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.
Is there a way to move myself as an user from one server to another?
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.
i need to know this too
No, but you can export your data/subscriptions through your settings, sign up on another instance and import it. But moving posts/comments over, no.
/u/murd0x@lemmy.ml
I think tagging here works like this: @murd0x@lemmy.ml
This worked :)
Frustratingly, @Madbrad200@sh.itjust.works’s comment created a hyperlink and yours did not, in lemmy-ui (the default web interface). This is probably one of the frustrations I should have mentioned in my comment about inconsistent UX between web and mobile…
I’m using Sync. I have no idea what’s going on 🤷♂️
In Sync, when you see your comment, does it create a link you can click to go to murd0x’s profile? If so, nice! Sync is doing the right thing in this context. I know already that Jerboa, the app from the main Lemmy devs, does this correctly.
But lemmy-ui, the interface you’ll see on most instances if you open it up in your web browser, that is not clickable, but the /u/username is clickable. It’s an obvious bug/shortcoming in lemmy-ui.
I think I know where in the code this could be happening for the web UI.
I’m not one of the devs but I’ll look into this a bit, I’ll update this comment when I get more info.
I believe
!should be changed to[!@]in this linehttps://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/129fb5b2f994e02bfecc36e3f6884bdbf485b87a/src/shared/config.ts#L47
And another elseif(match…) needs to be added for @ after this line
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/129fb5b2f994e02bfecc36e3f6884bdbf485b87a/src/shared/markdown.ts#L127
Here’s the relevant issue on the Lemmy-ui repo https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2579
Yes it does. Where did the other formatting one lead to?
The /u/ formatting works exactly the same as the @ formatting, except for different platforms. Right now, /u/ creates a link that goes to their profile on lemmy-ui (the default web interface). But @ creates a link on Jerboa (the first-party app) and Sync (a third-party app).
Unrelated to this but worth noting that Sync will be broken in the soon to come 1.0 update for Lemmy. The dev for Sync is awol. Might be worth checking out the other apps like Boost for Lemmy, Summit, Thunder, Jerboa, etc.
They’re working in the background, but who knows when we’ll get something.
I was thinking this cold prove necessary in the context of different servers policies. Got example, if my server would change policies to something I am not willing to agree, then it would be nice to migrate to another server
This is the huge disconnect between what the fediverse is and what the users actually want.
Users want the convenience of a single entity that floats around the different instances. They want to interact with community A on instance B and also commini X on instance Y.
But most clients deal with it by letting you log in with multiple users on multiple instances
I don’t follow. I’m on AZ, you’re on LW. We can talk to each other right here, in this community on ML.
Sure, account migration in some form might be nice, but we certainly are able to
I’m not sure I’m following what you’re describing here because I feel like I do have that convenience?
Disclosure: I have forgotten about my Beehaw account long ago.