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)
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.
Do you feel a recommendation algorithm of some sorts is something lemmy will need for bigger audiences?
What are your thoughts on blocking AI scraper access? Any attempts to improve that on the side of Lemmy? Basic things like allowing to customize the robots.txt easily would already help.
I also recently tried this new AI block tool called Anubis with Lemmy, but for some reason it fails with Lemmy-ui. Might be interesting to investigate further.
I just set up Anubis today. Specifically I’m only testing it for Lemmy-ui, and it seems to work fine.
It looks like the distributed waves that keep bringing the service down hit exclusively our lemmy-ui subdomain, so maybe non-SSR photon is also a good defense, heh.
Hmm, that is odd. I guess I need to double check my Nginx config for lemmy-ui then. You have your setup documented somewhere?
Edit: ah, you run Photon as the main UI and lemmy-ui somewhere else? I think specifically the split between frontend and backend on the root domain somehow makes Anubis fail to set the correct cookie.
I don’t think it should be a problem, but I’m not that sure either. Lemmy.fedi.zutto.fi also runs it and that’s just a normal lemmy-ui installation. I think Zutto simply forwarded all traffic to Anubis and then fixed federation. There was some discussion and config shared in sopuli’s finnish matrix room.
I’ve previously worked in anti-scraping. There is a negative 0% chance the Lemmy devs have the resources to effectively do this without tanking the server for everyone else.
Anyone that wants to scrape Lemmy would have an easier time setting up their own server, federating with everyone, and reading straight from their DB. No web scraping required. Though, web scraping defenses would be useful against general web scrapers/crawlers.
That would require the authors of these AI scrapers to actually give a f*ck. The problem is that they don’t, and just scrape what ever they can find repeatatly almost like a ddos attack on the open web.
Yup, same as they could clone git repos in one shot, but they instead crawl every single page.
You can load a different robots.txt in your nginx config, something like this:
location /robotx.txt { index /path/to/my/robots.txt; }Additionally 1.0 will change the “private instance” to work with federation enabled (see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5530). Then only logged-in users will see content, while AI scrapers wont see anything except the login page.
I think the greatest strength is that it is so compatible with other Threadyverse software like PieFed and Mbin. This brings a lot of freedom to the users.
Yes this is a major benefit of an open network. Lemmy is a very large project already, so it takes a lot of effort to implement new features, because they have to meet high standards for quality and performance and also work together with all the existing features. A project like Piefed is much smaller and can implement new features more quickly. This allows for more experimentation, and successful features can later be added to Lemmy.
Also users who are not happy with Lemmy for any reason can switch to a different platform while still interacting with those on Lemmy. So if Piefed and Mbin grow that is also a benefit for Lemmy.
Yes I’m very excited about the growth of other fediverse software, and a lot of the cool new features they’re adding. Its a great eco-system where we can experiment, be creative, and learn from each other.
the apps! the app support is really great for Lemmy
Absolutely agree on this point. My first app didn’t fulfill my requirements, so I just tested another one being able to configure it how I like.
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?
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.
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.
Thank you!
Old user, haven’t been active recently. Where’d all this growth come from?? Another reddit refugee situation?
Thought you meant pre-2023 by old user
[email protected] started to ban people based on upvotes
Blaze means the website Reddit, not the community they linked
Oh indeed, giving the community can help people read more about 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?
One of the biggest issue at this point is probably the registration experience. There are quite a few occurrences on [email protected] 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!
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
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
What was the last post that made you really laugh?
Hahaha thanks! That’s great!
Will we ever get the ability to mute posts?
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.
I see
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.
Thanks
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
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.
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
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.
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 . . . ?
Lemming:
Its a Lemming!
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.
Do you guys have plans to add a spoiler tag? I post a lot of memes about tv shows that I watch, but the users complain that the post isn’t blurred.
I know I can use the NSFW tag, but this gives the wrong idea and limits the post visibility (since people can hide nsfw posts).
You can hide images behind spoiler tags also:
check it out
You can put spoilers in the body
spoiler
Helloooo
but then the user might not realize that there’s an image in the post, which will also limit it’s reach.
So a spoiler tag for post links? This could potentially be added later as an addition to the post tags feature.
Even that isn’t too necessary, since you can already put images in spoiler markdown blocks.
I see. Would the spoiler tag also blur the thumbnail?
The only thing that concerns me about handling spoilers is how the third party apps handle them. Do you think it would be a good idea to also blur the entire image (not only the thumbnail) and remove the blur only when the user clicks the image?
Not sure, we would have to see whenever we get around to implementing that.
Doesn’t work on the android app Eternity
Eternity hasn’t been updated in a while. You might want to try [email protected] or [email protected]
Open up an issue on their repo.
Doesn’t work on boost client apparently.
It may still be using reddit style markdown
Yeah a lot of former Reddit apps that switched to Lemmy did a really lazy job of it and haven’t implemented all of the Lemmy text parsing syntax properly. Spoilers are one of the most common issues, but so are subscript (including ~multiple word subscript~) and superscript (and ^multiple words of it^).
If your app doesn’t parse text correctly 2 years later, it may be time to consider switching.
