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.
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.
You should have seen this place a week ago, it was very quiet. With all the new users its its getting a lot more active.
Haha, I was here 3 years ago, before Federation even worked. It was very slow, to say the least. ;)
It’s been my first time back since 2020, and it’s kind of wild to see it taking off. I’d imagine it’ll only grow as the enshittification of Reddit continues.
I am very curious what’s going to happen to the larger instances like lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org. Lemmy.ml was struggling to load for me a bit earlier; come July 1st when everyone gets their access cut off I’m very curious how slammed this’ll be.
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
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
Oh yeah guess so. No idea why I always think it was 2011.
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.
That’s around the time I first went to Reddit, and I agree. I’m getting very similar feelings.
The growth of users could be what pushes me to open Lemmy more than Reddit. I’m already seeing more and more varied activity than I was seeing in previous visits.
yeah, i saw that the Beehaw admin said that the had doubled their userbase in a day, and that their traffic had gone through the roof. Their server got the reddit hug of death for a few hours last night.
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.
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.
@Pepp3r @EnglishMobster@lemmy.ml 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!)
Yo that is so cool! I didn’t even know that Mastadon and Lemmy could interact like this!
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!
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
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.
I’m in the same situation, I’ve never posted or commented on Reddit, but I loved using it to find information, I searched on Reddit before any other website, there’s many great niche communities that exists.
I hope that Lemmy could grow enough to become a serious alternative. I don’t like what Reddit has become.
IMO the one thing that should be possible to do on lemmy is for users from one server to be able to post and comment on another server within the lemmy network.
Posts and comment made by users from a different realm could be published as some variaton of “user@server”, that way we could have multiple instances of “user” on the network, just on different servers.
Not only is what you say perfectly possible - you can also have people from Mastodon talk to you!
This is my Mastodon account. I’ve followed a couple Lemmy communities and I’m seeing their comments in my feeds, just like they were “real” Mastodon posts.
It doesn’t work the other way around (so you can’t follow me in Lemmy, for example), but it’s pretty neat that it works as well as it does!
Oh wow this is great!!
Everything you said is already possible. I’m commenting here from a different instance.
That’s great! :D