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.
Communities should be more unified across servers, especially for niche ones. I want to see an active Metroid community, I don't give a crap what instance is hosting it (or if it's a mostly-opaque medley of instances) so long as I'm federated with it. This is probably the biggest UX misunderstanding new users have.
Having distinct communities is a feature, not a bug. If two cities set up their own lemmy instances, say
lemmy.sao_luis.br, andlemmy.lagos.ng, they can each have anewscommunity, without them overlapping.Do a search for metroid, and subscribe to whichever ones you like.
It would still be a huge benefit, especially for more niche topics, if we had something like a federation-wide comm like
/f/niche_hobbythat you could subscribe to instead of 20 different/c/niche_hobbycommunities.Maybe comms could opt in/out of behavior to avoid the issue you described.
This would also benefit smaller instances because few people will subscribe to their comms because they are too inactive, making it so their content never gets traction.
My biggest complaint with Lemmy is that it is too hard to group & categorize content. Sometimes I want politics, sometimes I want nerd shit, but my only three options are subscribed, local, and all, which doesn't have any categorization unless you are on an active, niche server.
Multireddits are pretty much the only thing I miss from reddit.
Piefed has exactly that: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/38733273?scrollToComments=true
Interesting, is this all manually curated like multireddits? Would also be nice to have automatic ones (with include/exclude overrides)
The problem with it just being Piefed is that Lemmy clients probably won't bother to support it unless it becomes standard.
Is this a frontend specific thing or does it also require the Piefed backend on your instance too? If it is just frontend, I would definitely use it for desktop browsing.
Dope seeing implementation diversity resulting in experimentation and innovation. Would love to see this adopted in other Lemmy implementations too
They have both
It's a whole different software, backend and frontend
Awesome!
I know Piefed is both a frontend and backend, but does this behavior require the backend? Like can it be used with a regular Lemmy backend and/or database without backwards-incompatible changes?
The frontend requires the backend. Feeds and topics are managed by the backend anyway
Look, this is just my take -- I think this is bad UX. I'm not saying federation isn't a good idea -- on the contrary, I like the idea that many different posts in the same community are all hosted on different instances. Sure, for a community like
newsit doesn't make as much sense -- fixes for this would be that some communities don't have the behaviour I'm suggesting, or the convention is to call itsao_luis_newsor something.Who controls this universal community name system?
It's a good question. Perhaps nobody needs to control it. Users of c/foo post on their own instance (or choose an instance to post on). Mods are responsible for posts on their own instances (as before). The difference is that when viewing c/foo, you see posts from all federated instances.
For news, politics, etc, which might cause trouble if combined, here's a solution: Perhaps if your instance's
c/foocommunity has the "keep separated" flag enabled, then users on your instance browsing c/foo won't see posts from other instances, and users on federated instances won't see your instance's c/foo posts when browsing c/foo.Consolidation isn't always a good thing, communities on different instances will have different styles and trends, and that's a good thing. The benefit of federated social media is just as much in local instances as it is in federation, unique niches are going to have unique comments even if the post is the exact same.
I think the benefit of federation is that nobody controls the whole ecosystem. The downside of federation is splintering.
Less that nobody can control the whole thing, more that you can have full control of your own thing. Basically the same thing you said, but I think it's important to note that many niche communities thrive on Lemmy.
Many more niche communities languish because they can never get enough traction to be seen.
If I subscribe to
/c/dubstep, chances are I don't care if it islemmy.ml/c/dubsteporlemmy.world/c/dubstep, but neither community is likely to be active because one comm on one instance needs to be the popular one for other users to sub and want to post there. What I really want is/f/dubstepI disagree, actually. The issue here is relying on communities to be active, rather than instances with a healthy size and sorting by new rather than active. Hexbear has a bunch of communities, but people sort by New so any post will have some traction.
Lemmy works best when instances rely on themselves, and not federation. Federation is a bonus, not the point itself. Thinking of this massive fediverse as a single entity would mean it's probably better to use Reddit, anyways.
Federation should be the point. I didn't join Lemmy to join yet another reddit-like service but with far fewer users. I joined it because I want to be on something like reddit but which no one group controls. Otherwise I'd use threads, bluesky, etc.
Federation is one side of the equation, the fact that no one person controls it relies upon the fact that it isn't centralized into few communities. It's a double-edged sword, the same benefit is also potentially a drawback for others.
