this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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Announcements

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Official announcements from the Lemmy project. Subscribe to this community or add it to your RSS reader in order to be notified about new releases and important updates.

You can also find major news on join-lemmy.org

founded 5 years ago
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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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[–] m_f@discuss.online 10 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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?

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 8 points 1 week ago

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

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[–] seang96@spgrn.com 10 points 1 week ago (23 children)

On the server perspective, I have a question, what are your thoughts for horizontal scaling on the database? This seems to be the biggest limitation and requiring higher spec hardware to scale especially for the bigger instances.

My tiny instance for example I give over 20GB of RAM just to postgres to make it perform efficient enough.

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[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 9 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Will we ever get the ability to mute posts?

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[–] Bloomcole@lemm.ee 8 points 1 week ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] ex_06@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 week ago (10 children)

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

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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

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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Jehuty@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

To chime in on the user creation thing:

I think it's a natural part of decentralization that it's harder for a single instance to get big enough to be the "go-to" for general users.

Having said that, I also think this will naturally happen over time. As long as the mechanical aspects of sign up are simple, it's just a matter of users of a given instance to promote their instance.

World events also always play a role in encouraging a move to freer waters. Look at what happened with Mastodon and Bluesky (though Bluesky imo is just a big snooze button on a blaring alarm)

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago

Exactly, the more time goes by the better Lemmy will get. For sites like Reddit or now Digg its much easier to do marketing and get a quick user growth, but when they have problems then users will move to Lemmy.

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

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[–] mooncake@lemm.ee 8 points 1 week ago

More advertising! Boycott Reddit.

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