution as it is with other spam.

      1. A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

      This would be great.. also even if the "restore" part were not possible (yet?) I feel offering a way to extract your data might even be a requirement for a server to be fully GDPR compliant (though I could be wrong on that, IANAL), reddit does allow you to download your data after all.

  • 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!

      • 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).

      • 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 😊

  • Hello,

    Thank you for organizing this AMA!

    Starting with a quite expected question: when do you think you'll be able to release Lemmy 1.0?

    • Its hard to say because these things always take longer than expected. Now we are finally getting to the point where all the breaking database and api changes are almost finished. After that it will take some months to update lemmy-ui for all the backend changes and new features, and the same for all other apps. Then a testing period to fix all the problems that come up. So maybe around autumn for the final release, although lemmy.ml and some other instances may upgrade some months before already.

    • With the rate ppl are adding issues (and we're finding more), is sometimes feels like it keeps getting farther away than nearer, but we'll get there in some months.

  • When a instance goes permanently offline, does the content vanish? If so, could there possibly be a way for another instance to "adopt" the content on their instance so those posts aren't lost to time?

    I think it might help reassure people to pick smaller instances.

  • From my perspective we need better Mod and Admin tools. Forum software has a lot of them but Lemmy is lacking in this department.

    The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities. You'll often get reports of posts not being appropriate for a community but there is no way to actually move it.

  • Not really a question, but something to think about is being more strict about backwards compatibility so that people don't get burnt out on having stuff break. Coming from this post by the Tesseract dev, who did not like the breaking changes to the v3 API in 1.0: https://dubvee.org/post/2904152

    To formulate that into an actual question, do you think the changes are still worth it and you'd make the same decision to break backwards compatibility?

    • I would reply directly to that post, but it looks like the admin (who is also the Tesseract dev) has completely blocked federation with lemmy.ml by IP block or useragent block. So Im going to respond here to his complaints:

      Lemmy didnt have a single breaking change since version 0.19 which was released 1 year and 4 months ago. And the breaking changes in that version were quite minor. Before that was 0.18, 1 year and 6 months earlier. That version only removed websockets, so most third-party app devs who used the HTTP API didnt notice any difference. Meaning the API has been almost unchanged for over three years which is quite long for a project that hasnt reached a stable version yet. 1.0 includes all the breaking changes that were held back over the years, so that we dont need any more breaking changes for a long time.

      That said it would be great if we could keep backwards compatibility with the existing API in Lemmy 1.0. Problem is with all the major changes we are doing now, it would take a huge amount of work to implement this kind of backwards compatibility. If we had twice as many fulltime developers working on Lemmy this would be doable, but our resources are very limited so we have to make some compromises.

    • This is all a matter of dev resources. If we had maybe 6 full-time devs, we could handle things like backwards compatibility.

      People forget that lemmy, like other open source hobby projects, don't have the resources that large corporations do. People understandably get frustrated when there's breaking changes, but they also need to not put enterprise-level expectations on a small number of people.

      If someone wanted to work on that, of course we wouldn't be opposed, but you should know how monumental a task that would be.

    • Divas have problems no matter what you do.

    • Having a tantrum because breaking changes were announced is asinine. The Tesseract developer comes across like a proper twat.

  • Hi! As you might remember, i've been pushing for this platform for quite some time so i'll just dump ideas in a pretty annoying way, hope you'll spare me :3

