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.
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!!!”
Hey, if it kept the servers running, maybe that wasn’t the absolute worst thing they’ve ever done
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.
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.
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.
Thanks! We’ve been feature-crazy for its whole history… but I’ve kinda learned the hard way that none of that helps adoption.
How did you conclude that? do you have data that supports that conclusion?
According to some metrics lemmy is growing, for example the number of instances grew by more then 92 percent, If you don’t have big money for a marketing campaign that’s probably how good organic “word to mouth” growth might look like.
It’s also not just about the quantity of features, it’s best to try to aim at “killer features”, marking new comments that haven’t been read could be one, but maybe a UX study will provide better answers.
Because our greatest influxes of new users come not when we develop new features, but when lemmy gets cross-posted somewhere, or when reddit messes up in such a way that communities want to migrate somewhere else. This current influx is due to something reddit did, not lemmy’s developers.
Because our greatest influxes of new users come not when we develop new features, but when lemmy gets cross-posted somewhere
I do this type of cross posting all the time, sometimes it can get over 1000 upvotes and sometimes it can get 0 and i don’t really know what is the number of upvotes it will get before posting, one thing i do know is that if i find an open source project with interesting properties (such as a design or features i think are good) I might post it, and if i see a project with good features i will upvote it (which will give it more exposure).
when reddit messes up in such a way that communities want to migrate somewhere else.
Sure, but there are other open source reddit alternatives , as they say success happens when preparation meets opportunity and and those users shopping for a new platform might go to other alternatives or they might decide that despite the disadvantages of reddit the other platforms are not a better option.
So the root cause of all these gains is good features and designs, I won’t say marketing is meaningless , having a post with a summary of attractive developments people could post on reddit/hackernews once or twice a year could be useful.
A good thing about community-driven non-profit software is the features which get implemented are typically more in-line with what the users want, rather than adding commercial things like more ads and grifting gimmicks.
It is a mix of ‘has this! doesn’t have that yet’ and some rough edges because it is still young (well, 4 years is young compared to reddit’s 19 years) and only has a handful of developers, many of them hobbyists. But it’s great to see it already growing, and updates are a pleasant surprise rather than a cause for concern.
The only problem with lemmy right now is lack of users.
So it needs to tackle the root causes, what is causing the lack of users, hopefully like mastodon and the rest of the fediverse that will put him on a growth path (if it is not already is on one), the-federation shows the number of instances is growing but the number of active users is shrinking (but that could be due to some instances choosing not to show their users).
On the number of users shrinking, I’ll say that I quit using lemmy for several months, mostly due to losing hope on it. But after Reddit banned third party apps, I decided to come back.
Reddit did add the ability to add text to anything recently, but yeah, it’s weird it took so long while they keep releasing useless new rot.
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.
Appreciate it, there is a lot more to the story. Will make a great read and will make it a lemmy exclusive, because right now reddit admins are trying to keep it hush hush.
Can’t wait to get it all written up, on a more appropriate name.
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@smallerdemon @nutomic it really puts things into perspective not being fed ads constantly, I stopped using Twitter since March and I definitely notice a relief…
Same thing with the algorithms ‘suggesting’ content: I prefer to browse the content by myself
The algorithms are what I’ll miss the least. I used Apollo for Reddit so I didn’t see ads, but Reddit telling me what I’m going to see whether I want to or not really irritated me.
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that moved me. you sir, made my first day at Lemmy awesome
Thank you for taking your time to write about your experiences with the early internet. This is the kind of deep and informative comments that I loved fom the good days of reddit, but that seem to be slowly being killed.
Seeing your comment here was like a relief. I hope lemmy flourishes and becomes what reddit was.
I would say “If you’re posting here, aren’t you signed up by definition?”, but I’m posting from Mastodon, so I am literally my own counter-example. I don’t actually have an account on any Lemmy instance.
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?
This is the way. As a bit of a Reddit-addict I hope Lemmy (and perhaps other interoperable projects one day?) will take off. Centralized social media sites appear to be doomed to inevitable self-destruction. Protocols can survive.
Like Mastodon and other ActivityPub applications however, it is the Federated nature which IMO still needs some work. Not being able to easily browse remote communities, posts, scores, comments, etc. from the comfort of my home instance (which will also be the only portal to the federated world visible to mobile applications) is a problem. On Mastodon I often don’t see all replies, and likewise on Lemmy I don’t see any comments to this post yet.
