this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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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

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This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)
  • Is there a plan to improve search and federating communities between instances? My biggest hurdle joining and using Lemmy was without a doubt the search functionality and subscribing to a community on my own instance, it was severely off-putting. Let me walk you through it: you find a community you like, say [email protected]. You paste it into the search of your instance, as instructed. It immediately tells you "No results". If you don't click off, sometimes it changes it's mind within a few seconds. Sometimes it never loads. You try manually creating the URL by going to example.com/c/[email protected] but it gives you an error. If you're lucky it works the next day, if you're not then I don't actually know the next step. Not to mention the lack of feedback on subscribing to communities. I have "subscribed" to communities before then realised a week later that despite appearing in my list of subs it didn't actually work and I have to redo, the only feedback you get is "pending". This is the #1 issue that stops me from recommending Lemmy, or at least smaller instances that haven't federated with much yet. Is the search a priority?

  • I know you've been asked about splitting NSFW already, but is there any chance of a specific NSFL tag or a generic spoiler/blur tag? Gore and nudity are such different topics they really don't deserve to be under the same banner.

  • Are proper inline previews something on the roadmap? What I mean is items like YouTube videos, Streamable links, and just about anything that isn't a Lemmy image is not expandable and requires leaving the website. It's one of my most missed features from old Reddit with RES.

I read as much of the thread as possible, so hopefully these are new questions. Hope I didn't come across too negative here as I've been enjoying my time overall and I know y'all have been swamped these months and never expected this popularity.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Will an AMA comment sort type be added? Would be convenient to scroll by new replies from OP so we can easily keep up with AMAs

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  1. What's your favorite dinosaur?

  2. The way lemmy instances are organized reminds me of IRC. Was that any part of the inspiration?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Do you think 'normies' (people with very very little technical knowledge/experience) will be able to come to a decentralized platform like lemmy? Can a platform be successful long term (especially in niche areas) without that super huge low effort part of the user base?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

For me its already a huge success that Lemmy got where it is today, with over 50k users. If you had told me that a few months ago, I hardly would have believed it. When I started working on Lemmy, there were a couple dozen active users at most, yet the project didnt die. Instead it kept growing and growing steadily. So I think it will keep growing, and there will be more improvements which make Lemmy more accessible for normal users.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry, no question, only: Thank you for your hard work :)

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Why did you choose Rust for the backend and Inferno for the frontend?

P.S. Thank you for your work!

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (6 children)

First off. How dare you‽

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Any thoughts on overhauling cross-posting, to allow more interaction with the source interaction?

As far as I'm aware: currently when you cross-post, only the recipient instance gets all interactions (comments, upvotes), instead of duplicating or having the origin solely receive those.

The current implementation hampers the growth of smaller instances when reposting something to a bigger one. Discoverability is still there due to seeing from which instance the post originates from, but that's arguably not enough.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (12 children)

will uploading audio files become a thing? as a musician i need it

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you aim for Lemmy to become GDPR-compatible in the future ( see https://gdpr-info.eu/ for details)?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you have any strong opinions on Richard Stallman? Is it good that he's back at the FSF?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Very complicated figure, and we should weigh his contributions to the FOSS movement against his negatives, rather than defaulting to a simplistic worship or demonize.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What was your first reaction to the massive exodus from Reddit during the blackout? Was it something you were expecting?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Could you please create a middle ground between the nuclear option (banning sites) and the whack a mole option of banning users. It would be effective to be able to ban communities (at least temporarily) during bot spam attacks while you wait for admins to police up their site. Could there also be a way for admins to notify other admins that their site is spamming garbage so that admins know that they are the cause of a problem and what that problem is?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (8 children)

One of the major complaints on Reddit was the mod governance structure, with rank dependent on who showed up first. On the roadmap, do you see implementing other ways to govern mods, maybe something like how a lot of video game guilds govern themselves?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

what new feature would Lemmy have in the 1.0.0? I know it's quite a long way to go, but what is the vision you guys have moving toward it?

Edit: bonus question: what does Chat supposed to do?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

1.0 is not about features, but stability. It means there wont be any breaking changes to the api or federation for a while, until 2.0. In fact we were thinking to make some breaking changes and then release 1.0 later this year. But then the Reddit migration happened and those plans had to be scrapped.

Chat simply orders the comments in a different way, newest first without any nesting.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is it possible to disable the caching of images from other instances onto my server?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Who are you guys if you don't mind me asking. What's your background?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (23 children)

I have heard some respectable communities, namely r/AskHistorians, express hesitance at coming to Lemmy in part over fears of appearing biased due to the overt political stance of Lemmy's creators. In other words, it's hard to be a neutral body in affiliation with anything that has an overt political stance.

I wonder what the devs of Lemmy think of this hesitance. Is it unreasonable and itself biased? Or do you see any potential for finding a way to facilitate a platform that would allow for a more neutral space?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Thank you a lot for building such an awesome platform! Here are my questions:

How did you get into communism? Were there any events that had an influence on you becoming communists and what personally motivates you to keep working on lemmy even though you could earn much more as developers working on proprietary software?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Firstly, I just have appreciation for you and nutomic for this amazing platform that you've created. This has become my favorite source of reading discussions and looking at memes. I know it's small, but I love it and want it to succeed. My question is Do you see Lemmy or any other federated platforms reaching the level of audiences that other big Social Media Platforms currently have? Do you want it to grow big like them, or remain as it is, An amazing platform hidden in one corner of the Web?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For me Lemmy is already extremely huge now. For a long time it was possible to keep up with all new comments in less than half an hour per day of browsing. So I wouldnt mind if it stays small, but anyway its not my choice. On the other hand its also great to see the project finally grow after we put so much work into it. And getting more users is actually necessary in order to get more donations so that we can make a living.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know that we'll ever replace big tech, but none of us can see the future. These giants will likely have a slow decline, whilst open-source and federated services will grow at their expense. But of course in the long term I do want the fediverse to replace the US tech giants, who treat us and our data as commodities to be bought and sold.

Any case where we can draw users away from that exploitation, is a victory.

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