    • do you realize that the power of the threadiverse is that a forum can even fully exist alone and the federation between them is a plus while for microblogging it's kinda a shit to not have the big reach? basically, are you going to bring lemmy in a ''more forum'' direction or a ''more social'' direction?
    • will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes? it's clear that the reddit effect is already here and people are not incentivized to read the article and comment on point or discuss less agreable stuff just because posts gets downvoted?
    • if on my instance downvotes are deactivated, do they still influence my home when I browse subs from other instances that have downvotes?
    • more UI mod tools! they are never enough because a community manager has not to be also a sysadmin or a linux poweruser just to take care of the community; stuff like subscribing to blocklists and allowlists, stuff like deleting cached media and so on
    • how is the plugin stuff going?
    • wouldn't it be better to drop the android client and the federated wiki to fully focus on making lemmy the best federated threadiverse software? now that nodebb has federation the competition is existent (mbin and piefed were never enough e.e) and other frontends are generally cooler (voyager basically brought me back on being active here)
    • can we have a lemmy-first approach regarding comunication and contributions? basically i don't want to make a github account to push some opinions and it seems like they kinda get ignored when on the lemmy community about lemmy
    • ability to merge communities having them mirrored in a basic way i guess it's already on his way
    • would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv)
    • would be cool to have lists to be able to browse lemmy from lemmy in a more rss way: for example there are communities i want to check once in a while but totally don't want em in my home and having lists would help
    • changing ''favorite'' posts into ''bookmarks''/''saved''
    • would be cool to have the possibility to have a favorite users list to check what your friends are up to
    • any other suggestion would basically be ''can this thing that forums have also be ported to lemmy?'', i just think that lemmy has to evolve into a forum first with a link aggregator ui; it's kinda easy to use discourse as a bug tracker and feature request tracker for example (observation made because of the previous question of using lemmy instead of github for non code stuff)
    • would be nice to have word filters and user notes
    • also lobste.rs invite tree would be nice
    • have you taken into account that maybe offering a service of lemmy hosting managed by you could help?
    • dulcis in fundo, always about empowering non tech people, what about having lemmy on yunohost as one of the curated methods by the devs?

    alright i think it's enough lol; now one very big appreciation: thank you for the rss first approach, having rss for basically everything like it was on reddit (well still miss some query rss but i understand it's harder to do) it's really so fucking useful and cool and i really hope that lemmy will make niche communities shine again

    • There's a forum sort called NewComments, that servers and any user can use to turn lemmy into a forum-style feed.

      Instances can already disable downvotes site-wide, but we also already have fine-grained vote display settings:

      Merging communities is no more possible than merging mastodon users.

      Which mod tools do we need?

      We already have RSS feeds.

      We already have the ability to save posts and comments.

      Word filters and flairs are in the works.

      There's too many other things here for me to answer.

      • I love the NewComments sort btw, to find and engage in ongoing discussions in threads that sometimes span weeks

    • do you realize that the power of the threadiverse is that a forum can even fully exist alone and the federation between them is a plus while for microblogging it’s kinda a shit to not have the big reach? basically, are you going to bring lemmy in a ‘‘more forum’’ direction or a ‘‘more social’’ direction?

      Im not a fan of microblogging, so for me Lemmy should definitely be more like a forum.

      will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes? it’s clear that the reddit effect is already here and people are not incentivized to read the article and comment on point or discuss less agreable stuff just because posts gets downvoted?

      As mentioned by others, downvotes can already disabled by the instance, so that local users cannot downvote and federated downvotes are ignored. Lemmy 1.0 will also add per-community downvote settings.

      if on my instance downvotes are deactivated, do they still influence my home when I browse subs from other instances that have downvotes?

      Yes

      more UI mod tools! they are never enough because a community manager has not to be also a sysadmin or a linux poweruser just to take care of the community; stuff like subscribing to blocklists and allowlists, stuff like deleting cached media and so on

      I only work on the backend, lemmy-ui and other frontends could definitely use more contributors to work on these things. Im not familiar with all the different apps but they are probably missing many features that already exist in the backend. That said subscribing to blocklists and allowlists seems a bit risky, as you can end up with most instances subscribing to the same list, giving the creator a lot of power. I believe Mastodon or Twitter had some drama like that. Anyway this could be implemented with the API.

      how is the plugin stuff going?

      Practically finished, you can already start developing plugins.

      wouldn’t it be better to drop the android client and the federated wiki to fully focus on making lemmy the best federated threadiverse software? now that nodebb has federation the competition is existent (mbin and piefed were never enough e.e) and other frontends are generally cooler (voyager basically brought me back on being active here)

      Lemmy is not a company with a boss ordering the workers what to do. Everyone including me and Dessalines are volunteers, and chooses for himself what he wants to work on. As its all open source its not really competition, more users on NodeBB is also good for Lemmy as it means more user choice and activity.

