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 @dessalines@lemmy.ml.
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.
I still think the fediverse is using language that most people don’t understand. My cousins, let alone my parents, won’t understand half of what’s written there. Federation? ActivityPub? Instance?
The best comparison I’ve heard that everyone I’ve explained it to seems to comprehend is that the fediverse is basically email 2.0. You can send emails with only pictures, text, video, or all the aforementioned together. In order to do so, you need to pick a server, just like you do with email, but in the fediverse they aren’t “google”, “aol”, “yahoomail”, but “lemmy.ml”, “feddit.it”, “mastodon.social”, “chaos.social”, “kbin.social”, “kbin.pub”, and others.
You will notice that “lemmy.ml” and “feddit.it” look very similar, but have different names - that’s because they run the same software called lemmy. “mastodon.social” and “lemmy.ml” look very different and have different features, and that’s because (you guessed it!) they run different software (mastodon vs lemmy). It’s just like GoogleMail runs different software than YahooMail, has very different features, but can communicate with each other.
The fediverse is the same, just with 2 major differences: it uses email 2.0 (aka activitypub) and the software is opensource. That means developers (or anybody who wants to for that matter) can see the source code of the software. This is unlike Google, Yahoo, Yandex, AOL, who keep their source closed.In the fediverse, the different software focuses on different things. Lemmy presents the fediverse to you like reddit, mastodon like twitter, peertube like youtube, diaspora like facebook, and so on and so forth. The great thing is, they can all talk to each other using email 2.0 (aka activitypub)! Therefore somebody on a server using mastodon can view post made on a server running lemmy with a video hosted on a server running peertube and comment on that video, right from their server that runs mastodon!
So please, pick a server with the software and conditions you like and have fun on the fediverse!
Just recently made an account with kbin.social. It’s crazy how all of this works right? But yeah, I’m really looking forward to this new style of doing social media. Can’t wait to see how this evolves.
Interestingly, Reddit was open-source between 2008-2017. I’m hoping we can kind of re-capture the feeling of old Reddit without botspam, adspam, and more focus on community and improving experience than on “premium features” and monetization.
You mean to say you don’t want to spend thousands on avatars?
Hahaha that’s one of those things. “Look at me, I spent a bunch of money to get a bored looking monkey face, it’s exclusive!!!”
I had heard of Lemmy before the Reddit API debacle, same as I’d heard of Mastadon before the Twitter Elon debacle. Just as the Twitter debacle really pushed me toward using my existing Mastadon account, the Reddit debacle is pushed me toward actually finding a Lemmy server to join and signing up.
I’m 57 (58 next month), so I was in my mid-20s when the Internet of the 90s really started to form. What was crazy was being in college and wandering over to labs on campus that had access to the latest protocol, https, and seeing Mosaic for the first time and kind of fantasizing about that being the future of the internet. …and it was. But not always for the better or for the benefit of people. By the time I moved to San Francisco (not for dot com myself, but my spouse was in grad school) in 1999 the dot com boom was in full peak force about the crest the edge of the wave and completely bust in a couple of years (and hoo boy did it). The commercialization of the internet was utterly and completely underway during that early 2000s period, but I was still sort of shuffling around telnet based BBSes and still pulling a lot of my files with FTP. GOPHER was long gone by then, though, and usenet was always more of a hardcore user area in my personal circles (mainly due to the the fact of how overwhelming and disorganized it could be to me, which is so incredibly laughable now).
The promise of those early telnet and early web days almost completely disappeared and a lot of those people who saw the internet as a democratizing force either did find a way to make money from it or they just found jobs and turned into Makers during the 2000s. Now it feels like a lot of those Maker folks have started to find ways to come back to the internet in ways that bypass commercialization in order to have methods of having communities that aren’t targets for bigots and fascists to intrude on safe spaces that a lot of people felt like they had found initially.
And it DEFINITELY feels like a lot of tech nerdy Millennials and Gen-Z have completely tired of the commercialized internet entirely and are inventing and finding ways to control their own communities. And friends… I fucking love it.
I’m happy i’m finally here the website is also a way lighter than reddit
I’m a bit confused as to how federation works.
I have an account here, and see a community I want to join in another instance… but I the login option only lets me log in with an account on that instance.
Is participating in communities cross-instance not possible yet?
One way is put the URL of the community you want to follow in the search box; that’s how I’m able to follow /c/lemmy from lemmy.ml on the mastedon server I’m using.
Since you’re on a lemmy server, you can also switch between Subscribed, Local, and All at the top of the main feed. “All” is all communities from all federated instances that _someone_ on your home instance already subscribes to. If you see something in the All feed you like, you can join that community from there.
Ok, so it’s all ActivityPub. But you did precisely what to follow a lemmy community from Mastodon? Examples would be hugely helpful for those of us who are also using Mastodon!
Figured it out. Literally <community>@<lemmy instance> as a user search. Not sure how the content will look. Or comments.
I did what I said… I put the “URL of the community” (https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy) into the search on my mastodon server.
It sounds like you found a shorthand.
Twitter makes a series of bad and user-unfriendly decisions, causing many of it’s users to flee to Mastodon. Now Reddit makes a series of bad and user-unfriendly decisions, causing many of it’s users to flee to Lemmy. When will the big suits learn?
