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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dessalines@lemmy.ml

nutomic@lemmy.ml

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Lemmy AMA March 2025 (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago by nutomic@lemmy.ml to c/announcements@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] totallyNotARedditor@lemm.ee 18 points 1 week ago (5 children)

We are seeing an influx of new users, but what's happening to older users? Are they still active? What's the average lifetime of Lemmy users nowadays? I'm kinda curious about the user retention in general

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 week ago

The best data we have on that is probably https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Not sure how to get the user retention from that, though

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 week ago

I believe they are still active. User numbers have been stable for a long time, and there are some names that I recognize from the very early days 5 years ago.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 week ago

Every server and community has monthly active users stats. Best way to see them would be a tool like this that keeps track of history: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

We don't do any tracking of user retention, but overall lemmy has been fairly steady at ~50k users for a year now.

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[–] MemmingenFan923@feddit.org 18 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Some companies use Reddit as their main forum or an established way to communicate with customers. Are there any companies that have explored Lemmy and have their community yet?

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[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 week ago (31 children)

Communities should be more unified across servers, especially for niche ones. I want to see an active Metroid community, I don't give a crap what instance is hosting it (or if it's a mostly-opaque medley of instances) so long as I'm federated with it. This is probably the biggest UX misunderstanding new users have.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 week ago (16 children)

Consolidation isn't always a good thing, communities on different instances will have different styles and trends, and that's a good thing. The benefit of federated social media is just as much in local instances as it is in federation, unique niches are going to have unique comments even if the post is the exact same.

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[–] murd0x@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 week ago (29 children)

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

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 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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[–] abobla@lemm.ee 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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[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

What was the last post that made you really laugh?

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[–] Itte@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

What is your opinion on Bluesky being more popular than Mastodone because it is easier for most?
Will Lemmy can become easy like Bluesky? Are there plans like that?

thanks

edit: lemmy dev replies only please

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[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 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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[–] prototype_g2@lemmy.ml 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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[–] roguetrick@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Who is your daddy and what does he do?

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No seriously he's retired and cooks his brain watching fox news all day. If he got off that drug for even a month he'd return to being a sweet and caring person.

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[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 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.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 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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