      One reason Im working on Ibis is because I waited for a long time for someone to start a federated wiki project. Its a major thing thats missing from the Fediverse. As no one else did, I have to do it myself. The other reason is to have something different that Lemmy to code on. Working on Lemmy can be quite exhausting because the project is already very mature, so every new change needs to pass tests, be approved by other maintainers and work with the existing features. Ibis is still in early stages and under my control alone, so I can do whatever I want.

      can we have a lemmy-first approach regarding comunication and contributions? basically i don’t want to make a github account to push some opinions and it seems like they kinda get ignored when on the lemmy community about lemmy

      I checked your profile and it looks like you received adequate replies for all the latest posts.

      ability to merge communities having them mirrored in a basic way i guess it’s already on his way

      There are open issues for these, but developer time is very limited so we need to set priorities.

      would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv)

      Theres an open pull request for post tags.

      would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv) would be cool to have lists to be able to browse lemmy from lemmy in a more rss way: for example there are communities i want to check once in a while but totally don’t want em in my home and having lists would help changing ‘‘favorite’’ posts into ‘‘bookmarks’’/‘‘saved’’ would be cool to have the possibility to have a favorite users list to check what your friends are up to any other suggestion would basically be ‘‘can this thing that forums have also be ported to lemmy?’’, i just think that lemmy has to evolve into a forum first with a link aggregator ui; it’s kinda easy to use discourse as a bug tracker and feature request tracker for example (observation made because of the previous question of using lemmy instead of github for non code stuff) would be nice to have word filters and user notes also lobste.rs invite tree would be nice

      A lot of things would be nice to have, but with the very limited resources we have there is only so much we can do. So we need to focus on the main functionality, its basically the unix philosophy: "Do one thing and do it well".

      have you taken into account that maybe offering a service of lemmy hosting managed by you could help?

      Yes, but in the end I dont think the profit would be enough to justify the workload.

      dulcis in fundo, always about empowering non tech people, what about having lemmy on yunohost as one of the curated methods by the devs?

      We dont have time to manage yet another installation method, but anyone can help out and contribute there.

      Wow these were a lot of questions :D

      • Wow these were a lot of questions :D

        Ahah, y e s

        Thank you for the answers, I’ll avoid answering back to not make a mess u.u

    • I can confirm the sections around downvotes as Reddthat has the stance exact what you are talking about (re your child comments)

      A downvote disabled instance creates it's own algorithm/feed/ranking based purely on all other metrics, because as far as the data is concerned, it sees every post having 0 downvotes. It does not take into account external instances.

    • They did managed hosting before but everyone freaked out that the communist devs were controlling the narrative or some shit. It was a mess, I think they stopped doing it now that there are more instances.

      Down votes should remain. It expresses dissatisfaction with peoples cringe bad takes

      • We offered free instance hosting for some time, in order to encourage the creation of new instances. That was before the Reddit migration when lemmy.ml was still by far the largest instance. It was a success because numerous instances like slrpnk.net and aussie.zone were started that way. But after the migration there was no need for it anymore as plenty of instances were created without our help.

      • It expresses dissatisfaction with peoples cringe bad takes

        I wish this was real. In those cases the right button should be the report button anyway…

        Having one vote to incentivize hive mind and another to punish a different opinion is just much more polarizing than having just the incentive only

        It’s not rare to see people downvoting someone who wants an honest discussion and bringing their ideas to the table. (to be clear I’m not talking about people wanting to justify their racism or shit like that lol)

        everyone freaked out that the communist devs were controlling the narrative or some shit

        I must have forgotten 🫨

    • will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes?

      There is an option in your settings so you don't see upvotes or downvotes.

      Lemmy (AFAIK) doesn't even show you your total upvotes (karma... whatever it's called) by default either. None of these imaginary points matter.

      So why don't you do yourself a favor and uncheck these boxes and not give a fuck what others think about your comment.

