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.
I’m reading threads on Reddit with people that act like it’s the most complicated task ever, like come on just pick anything. On one hand I guess it acts as a filter of sorts but on the other it’s a fact that it’ll slow down adoption. Maybe there should be a text in big friendly letters that says it’s not a big deal, just choose any and get started. Maybe even a randomised button where it just selects it for you? Maybe it could ask a couple of questions to the user to determine the best suited server?
The other big one is the whole part about having communities existing under multiple servers. It’s nice that I can go subscribe to communities from any server but it does complicate things a lot if I just want to see everything from subject X, and fragments the userbase further. Right now it’s ok because there’s only a few servers and communities are focused on large topics but down the line when Lemmy gets big and we have communities for niche topics, it’ll definitely be a headache. There needs to be a way to simplify this even if it’s on the user’s side.