I pay around 80€ per month for the lemmy.ml server, plus a few euros for image hosting and domain. So that’s around 3 cents per active user.

Please open an issue for this if there isn’t already one. Then I can have a look once the summer holidays are over.

Interop with microblogging is not the main purpose of Lemmy. The main purpose is to have a federated Reddit, with federation between Lemmy instances. That it can also connect with other platforms like Mastodon is more like a neat side effect.

We created Lemmy from the very start with federation in mind. But it was always meant to be a Reddit alternative, which means community focused. I don’t see any reason to add user following when that’s already supported by a dozen other Fediverse platforms, and would only dilute our main focus. I believe in the Unix philosophy: do one thing and do it well.

I could certainly see a feature like this implemented as a plugin. But it would need someone to volunteer for the programming work.

I think no one ever opened an issue for such a feature, so please go ahead and do that.

Posting links with no attached (body) text

We could easily add a community setting to make the body mandatory. I suggest you open an issue for that.

This, now we have school holidays and my kids are home 24/7. Takes a lot of time and energy to keep them entertained.

I am planning to implement private communities soon, hopefully it can help with that. Then maybe Lemmy can become an alternative for Discord and other platforms too.

I don’t have time to respond everything, but just about the growth part: Before the Reddit blackout happened, Lemmy was stuck with around 1000 monthly users for at least a year. It was quite boring compared to now, in 15 or 30 minutes you could read all new posts and comments for a day. It was also easy to recognize the handful of regular posters (cheers). At that time you could easily think the same, that Lemmy will never grow and people will leave. But then the Reddit migration happened and we got completely overwhelmed with a 70x increase in active users.

It seems to me that growth on the internet always happens with short spurts and long quiet periods. There will probably be a time when people come to Lemmy again and we reach hundreds of thousands or millions of active users. Then we will fondly remember the time when it was so small.

Votes are needed to sort the posts and decide which ones are shown at the top of your frontpage. If we add different reaction types, it’s not at all clear how each of them should affect the score. We might come up with some arbitrary numbers, but then the system will get a lot less intuitive and more complex.

She was also on lemmy.ml for a very short time.

https://lemmy.ml/u/EMPRESS

I think the issue isn’t that the Lemmy developers don’t want these things to exist that you’re talking about, so much as them being the only ones in a position to make the changes or accept the PRs to make them happen.

Lemmy maintainer here, and I’m really curious what gave you this idea. We generally welcome all contributions to the project. On the backend I made a pull request to add plugin support which is waiting for feedback. Onthe frontend I havent heard any interest in a plugin system yet.

So if this is something you want, you’re welcome to implement it and open a pull request.

The RFC is merged now!

https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/blob/main/0004-post-tags.md

Well someone has to write the code.

There is no need for any “green light”, if there was a problem with the rfc we would have said so from the beginning. From what I can tell the rfc is not completed yet, and when it’s completed someone still needs to step up to implement it. Even my own rfc which was finished months ago is still not merged and not implemented.

Finally, Lemmy appears to be run by developers who appear to be interested in their own issues and regularly appear to dismiss issues raised by users. This is not sustainable.

I would love to fix all the issues that users report, but for that we would need about ten times as many developers. The way it is we simply don’t have enough time to work on everything, and need to prioritize things.

They refuse to upgrade and then complain that mod tools are insufficient (which have improved a lot in the meantime). You really can’t make this up.

Having another volunteer also means more work for us, as we need to communicate with this person regularly. It also means that we maintainers get more removed from the users, and wont be able to talk with them directly anymore. And in my experience, volunteers are very motivated in the beginning, but most of them get bored or busy after a while and then you need to find someone new again. Not really worth the hassle in this case.

Also the database issues mentioned in this thread may simply be from lack of ram.

Sure but its not so easy to find volunteers. Would you or db0 be willing to do this?