      I know I have.

      (Lemmy is rad as fuck)

      • I already hide them and my ego is already not touched by downvotes :P

        I explained in another comment why I think they are deleterious nonetheless

        It’s not about me, it’s about social dynamics :)

      • I already hide them and my ego is already not touched by downvotes :P

        I explained in another comment why I think they are deleterious nonetheless

        It’s not about me, it’s about social dynamics :)

  • What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it?

    There are some more obvious things, like mod tooling, but I'm gonna concentrate on smaller, niche UX issues that I think arise from how it is designed already, because I think there are probably already enough voices who will speak up for the bigger things.

    • Inconsistent language UX between lemmy-ui and Jerboa. Specifically, that Jerboa provides no way to specify the language of a post or comment.
    • Inconsistent parsing of markdown between lemmy-ui and Jerboa. Specifically. Superscript and subscript work fine on single words, but multiple words in superscript or in subscript do not display correctly in lemmy-ui. They do in Jerboa.

    It's bad enough that third-party apps do these things (and others, like spoiler text) without following the spec consistently. But can they really be blamed when even the two main first-party UIs don't do it right? The post/comment language feature is awesome, as is the fact that you can do such a wide variety of syntax including subscript. But if users are not getting a consistent experience with these across platforms, it leads to confusion.

    • Spoiler text syntax is clumsy. I like the idea of having collapsible text, but ::: spoiler [display text] is an insanely wordy way of doing it. In what other context is markdown do anything similar to requiring the literal text spoiler? It would be great if (a) an inline spoiler text syntax could be implemented, similar to >!Reddit's!< or ||Discord's||, and (b) if a more elegant collapsible text syntax could be created.
    • Lemmy has a nasty habit of transforming user input. I just found out it converts your backslashes into forward slashes (see this comment), but a while ago I noticed that it completely removes text posted between angle brackets

      <like this text>

      , which is annoying when trying to write pseudo-XML. {does it allow braces?} [square brackets?]. It feels to me like a relatively lazy attempt to sanitise user inputs, and it creates a poor UX, especially since I'm sure prepared statements and other safe data handling is employed. In my opinion any time you're changing what a user wrote, that's an anti-pattern. If you can't just leave it how it is, it's better to just block posting with a clear error message explaining why

    Basically, I'd just like to see an overall focus on the user experience and how it all fits together as a system.

    Also my little pet feature: keyboard navigation. Back on that other site, before the redesign, there was incredible keyboard navigation thanks to the Enhancement Suite. j/k to navigate up/down through comments. Enter to collapse. a/z to up/downvote. Etc. It's a delight to use, and is a big part of the reason I could never move to the redesign, before I came over here. Not having that is a big drawback IMO.

    edit: looks like the angle brackets thing was

    <fixed>

    . Still need the backslash thing fixed.

    edit 2: I was just reminded of another example of the lemmy-ui vs Jerboa confusion, as well as another example of well-intentioned by ultimately anti-patternesque transformation of user text: how user and Community mentions are handled.

    @nutomic@lemmy.ml will not be a hyperlink for viewers in lemmy-ui, but /u/nutomic@lemmy.ml will be...despite the latter being generally not the preferred way to do it. lemmy-ui also does this awkward thing where if you use the autofill suggestions when typing a name, it wraps them in a hard-instanced URL instead of the better UX of taking someone to their profile on your instance: @dessalines@lemmy.ml.

    Communities are even weirder. Allowing the autofill of !announcements@lemmy.ml will create a hard-instanced URL ([!community@domain](https://domain/c/community)), but then the parser ignores this and creates a URL to the user's instance. If, instead, URLs went where the user's text input says they go, but the autofill would default to naked Community mentions such as !announcements@lemmy.ml, this would be a much better experience.

    Meanwhile, Jerboa doesn't have an autofill capability for users or Communities. Users who are mentioned with /u/ are not linked, while users who are linked with @ get a link that is handled within the user's instance, regardless of whether it's a hard-instanced link or a naked mention. Communities are also always handled within the user's instance.

