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:
@flamingos
@dullbananas
@phiresky
@sleeplessone
Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.
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.
There was some discussion of this here: feddit.uk/post/24412286
It shouldn’t be too difficult. A move is essentially a cross-post but it keeps the OP as the poster (rather than the cross-poster). You’d then want to lock the original post, and either hide it or add a message directing people to the new post. That’s all current forum software does.
The main question is how this can work in terms of federation. When creating a new post it directly references the community url. If the user and community are on different instances then the community instance cannot rewrite the post to reference a different community. So it would have to tell the post creator to (automatically) resubmit the post to the new community. Same for all comments, they would have to be recreated by the respective author’s instance in the new post. Seems quite complex to implement.
@nutomic Yes, exactly.
I think this is a case of needing to maintain the mindset of working WITH the technology instead of against it: some ideas about mod functions just aren't really compatible with the underlying infrastructure.
IMO, ActivityPub often lends itself constructively to separating presentation from processing.
Someone else mentioned modding through metadata, and that seems reasonable. You don't delete or edit posts as that runs up against reliance on unreliable federation, but flagging posts allows user interfaces to Do The Right Thing (for the end user) based on the metadata.
This is fundamentally a broadcast platform. There is no end-to-end moderation functionality here, so don't try. Instead, broadcast hints that end user clients can use to do right for the end user.
