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.
Yeah this is great. Reddit was also formed like this before they lost their way. I love that lemmy is open source and... is it decentralized? Have to read. Either way I really like that this is yet a small community but the posts are smart and the comments are interesting. I think this will be great.
yes it's decentralized. And also federated, meaning it can interact with other software like Mastodon or kbin
How does the interaction work?
Well if you have a mastodon account, which works far more like a twitter feed, you can also subscribe to a lemmy community on any instance and you'll get all posts and comments from that sub as a mastodon post in your timeline. it's a bit not very useful i'd say in its current implementation but hey, pretty cool.
you can also post to any kbin community and interact with the comments but that's far closer to the reddit model so a bit less alien.