We are happy to see that many of you are exploring Lemmy after Reddit announced changes to its API policy. I maintain this project alongside @[email protected].

Lemmy is similar to Reddit in many ways, but there is also a major difference: Its not only a single website, but consists of many different websites which are interconnected through federation. This is achieved with the ActivityPub protocol which is also used by Mastodon. It means that you can sign up on any Lemmy instance to interact with users and communities on other instances. The project website has a list of instances which all have their own rules and administrators. We recommend that you sign up on one of them, to avoid overt centralization on lemmy.ml.

Another difference compared to Reddit is that Lemmy is open source, and not funded by any company. For this reason it relies on volunteer work to make the project better, whether it’s programming, design, documentation, translating, reporting issues or others. See the contributing guide to get started. You can also donate to support development.

We also recommend that you read the documentation. It explains how Lemmy works and how to setup your own Lemmy instance. Running an instance gives you full control over the rules and moderation, and prevents us developers from having any influence. Especially large communities that want to use Lemmy should host their own instance, because existing Lemmy instances would easily be overwhelmed by a large number of new users.

Enjoy your time here! If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or in the Matrix chat.

  • English Mobster@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been on Lemmy for years now (before it could even federate!), but never really used it because there was nobody really here (and at the time there weren’t any good Android apps - that’s changed with Jeroba though).

    The biggest competitor I’ve seen appears to be Tildes. I actually got an invite link to Tildes and have been trying it out.

    The main difference is that Tildes is focused on high-quality discussion, trying to replicate old-school Reddit - before it went mainstream. Tildes purposely doesn’t have memes or cat pictures, and comments are closer to paragraphs than anything else.

    I think that’s valuable… but I also know one of the big things that attracted people to Reddit were the memes. Not having memes is going to cause a lot of people to not want to stick around.

    Lemmy is a lot more loose, so those people will be right at home. The main complaint I’ve seen from Reddit is that a lot of people are turned off when they see Lemmygrad as one of the most active instances, and they’ve been associating Lemmy with hardcore tankies.

    • mildpepper 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      Yeah I’ve also been on Lemmy since before federation, just haven’t been active because of the lack of engagement in general. I’ve considered getting an invite for tildes, I will probably check it out, but most of the other alts are mostly filled with the sort of racists that reddit has been banning the last few years, so Lemmy and tildes are I think the only viable options atm.

      I like Lemmy more because personally I’m a fan of shitposting and memes and Lemmy seems to support that more. I hope that the popularity of Mastadon in relation to twitter will help redditors understand what Lemmy is, and they can look past the tankie stuff. There are already instances like beehaw that arent tankie but are pretty popular. I guess I just really hope we can move on from reddit but keep the community that made reddit feel special in the early days.

      • Jay Stevens@sunny.garden
        8·
        2 years ago

        @Pepp3r @[email protected] It’s also interesting because of how it opens things up beyond other platforms. For example - I found your post on Mastodon, and I’m replying from my Mastodon account.

        The interface isn’t as nice as Lemmy… but it’s certainly extremely interesting that this works! (Or at least… I hope it does!)

          • Jay Stevens@sunny.garden
            5·
            2 years ago

            And you even showed up as a reply to my comment on Mastodon! Very neat.

            I knew it was theoretically possible, but I had never tried it before. The thing is from the Mastodon end I see everything as a feed of comments, as if I followed everyone who posted to a certain community.

            That _probably_ works fine for now, but as Lemmy grows and these communities get huge I could see it completely take over my Mastodon feed.

            I kind of wish it would just show the top-level posts with some way of hiding the replies by default (kind of like Twitter), but I also know that’s not how Mastodon really does things. Still pretty neat!

            • mildpepper 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈@lemmy.ml
              3·
              2 years ago

              That is so interesting. I’m not actually on Mastadon yet (still on twitter, I know…) but I can click the fediverse icon on Lemmy on your comment and see this thread on Mastadon, it takes me to sunny.garden which I assume is your mastadon instance. This is really cool lol

              • Jay Stevens@sunny.garden
                3·
                2 years ago

                Theoretically it would also work for other Fediverse stuff, like PeerTube (YouTube replacement). I wonder if once Lemmy takes off we’ll see PeerTube start gaining traction next.