How much experience did you have with Rust when you started making Lemmy? What programming languages did you use before?

will uploading audio files become a thing? as a musician i need it

Will an AMA comment sort type be added? Would be convenient to scroll by new replies from OP so we can easily keep up with AMAs

Why is lemmy licensed under the AGPL3? What prompted you to take that decision?

Could you please create a middle ground between the nuclear option (banning sites) and the whack a mole option of banning users. It would be effective to be able to ban communities (at least temporarily) during bot spam attacks while you wait for admins to police up their site. Could there also be a way for admins to notify other admins that their site is spamming garbage so that admins know that their board is the cause of a problem and what that problem is?

Thoughts on a GPL4?

Many examples indicate an even stronger license is needed, I will list a few

1. The current RedHat debacle

2. MuseScore's closed source Musehub (after being acquired by Ultimatw Guitar)

3. Google commiting copyright infringement by combining free (as in freedom) software with code under Apache license for Android

We clearly need a stronger, more all encompassing license.

For me the whole point of fediverse is not depending on a single party for your socials/subs. But the current climate in each instance forces users to have accounts in multiple instances.

As a Lemmy user I believe account migration should be a default Lemmy feature which enables true federation for end users. Any plans for this feature in the near future?

I have heard some respectable communities, namely r/AskHistorians, express hesitance at coming to Lemmy in part over fears of appearing biased due to the overt political stance of Lemmy's creators. In other words, it's hard to be a neutral body in affiliation with anything that has an overt political stance.

I wonder what the devs of Lemmy think of this hesitance. Is it unreasonable and itself biased? Or do you see any potential for finding a way to facilitate a platform that would allow for a more neutral space?

A few questions:

1. Why did you name it Lemmy?
2. What have some of the biggest challenges been in developing a Reddit-like community platform?
3. What's a big feature you hope to implement someday?

Why isn't there a feature to allow individuals to block whole instances?

how often will you do AMAs?

Any regrets during your time working on Lemmy? Like implementing a feature and then later on thinking "Shit. This sucks, but I can't remove it now or it will fuck up everything later."

• What are your dream features or rework you would ask a magic genie? I mean nice features that require a huge amount of work
• If you were to rewrite Lemmy from scratch, would you do everything the same way or would you rethink something?

Thanks for your amazing work, you guys are changing the world!

Something that trips me up a bit about federation and instances is the overlap of identical communities from different instances.

So for example, I'm an atheist, but it's be years since that was a part of my identity that moved me to care about atheist memes or patting myself on the back for not being religious, which (sorry guys), is what I feel like happens in those communities. So I get them out of my feed by blocking them the way I block plenty of other communities I'm not interested in. In Apollo I was spoiled by the 'hide subreddit' feature that I don't believe existed in Reddit itself, but which was crucial to my enjoyment of that particular app. But since there are multiple instances hosting a version of any given community, I must've blocked at least three 'atheist' and two or three 'atheistmemes' communities, which look the same to me, but are hosted on different instances.

Is my All feed destined to continue having different instance versions of all the topics I don't want to see, no matter how many times I block them, as long as there are more and more instances hosting those communities? I don't want to sound unimpressed by this new technology or ungrateful for the amazing service you all are building, but this feels like either a pretty big flaw in the federated user experience or a pretty big gap in my knowledge of how to work the platform. I'm entirely receptive to the idea I may just be doing something wrong.

Just curious. Thank you for everything you do.

• Is there a plan to improve search and federating communities between instances? My biggest hurdle joining and using Lemmy was without a doubt the search functionality and subscribing to a community on my own instance, it was severely off-putting. Let me walk you through it: you find a community you like, say !vinyl@sopuli.xyz. You paste it into the search of your instance, as instructed. It immediately tells you "No results". If you don't click off, sometimes it changes it's mind within a few seconds. Sometimes it never loads. You try manually creating the URL by going to example.com/c/vinyl@sopuli.xyz but it gives you an error. If you're lucky it works the next day, if you're not then I don't actually know the next step. Not to mention the lack of feedback on subscribing to communities. I have "subscribed" to communities before then realised a week later that despite appearing in my list of subs it didn't actually work and I have to redo, the only feedback you get is "pending". This is the #1 issue that stops me from recommending Lemmy, or at least smaller instances that haven't federated with much yet. Is the search a priority?

• I know you've been asked about splitting NSFW already, but is there any chance of a specific NSFL tag or a generic spoiler/blur tag? Gore and nudity are such different topics they really don't deserve to be under the same banner.

• Are proper inline previews something on the roadmap? What I mean is items like YouTube videos, Streamable links, and just about anything that isn't a Lemmy image is not expandable and requires leaving the website. It's one of my most missed features from old Reddit with RES.

I read as much of the thread as possible, so hopefully these are new questions. Hope I didn't come across too negative here as I've been enjoying my time overall and I know y'all have been swamped these months and never expected this popularity.

Maybe I couldn't find it somewhere online, but is there a structured development roadmap for features you plan to implement? If not, what are the top priorities going forward? What are your long term goals with the project?