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.
How do communities work across instances? Among other things, can a community have a moderator on another server? Would the top mod need to be on the same server?
Mods can be on any server. A community is on a server, i.e. community a !a@server1.tld and !a@server2.tld are two different communities. You could follow one, none or both.
Is there a way to filter by language?
When you go to your settings there should be a field looking a bit like this:
I imagine that should allow you to filter by language by control-clicking every language you can read, and then when you are finished, clicking outside of that field. I say I imagine, because I don’t use that feature.
Lemmy is fun!
slides £20 over to the reddit enhancement suite team to come over
That would really be awesome. I feel like Lemmy needs some UX improvements. It also needs an iOS mobile app
It has potential. Hopefully the creator of Apollo is able to jump in on that somehow and make it better. Heck, I’d love to help out with it myself.
Definitely. lemmy.ml previously had like one new user per day, now its a few dozen per day.
It’s going to grow exponentially once people find out how cool Lemmy is.
Curious - What led you to choose “.ml” (Mali) as the domain?
For the lemmy devs and the main server lemmy.ml they probably chose .ml because it’s free and also because they’re marxist-socialists maybe?
Question for everyone, where is lemmy getting linked from? (besides me in that apollo thread yesterday)
I saw it in the PrivacyGuides subreddit, they’re trying out an instance here too from the sounds of it.
yeah they’re at !privacyguides@lemmy.one. Already on their own server (lemmy.one) :)