this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

founded 5 years ago
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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.

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[–] elouboub@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago

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!

[–] ArkoSammy12@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Bassiette@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

I'm happy i'm finally here the website is also a way lighter than reddit

[–] ClumsyHacker@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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?

[–] bobpaul@fosstodon.org 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] AccurateGoose@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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?

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[–] arne@posta.no 3 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] oishiiburger@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

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!

[–] anonion@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

Thanks, happy to be here!

[–] pleasemakesense@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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?

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] Sparsin@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] Spacebar@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] Spidertax@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Fingers crossed that the rapid decline of "mainstream" social media, news, forum sites leads to more widespread adoption of the fediverse. The internet used to be so good before we were all under the Boot...

anyway, hi y'all. I'd say I'm happy to be here, but I'm not... I'm just so disheartened at what our internet has become. BUT - I am hopeful. I think we're experiencing growing pains as a society and this is but one side effect of that; I truly believe the future is on our side, here.

either that, or we all return to monke and THAT is how we free ourselves of the collective brain rot that is web2.0 and beyond. :)

anyway, cheers to a Good Internet. may it still be possible. <3

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

In many ways, this is just going back to a time before these giant US centralized services took over all our communications platforms. The internet used to be small, independent forums and communities, with more accountability, a lot less trolling, and less bots.

[–] NeonBlue@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Someone point me to the nsfw instance that allows porn. I just don't see lemmy being a viable alternative to reddit at this point.

[–] monkeydog453@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

This is the first thing I tried to find, tbh. I agree it won't be a viable alt without.

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[–] cyclohexane@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Imo lemmy seems to have more features than Reddit also, like editing post titles, having text alongside an image post, using third party apps (which will stop soon with Reddit) etc. Reddit is very slow to add updates that make sense, but lemmy moves fast and is a great piece of software.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Thanks! We've been feature-crazy for its whole history... but I've kinda learned the hard way that none of that helps adoption. The users are the feature, and its the only reason people don't leave reddit, facebook, etc.

What @nutomic@lemmy.ml is doing with activitypub service interoperability is far more important than almost anything else we work on. Because at least mastodon and other services have an existing userbase that can plug into lemmy.

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[–] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Hello! Also a reddit refugee here. I was thinking of making the switch before all this since reddit needs an increasing array of tweaks & add-ons just to be usable (RES, old reddit redirect, custom ublock filters etc.) so this seemed like a good time to start migrating.

[–] swarrior216@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hello everybody! I was a Digg refuge, now I'm a Reddit refuge. This is pretty neat that its not funded by a company and relies on volunteers. I think this is going to be a good place. I was wondering if there is an app for IOS?

[–] Surreal@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Would love a native iOS application. Maybe @christianselig@mastodon.social could be convinced as the brilliant creator of Apollo!

[–] KelsonV@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

This post alone now has as many upvotes as I saw someone on Reddit claim Lemmy had total users.

[–] BlazingFlames6073@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Anybody know if we had a spike of new users and activitiy here after reddit's announcement?

I joined lemmy like a week before reddit's announcement after checking it every now and then for months. I didn't see so many comments and upvotes on posts last week.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

We definitely did have a spike in registrations here at least. One of the only ways people find out about lemmy is when it gets cross-posted. We could really use more news articles about it tho on open-source / privacy related spaces.

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[–] 018118055@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Cancelled my Reddit premium renewal (it's 10 months away but still...) and donated with the link above.

[–] Mordiken@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

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.

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