Lemmy Development Update January 2026
Lemmy Development Update January 2026
Last month @Nutomic made some posts in !lemmy@lemmy.ml to get feedback and ideas for the official website join-lemmy.org:
- [Help Design Lemmy] Joinlemmy website and New User Onboarding
- [Help Design Lemmy] How to describe Lemmy in a single Sentence?
Based on these we made various changes to the site. Most importantly, visitors can now register on a suggested Lemmy instance with a single click. Additionally the feature overview, app list, and instance list were reworked.
join-lemmy.org is one of the first search results for people who hear about Lemmy, and want to find out what it is. They should easily be able to register an account to become an active user, with as little friction as possible.
So if you have any suggestions for further improvements, please open an issue or comment below. We especially need help from designers to create better images and polish the design. You can also contribute by translating the site to your language via Weblate.
Now on to the Lemmy code itself. On this front it has been mostly the same as last month: Implementing the new backend features in the UI, bug fixing and minor backend changes. You can follow the progress with these milestones:
If you are impatient to see the new features in production, we share those feelings. But there is still a lot of work needed to make sure the new features work well and make for a good user experience. If you have any experience with web development (or want to learn it), you can also contribute. Checkout the lemmy-ui repo and the milestone above. It is written in standard Typescript with Bootstrap. Additionally you can help by testing the new version on voyager.lemmy.ml and reporting any problems.
Finally here are the major changes from January:
- Added colour field to community tags by iByteABit256
- Make bootstrap instances configurable by Nutomic
- Added dedicated community and multi-community settings pages by Dessalines
- Partial url search and normalization (fixes #4748) by Nutomic
Or see the full list of changes at the links below:
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations.
To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.