First, just want to say thanks for building and maintaining Lemmy. It's an incredible project, and it provides an incredibly valuable public forum that's completely open. This is the way internet was always meant to work before it got hijacked by corporations.

The questions I'd like to ask would be whether the platform is developing in the way you originally envisioned, what surprised you in terms of how the platform ended up being used in the wild, and what were the biggest technical and non technical problems that came from the rapid growth after the Reddit migration. And finally, how would you like the platform to evolve going forward, and what your long term vision is.

Since you're very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?

Thanks for your work, it's projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive.

I'm gonna ask some tough questions, but I am hopeful to get a response. Thank you for all that you do.

1. Do you envision NSFW content having a place in the federation safely? And if so, would lemmy.ml ever refederate with NSFW instances? What would it take for that to happen?
2. How do you feel about lemmy.world being the proto "default" lemmy instance right now, especially on Sync app. Some have expressed concern about it causing centralization on the platform, others are hoping that people will spread out.
3. Do you anticipate making a distinction between NSFW and pornographic content at all? And taking that a step further potentially, is implementing activitypubs content warnings on the road map?

Comrade Dessalines, you rock. Your audiobooks and essays are great. No questions.

Thanks for both of your work on Lemmy, join-lemmy, lemmy-ui and Jerboa.

1. Can you tell us about any upcoming major features/issue resolutions in development currently, if there are any?
2. Will Lemmy have any form of cross-instance community/post grouping, similar to multi-reddits, hashtags, "alliances" or categories? Although some Lemmy apps have implemented something along those lines, it could be more fully-implemented in the official backend/frontend. I've been thinking Lemmy has desparately needed it to help solve some of the fragmentation problems across instances. It would also help avoid one instance necessarily having all the content, ballooning in both running costs and control.

Do you think 'normies' (people with very very little technical knowledge/experience) will be able to come to a decentralized platform like lemmy? Can a platform be successful long term (especially in niche areas) without that super huge low effort part of the user base?

1. Are you proud/happy/satisfied how Lemmy progresses and its current status?
2. Does it make sense to spend your time to develop client apps when there are so many other already (including open source)
3. What are your ambitions/goals/hopes for Lemmy in one year from now?
4. What do you see as the biggest issue for Lemmy (as a platform) which must be addressed?

Ps: thank you for your work!

Is there a reason we don't have users ability to block entire instances, or is it difficult to code? (I don't mean to sound ungrateful)

The only thing I think is missing is that we can't group subscriptions to communities. Do you have plans for that in the future? Really happy here regardless.

First off, thank you for this awesome platform and for being my first real experience with contributing to FOSS, I learned quite a bit and I had a lot of of fun! I really hope Rust ends up becoming the new standard in web backends instead of Java with Spring/Springboot.

The only question I have that hasn't already been asked is about the legal side of things:

What are you responsible for as the developers of Lemmy, and what are you responsible for as the owners of a Lemmy instance?

Do you have to take certain measures to keep the platform clean from illegal activities and CP/gore? If so, what has been done?

The same question applies to GDPR rules for Europe.

Thanks for doing this :D

Maybe I'm completely misremembering things, but at some point wasn't there a hotfix to Lemmy that hard-limited how many comments a thread could have? Does anyone know if there's a maximum and if so how many?

Just wondering, cause uh, I could see this one having a lot of comments.

1. What is the best Linux distribution?
2. Favorite instance outside of lemmy.ml?
3. Best and worst Lemmy client?

Opinions on hexbear finally federating?

Which are your 3 favorites lemmy instances besides Lemmy.ml?

also thanks for the work you do

1. Can we get the show context bug fixed? Pretty please? :3 Possibly the most frustrating bug we've ever had.

2. Also, on crossposted threads can we get the first thread marked as "original post" so it's clear what the originating community is for people that might want to subscribe to it for similar content. The indication of the originating community is a considerable source of subscriptions over on reddit and one of the primary methods that crossposting functions as a growth tool for new communities.

3. When you started this project did you think it would get where it is now? Was it a sort of daydream thing or a serious belief that it would get this far?

Any plans to make it easier to interact with links to other instances?

The QoL value to automatically open links to other instances inside my current instance would be enormous.

What was your first reaction to the massive exodus from Reddit during the blackout? Was it something you were expecting?

How do you plan on improving the onboarding/sign-up process for newcomers, especially when they have little to no understanding about the Fediverse?