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 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.