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 just a user and don’t follow the project super closely so please forgive me if this has already been addressed somewhere.
Is there any sort of JavaScript-less interface that would work properly on the Tor network with strict settings enabled? And could you set up instances only with a .onion domain? That way you don’t have to pay for a domain and you’re not at risk of having your domain yanked by ICANN, etc.
If I remember correctly, there was a mastodon instance that was using like a Pakistan domain or something like that and they yanked it.
Also, Federation between Onion and Standard Domains that way tor users would not be isolated.
My main reason for asking is that in my worldview, governments want to break encryption and break freedom of speech, if at all possible, and so the dark web is going to be more and more necessary as time goes on.
Edit: The more standard traffic we add onto the Tor network, the less able it is to be blocked or surveilled as to why somebody is using the Tor network. As an example, I send all of my signal traffic through Tor and download apps from fdroid through Tor and chat on SimpleX through Tor and quite a number of other things. Not because I need the Tor network, but just simply to be yet another person using it for standard activity
There is documentation for running a Lemmy instance over Tor, and one of the many frontends probably works without JS. If not someone could implement it with the API. Anyway there doesnt seem to be much interest in practice, because the clearnet works good enough for now.
I did open an issue on the thunder application asking them if they could implement SOCKS5 proxy support in order to do the tor proxy at like 127.0.0.1:9050
Okay, that shows how to make the interfaces available over the network. But is there planned functionality for making Federation work? Even if you don’t federate to clearnet domains, you could have several onion instances that could federate with each other and have a network of onion instances.
Federation uses standard HTTP so it shouldnt require any specific support. If you want to send outgoing federation over Tor you can set a proxy via environment. Youre welcome to test these things and update the documentation with your results.
Oh, okay, good to know it should work. I’m just a standard user, but it is something that interests me.
This is the hardest part as you would need to be both have an onion and have a standard domain, or be a tor-only Federation.
You can easily create a server and allow tor users to use it, which unless a Lemmy server actively blocks tor, you’d be welcome to join via it. But federation from a clearnet to onion cannot happen. It’s the same reason behind why email hasn’t taken off in onionland. The only way email happens is when the providers actively re-map a cleanet domain to an onion domain.
This is what Lemmy would need to do. But then you would have people who could signup continuously over tor and reek havok on the fediverse with no real stopping them. You would then have onion users creating content that would be federated out to other instances. & User generated content from tor users also is … Not portrayed in the best light.
I’m sure someone will eventually create an onion Lemmy instance, but it has it’s own problems to deal with.
This is especially true for lack of moderation tools, automated processes, and spammers who already are getting through the cracks.
@ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io time to shine