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’ve had my account only for about 30 minutes and I can see this fully replacing reddit for me. Here’s to the future!
Do you know how to create new sublemmys? I want to copy my favourite subreddits and tell people to migrate here. Do I need to buy a literal server?
If you’re talking about the equivalent of a subreddit here on lemmy.ml, that’s just called a “community”. Click the “Create Community” link up at the top of the site. If you want to create your own whole Lemmy site with its own communities you can do that too, but you’d have to read the documentation on that.
Also, do you know how to view communities from multiple servers in the Jeboa app?
Just figured it out myself - in the top-left menu, click your username and then +Add Account, then you can enter the URL of the Lemmy server you want to connect to along with your credentials. You can then switch back and forth between your logins on the different servers.(edit) - Or do what @sexy_peach@feddit.de said below. I don’t know what I’m doing. :P
Of note - while logged into any one instance, you can also pick from the various filtering options:
So, selecting “All” at any given time will show you posts from all servers that are federated (share creds) with Lemmy.ml.
you can search for !communityName@serverThatTheCommunityIsOn.domain and your server will look it up and you can join it. No need to have multiple accounts.
Edit: instead of the above you can also search for the link to a community on a foreign server to look it up, both works.
i.e. if you were on a server that didn’t yet know about https://beehaw.org/c/news, you could search for https://beehaw.org/c/news or !news@beehaw.org on a lemmy server so the lemmy server will recognize that community and list it, you’ll then be able to join it, participate, mod it (if you’re given the rights) etc.