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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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (29 children)

Is there a way to move myself as an user from one server to another?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

You can export your settings, community follows etc and import them in another instance. Moving your existing posts and comments doesnt work well with federation.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (13 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What was the last post that made you really laugh?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)
  1. What is your opinion on Bluesky being more popular than Mastodone because it is easier for most?

  2. Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?

thanks

edit: lemmy dev replies only please

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

Some Lemmy clients offer the option to auto-hide posts and comments which contain certain keywords of the choice of the user. Are there any plans to implement this feature into the stock Lemmy experience?

I know it is possible to do some hacky stuff with UblockOrigin to do the same, but that is not something most know about and are willing to do.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (14 children)

From my perspective we need better Mod and Admin tools. Forum software has a lot of them but Lemmy is lacking in this department.

The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities. You'll often get reports of posts not being appropriate for a community but there is no way to actually move it.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Who is your daddy and what does he do?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

It can't be transferred, but the posts / content will never vanish. Most importantly, it will stay searcheable.

The best option is just to create another community on a living server, and link to the local version of a dead one in a sidebar.

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[–] [email protected] 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?

[–] [email protected] 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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks a lot for the work you do! How do you get by with such a limited amount of funds? How sustainable is your financial situation if donations don't pick up considerably?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

I live in Spain, the cost of living here is much cheaper than Germany or especially the United States. I also dont need luxuries, and have enough money saved to last for a while. If donations are not enough I could always work for some company, and spend less time on Lemmy.

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