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.
They did managed hosting before but everyone freaked out that the communist devs were controlling the narrative or some shit. It was a mess, I think they stopped doing it now that there are more instances.
Down votes should remain. It expresses dissatisfaction with peoples cringe bad takes
We offered free instance hosting for some time, in order to encourage the creation of new instances. That was before the Reddit migration when lemmy.ml was still by far the largest instance. It was a success because numerous instances like slrpnk.net and aussie.zone were started that way. But after the migration there was no need for it anymore as plenty of instances were created without our help.
I wish this was real. In those cases the right button should be the report button anyway…
Having one vote to incentivize hive mind and another to punish a different opinion is just much more polarizing than having just the incentive only
It’s not rare to see people downvoting someone who wants an honest discussion and bringing their ideas to the table. (to be clear I’m not talking about people wanting to justify their racism or shit like that lol)
I must have forgotten 🫨
Cringe is not a reportable offense