I'm not asking that we centralize communites to be hosted on a single instance. I'm asking that communities with the same name on multiple instances appear to the user to be merged. In this way, a community can grow and benefit from network effects, but no one instance controls the community.
Communities don't need to grow, though, my point is more that different instances have their own flavors of the same concepts and that's a benefit.
When I want to post about metroid, I want to reach everyone on lemmy who is interested in metroid. I understand that people are not homogenous. On reddit, I expect a range of opinions. Different instances perhaps serve to adjust the distribution from a smooth continuum to something more lumpy. Perhaps there is value in that, but I think it's outweighed by the value in reaching a larger portion of lemmy.
I understand what you want, but you'll never reach everyone on Lemmy, as there are no instances that are not defederated from anyone. This is a structural aspect of Lemmy's federated model. You can find different opinions all over Lemmy, but any community is going to be subject to its mods and admins for the instance, and a "multicomm" will still run into issues with federation.
I think we might be talking past each other. I understand that not every instance is federated with every other instance, and that there are differences between the instances.
Each instance is one piece in a larger mosaic -- but looking for niche interests inside one particular instance is a bad venn diagram. The choice of instance should be of secondary consideration when it comes to niche interests. I barely care from what instance someone hails if they're giving me cooking advice. This is why we have federation in the first place -- it just needs to be a smoother experience.
Sure, but this community will belong to an instance though.
I don't see why that is necessary, as different posts could be hosted on different instances. Either way, the choice of instance is of little concern for me as an end user, so it should be de-emphasized.
It does not have to be something mandatory...
I mean, there could be some form of "metacommunities", something like being able to group multiple communities together in a "view" that shows them to you visually as if they were a single community despite being separated.
I think reddit has something simialr to that, multireddits or something I think they are called.
Piefed has feeds that achieve exactly that: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/38733273?scrollToComments=true
Nice! It also seems to be under discussion on lemmy's github here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
To be totally honest, a lot of communities aren't big enough yet to really necessitate splitting into niche communities yet. I don't know if gaming/Metroid is an example of one that does or doesn't meet that. It's just an observation.
this post provides a good overview of this issue and possible solution. https://popcar.bearblog.dev/lemmy-needs-to-fix-its-community-separation-problem/
Really, really like that idea!
Not on the current roadmap of Lemmy 1.0, which is planned for autumn 2025
What exactly is it you're asking for, though? A change in user behaviour towards consolidation? Some new feature of the platform similar to multi-reddits? How exactly do you suggest that should work?
Not a change in user behaviour. How about: communities on different instances with the same name appear as one community essentially. As in, all instances' version of that community appear in your feed if subscribed, and when viewing posts in a community, all instances versions of that community are visible.
Perhaps the user can restrict to just one instance's community or just the local instance's community with a button (like local/all), if that's their preference.
Good luck with [email protected] and [email protected]
Ha! The discoursive whiplash would be immense.
Right, so, in some circumstances it wouldn't necessarily be a good idea to join identically-named communities.
Maybe it should be more like the multireddit idea -- people have to manually set up the links between the communities.
Piefed has feeds which work like multireddits https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/38733273?scrollToComments=true
This is a bad idea. They're different communities. Full stop. They have different moderators. They may have different rules. I'm not even convinced communities using the same URL slug on different instances would even imply they're the same topic.
That's gonna be fun for cases like c/trees. Someone somewhere will get the joke, someone somewhere won't.
Being able to view "all" communities with the same name across all instances would be so nice.
The problem here is that a community [email protected] will have a completely different topic than [email protected] . In some cases the same name means same topic, in some cases not.
This should be among the first priorities. It would really help kick things off. Not only niche communities, but bigger ones as well. They represent topics of interest. I think I've seen a thing like macro community in one of the clients?! Could that be it?
How would two communities named
news, work for say, a server about star trek, and another located in a city.Well, what is each meant to represent? Should communities be constructed around the concept of topics, or should there be a server for each topic?
And please don't use any variant of "everybody can do it whichever they want", because this just avoids the responsibility of offering a personal answer and shifts it to them.
Personally I think the first (communities=topics)., while servers should provide voluntary redundancy for each other in case one of the servers has an inconvenient change of policies or circumstances for the users.
But I am not on the creative team of Lemmy, so my vision might differ from theirs. Also, I'm willing to change my belief if more solid arguments are presented.
Eternity Android client allows grouping communities into a multi community, but it only helps on getting consolidated feed, not necessarily reaching the same people
the Summit app does it too
[email protected] has several examples of consolidation