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.
Random general question, how do you feel about file hosting? When posting, I tend to avoid uploading media larger than like, 5MB, just cause I know that the cost of storing said media can get exorbitant very quickly and I wouldn't want to be part of the burden.. I'm not able to donate just yet. Knowing this, I am currently on the fence on whether I should create a "gaming clips" community.
That said, it's nice to be able to embed media from other sources (despite it potentially not working natively for mobile platforms if I'm not mistaken?), which got me thinking: it'd be nice to have some sort of preference list of image/video hosting hosts that users can add to or remove from, and uploading directly from the comment/create post view would use the first working file hosting domain from the list.. Just spitballing here.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html#torrents
Torrents should be used, as it entirely solves the static data distribution problem, and keeps servers from having to shoulder potentially enormous hosting costs.
I've even added a lot of torrent-support related features to lemmy-ui and jerboa, that will come in 1.0
Great!
The upload function is mainly meant for images, like others said its better to use external sites for video uploads. Integrating upload to those remote sites seems like a lot of work for little benefit though.
You could find a peertube instance and upload links to peertube videos.
Shouldn't torrents be used for large files?
This is correct. Torrents should be used.
i'm clueless about torrents and Lemmy, can you embed them in posts/comments somehow? The closest thing I could think of is using a Framatube instance, but I don't think you can embed them
You can just use magnet links. I wrote a guide for how to use them here
Like here's a Joan Crawford movie I like: Sudden Fear 1952 . A super-beginner way, is to install stremio and click that link. Boom, you're now watching the movie.
I was hoping it could be embedded, but this is a nice-to-know, thanks!
depends on instance they all set hard limits of their own lemmee is 5mb which is lowaf
What would you upload that's larger than 5mb???
damn near every single image on my phone fails to meet the requirements so I host my own instance lol, I tried compressing butchered the quality this is 1080p too
I think I've uploaded images bigger than that, before.