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’m pretty sure that was Beehaw’s decision to disengage. But thats freedon of association for ya.
That’s the problem: the protocol pretty much requires explicit relationships between instances since they are forced to proxy/cache each other’s content. I think there’s too much responsibility on the instance… I feel it would be a moderation nightmare to host an instance with truly open federation (potentially even result in legal trouble!). So I totally understand why so many instances want to be conservative on who they federate with…
The ideal situation would be to be to be able to interact with third party instances directly (at least when the 2 instances don’t wanna agree on caching each other’s content), instead of having to use your home instance as proxy/cache… so the home instance would not need to have the burden (both legally and in terms of hosting resources) and it would just act as a way to identify the user, not necessarily as the primary content provider.
Okay, i think i’ve understood what you’re saying here. I’m not sure it works with the example for Beehaw.
I think i get what you’re saying. Especially if i consider a large instance like LW’s point of view. A large/general instance where large numbers of disparately opinioned users have gathered, freedom of association must necessarily be more individual to the user themselves than the instance as any kind of individualised entity.
Remembering the comments around the beehaw defederation, this was a case where a group of like minded people on their instance acted as a group to disassociate from the wider basket of instances. Their instance has an individual identity they wished to protect.
I feel like the discussion assumes an individual users wish for seemless interactions is more important than the wish of other users to have the choice of non-interaction. I think the assumption should be they are equally as important?
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