    • All these are due to a lack of developers for open source in general. Jerboa needs more devs than just me and @MV-GH, but no one else has stepped up to take on fixing any of these. If there were 5 more of me, I could get these done, but I'm too busy.

    • Regarding the markdown point for lemmy-ui, I think part of the issue is that we don't use a markdown parser tailored to our purposes. We use markdown-it, and our custom (non-common mark, so stuff like the spoiler blocks) stuff uses plugins for it like this one. One of these days I'd like to make a markdown parser specifically for Lemmy.

      • The plugin architecture for markdown makes a lot of sense, because it allows other projects to mix and match markdown rules for their specific use case. I also used some of your Rust markdown plugins for Ibis.

    • Have you ever tried https://github.com/vmavromatis/Lemmy-keyboard-navigation ?

      • I had not. I had no idea that even existed, thanks!

        Do they have a Lemmy community for feedback? It's super buggy right now unfortunately, with "a" taking me to the post on the poster's instance, instead of upvoting (or at least taking me to the post on my instance...), and with all keyboard shortcuts handling alternative keyboard layouts in what I would consider to be the wrong way (though this is possibly debatable/up to preference).

  • How do we avoid defederation through leemy.world and lemmy.ml? What I mean is, there are instances for Canada, or FOSS, or any other inalienable trait. Most can communicate with eachother with exception of porn specific instances. When new people sign up, they look for popular instances and there are no restrictions on what you can join. So, larger instances like .world and .ml will have more foot traffic and more new signups. I think that's just an immediate path to recreate reddit and I think that needs to be recognised and seriously avoided, at all costs. The whole point is that this is not-for-profit, free of advertisements and already voyager as downloaded for android contains ads. Also, unless specifying only foss software during the building process of app on linux, ads are present there too. I would love to see some community driven livestreams or events, where we could fund the developers ourselves through donations. We're all refugess from reddit, but that doesn't mean we have to be "libre reddit." I think we could easily fund ourselves if we fostered more of a connected sense of community through events and conversations, turn this group of websites into something more than just friendly social media.

    • This is a serious problem, that we didn't anticipate during the first reddit migration wave. Since then, we added a join dialog to join-lemmy.org, and tried to make its join page sort by random, to spread out users more evenly.

      Unfortunately, the people evangelizing lemmy on other platforms like reddit, continue to link specific popular servers, rather than join-lemmy.org or server pickers that sort by random. And people also tend to just link their own home server as a sign-up, instead of join-lemmy.org, so we'll likely continue to see centralization problems.

      We're doing what we can to fight it, but other need to also.

      I would love to see some community driven livestreams or events, where we could fund the developers ourselves through donations. We're all refugess from reddit, but that doesn't mean we have to be "libre reddit." I think we could easily fund ourselves if we fostered more of a connected sense of community through events and conversations, turn this group of websites into something more than just friendly social media.

      @nutomic recently added Donation dialogs, which adds support for wikipedia-style banners (which are annoying, but they work). I think most of lemmy's problems could be solved if we were able to add a few more full time devs. We currently don't even have a single dev funded.

    • So, larger instances like .world and .ml will have more foot traffic and more new signups

      Lemmy.ml is only 5th by monthly active users: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

      voyager as downloaded for android contains ads.

      That's Boost or Sync? Never seen an add on Voyager @aeharding@lemmy.world

    • Any possibility for hash tags to be added? Cross instance topics would be so much easier to browse especially when similar topics are discussed across different community names across difference instances.

      I'd like to be able to browse the federation for tv show discussion with #tvshows or #fringe or something

    • Admits should defederate as they wish.

      New users should be able to join a "default instance" that is federated with all instances so people can window shop for the instance they prefer.

      That way they aren't intimidated by the many choices available right away.

      • New users should be able to join a “default instance” that is federated with all instances so people can window shop for the instance they prefer.

        Almost by definition, any default instance is likely to get defederated by some other instances, if that default grows too large. Being default means it's more likely to attract more people of all sorts. And some of those won't get along with the federation policies of some stricter instances.

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