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.
Another issue is that post links are instance-specific, since the post ID isn’t the same across instances.
ex: https://lemmy.ml/post/27659153 is https://lemmy.ca/post/41237641 on Lemmy.ca
There are external tools like https://lemmyverse.link/ and some browser addons to alleviate those issues, but it’d be nice if this could be addressed at the source if doable.
And I dream of a
lemmy:\\
protocol handler one day.Protocol handlers are the way to go IMO. I’ve opened an issue based on @phiresky’s comment.
It will be a feature for Lemmy 1.0: https://feddit.org/post/5390705
Until then https://lemmyverse.link/feddit.org/post/5390705 ;)
I even discovered there was a new one today because the creator wasn’t aware of Lemmyverse link x)
[email protected]
Potentially, using some sort of predictable hashing to get the same id across instances might also help in the detection of duplicate links so that they can be aggregated in a single place (sort of what was suggested at point 2 here).
I fear this could be too much of a breaking change though.
We won’t add UUIDs or any “universal” sort of identifier, but universal links are still possible without them.
Seems like a good time to introduce a breaking change, jumping from 0.19 to 1.0.