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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@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.