I think the elephant in the room is that endless year-over-year growth is unteneble and mathematically impossible. So as the suits get their hands on more and more, they are actually kind of stuck. That means e.g. reddit is unable to operate as normal, not necessarily because they lose money, but because they can’t hit unrealistic targets.
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Thank you so much for this! We just set up an instance as well, and we’re going to play around with it more the next couple of days.
Thanks for all you are doing! Very impressed with this and sorry I hadn’t seen it before. But super happy it’s here for the refugees!
A very minor thing, but I really like that you can see the downvotes on posts like you used to be able to do on reddit. Is there any vote confuscation like reddit did/does or is it straight up what the votes are?
Yup… I’m glad I’m not the only one who remembers when reddit used to show full and real vote scores. They removed down-vote showing so long ago that a lot of people joined after, and had no idea that existed.
And of course most US-based social media platforms have removed downvotes / dislikes entirely.
Thanks, happy to be here!
Let me know how I can help. I brought a lot of traffic to reddit, just to find out reddit admins are more sensitive than the mods that work for free.
I spoke up how poorly their mobile app changed towards modding on mobile, instead of taking the issues at hand they limited my number of subbreddits I could moderate.
I have knowledge in automod if that’s a feature here, also I am pretty fast at finding information.
TLDR - fuck reddit here to help.
It sounds like you might be interested to host a new Lemmy instance. Right now the number of instances is still limited, and most of them cover niche topics. So it would definitely be good to have a Lemmy instance that is more mainstream. Hosting an instance requires some technical knowledge, but you can always ask for help in /c/lemmy_support or find someone else to take care of that aspect.
I’m 51 and started using the internet before HTML was a thing. This feels polished but also old school in a usenet / mud / telnet kind of way.
I’m liking it a lot.
Lemmy looks great, I hope it manages to comes out on top on the upcomming battle of the reddit alternatives because due to it’s decentralized nature it’s pretty much impossible for lemmy to go south like reddit and digg.
The biggest issue with this platform for me, as someone who lurks more than posts, is the smaller user base and, consequently, fewer posts and communities. Otherwise, I love the decentralization, open source nature, and general community.
This reddit issue could be what pushes this platform forward. Will be interesting to see.
Reddit was once tiny too, with very little activity. Now its frustratingly the opposite… a lot of bots, karma-farming, thinly-veiled advertising, copaganda, unpleasant and rude interactions.
I’d love to have back the feel of old-school forums, with smaller, tight-knit communities, and good content. While at the same time the fediverse gives us the opportunity to click the
All/ Global view, so we can see a wider universe of content.Oh yeah. I joined Reddit pretty early by most standards (2007/2008), and it was a much different place, especially before the big Digg migration in 2011. Not sure if I was just younger, but the default experience wasn’t quite so intolerable as it is today.
I’m hoping this platform can be similar to those early days. I really like the community here. It’s probably better than the early Reddit community. And the federated nature offers so many benefits compared to more traditional sites like Reddit.
There is a critical mass of users needed to drive posting and interactions for any online platform like this. It’s a delicate balance. Further large growth is when you may start seeing the culture degrade, the dreaded eternal September. Maybe the federated structure will allow this platform to avoid that.
I do think this Reddit issue is definitely an opportunity to attract that critical mass of users though. I think you’re on top of that.
Looking forward to seeing how it goes
the big Digg migration in 2011
fyi, that was in fall of 2010. although, I suppose, more people continued migrating into 2011, but the mass exodus was almost immediate in 2010. I remember how reddit had trouble handling all of the new traffic, much like lemmy instances are now, lol
i moved over to reddit from digg in 2007 during the whole digg v4 fiasco. migrating here feels very much the same. it’s new, much smaller, works a bit differently (in a good way), and is still mostly undeveloped. This platform has a ton of potential as a reddit replacement, and, if they really do go through with pricing out the 3rd party apps, you’ll likely see this place explode with traffic.
I also lurk a whole lot and thats my biggest issue as well. It looks like a lot of people talk about Lemmy when the topic of migrating from reddit comes up though, im hopeful that it takes off.
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.
I have a pretty good feeling that lemmy.ml is going to be the next reddit.com. Sure, there’s different instances of the federation, but this one seems more developed than most of the others.
you can mention or message anyone on any website using their address.
So someone on a Mastadon community of servers could ping me in their server/website and I’d get a notification?
And can posts on one Lemmy server also show up in another Lemmy server? Like could a post be made here, braodcast into the lemmy-verse, and appear on another Lemmy website?
Yeah, it looks like it. I saw a message yesterday from someone posting a toot on Mastodon that showed up here, and I replied and they confirmed they got it. So I think they’re all connected somehow.
Yup, posting this from Mastodon. I love this integration. Curious to see what’s possible with this.
So are you able to read the Lemmy posts and comment threads using a mastodon app? Or through a mastodon implementation?
I’m using the official Mastodon app. Browsing Lemmy communities is a bit awkward this way since they’re essentially just another account retooting every user’s comments and replies in threads. But I can search for individual comments through permalinks. Your response also triggered a regular notification in Mastodon.
