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 have a pretty good feeling that lemmy.ml is going to be the next reddit.com. Sure, there’s different instances of the federation, but this one seems more developed than most of the others.
So someone on a Mastadon community of servers could ping me in their server/website and I’d get a notification?
And can posts on one Lemmy server also show up in another Lemmy server? Like could a post be made here, braodcast into the lemmy-verse, and appear on another Lemmy website?
Yeah, it looks like it. I saw a message yesterday from someone posting a toot on Mastodon that showed up here, and I replied and they confirmed they got it. So I think they’re all connected somehow.
Yup, posting this from Mastodon. I love this integration. Curious to see what’s possible with this.
So are you able to read the Lemmy posts and comment threads using a mastodon app? Or through a mastodon implementation?
I’m using the official Mastodon app. Browsing Lemmy communities is a bit awkward this way since they’re essentially just another account retooting every user’s comments and replies in threads. But I can search for individual comments through permalinks. Your response also triggered a regular notification in Mastodon.