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 @[email protected].

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.

  • ClumsyHacker@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    I’m a bit confused as to how federation works.

    I have an account here, and see a community I want to join in another instance… but I the login option only lets me log in with an account on that instance.

    Is participating in communities cross-instance not possible yet?

    • Bob/Paul@fosstodon.org
      3·
      2 years ago

      One way is put the URL of the community you want to follow in the search box; that’s how I’m able to follow /c/lemmy from lemmy.ml on the mastedon server I’m using.

      Since you’re on a lemmy server, you can also switch between Subscribed, Local, and All at the top of the main feed. “All” is all communities from all federated instances that _someone_ on your home instance already subscribes to. If you see something in the All feed you like, you can join that community from there.