I hope ActivityPub apps figure out a way to better synchronize remote and local state so users won’t keep seeing incomplete/fragmented views of Fedi content.
Someone did create this Lemmy community browser, which searches all known instances for any community. It might be useful to integrate that into lemmy, or at least link to it, in some way, to help people discover communities not on their own instance already.
Thanks for that link. I was looking for something like that.
Its not so difficult to implement functionality that remote content can be fetched automatically on demand like you describe. It just takes a certain amount of work, and so far we are busy with other things. These things take time when there are only two developers funded with donations, and not some startup with millions in venture capital.
Really… I thought you two were loaded with billions of VC funds… ;P
Yeah, totally understood. What Lemmy is today is already quite impressive! I’m just chipping in my thoughts of what I hope can happen eventually, as a more unified experience is something I think I’d enjoy, and it may help make the platform more accessible.
If I had any spare time (sigh) I’d help code this up. Rust is neat.
This post alone now has as many upvotes as I saw someone on Reddit claim Lemmy had total users.
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.
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.
Nice to hear that.
Personally, I do feel like there’s some more activity and you can see a spike in “Active users ratio” here, too: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
The other graphs are all pointing downward, even for statistics that should pretty much always be going up, so I’m guessing, they’ll only start becoming useful once the current collection period closes…? I don’t quite know how these statistics work either. 🙃The-federation.info is unfortunately a bit unmaintained, https://fediverse.observer is a much better site overall, for all fediverse projects. Here’s the stats for lemmy.
Thanks a bunch for providing a graph link. I wasn’t sure where to look lol.
@BlazingFlames6073 @nutomic I at least joint because of reddits announcement, but I think the real wave will come when the technical subreddits go dark.
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
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.
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 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 also needs an iOS mobile app
There is mlem (only on TestFlight yet).
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.
If Apollo was only open source, one could probably even port it. Heck, if there’s enough momentum from Reddit to Lemmy, it might become attractive for the dev.
I’ve been messing around with some userscripts and custom CSS to help improve the UX a bit (and make the UI a bit more compact), I bet we could get some people together to work on a “Lemmy Enhancement Suite”
A long, long time ago I can still remember how upvotes used to make me smile And I knew if I just got rollin' That I could help keep users scrollin' And maybe there'd be content for a while But July 1st makes me shiver With far less content to deliver Bad news on the frontpage I can no longer engage I can't remember if I erupted When I read apps would be disrupted But disappointment interrupted The day that Reddit died So bye, bye, old Reddit API Stuck with Huffman through some updates but the updates were shite And them good ole boys were snortin' gonewild 'n smite Postin' this'll be the day that it dies This'll be the day Reddit dies Did you read the TOS? And do you have faith in mods success If users still engage with subs? Now do you believe in open access? Can ads save your failing assets? And could you be less avarice heedless schlubs? Well, I know that you're in need of clicks 'Cause I see you suckin' Newhouse dicks You both killed third party apps Man, I thought that you might give a crap I was a lonely teenage software dev With a git repository and a shit to give But I knew those apps wouldn't live The day that Reddit died I started singing bye, bye, old Reddit API Stuck with Huffman through some updates but the updates were shite And them good ole boys were snortin' gonewild 'n smite Postin' this'll be the day that it dies This'll be the day Reddit dies Now for ten years we'd moved on from Digg And greed grows fast for a ventured pig But that's not how it used to be When the users came for the cats and memes From apps made by the community And content that came from you and me Oh, and while those cats were growing old The number crunchers grew too bold The communities dismissed Now everyone is pissed And while Lemmy federates with Marx The concept knocks it from the park It's time to migrate to an ark The day that Reddit died So bye, bye, old Reddit API Stuck with Huffman through some updates but the updates were shite And them good ole boys were snortin' gonewild 'n smite Postin' this'll be the day that it dies This'll be the day Reddit diesJust created an account because Reddit official app is a big no no for me. I really liked Infinity, and since I never use Reddit on my desktop, this is the only way for me to browse it without getting mad. I’m really interested to see where it all goes
Something I just found out in the Settings page that I wish existed in every social media site: you can turn off scores!
