Welcome Reddit refugees!
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.
I still think the fediverse is using language that most people don't understand. My cousins, let alone my parents, won't understand half of what's written there. Federation? ActivityPub? Instance?
The best comparison I've heard that everyone I've explained it to seems to comprehend is that the fediverse is basically email 2.0. You can send emails with only pictures, text, video, or all the aforementioned together. In order to do so, you need to pick a server, just like you do with email, but in the fediverse they aren't "google", "aol", "yahoomail", but "lemmy.ml", "feddit.it", "mastodon.social", "chaos.social", "kbin.social", "kbin.pub", and others.
You will notice that "lemmy.ml" and "feddit.it" look very similar, but have different names - that's because they run the same software called lemmy. "mastodon.social" and "lemmy.ml" look very different and have different features, and that's because (you guessed it!) they run different software (mastodon vs lemmy). It's just like GoogleMail runs different software than YahooMail, has very different features, but can communicate with each other.
The fediverse is the same, just with 2 major differences: it uses email 2.0 (aka activitypub) and the software is opensource. That means developers (or anybody who wants to for that matter) can see the source code of the software. This is unlike Google, Yahoo, Yandex, AOL, who keep their source closed.
In the fediverse, the different software focuses on different things. Lemmy presents the fediverse to you like reddit, mastodon like twitter, peertube like youtube, diaspora like facebook, and so on and so forth. The great thing is, they can all talk to each other using email 2.0 (aka activitypub)! Therefore somebody on a server using mastodon can view post made on a server running lemmy with a video hosted on a server running peertube and comment on that video, right from their server that runs mastodon!
So please, pick a server with the software and conditions you like and have fun on the fediverse!
Interestingly, Reddit was open-source between 2008-2017. I'm hoping we can kind of re-capture the feeling of old Reddit without botspam, adspam, and more focus on community and improving experience than on "premium features" and monetization.
You mean to say you don't want to spend thousands on avatars?
Hahaha that's one of those things. "Look at me, I spent a bunch of money to get a bored looking monkey face, it's exclusive!!!"
Just recently made an account with kbin.social. It's crazy how all of this works right? But yeah, I'm really looking forward to this new style of doing social media. Can't wait to see how this evolves.
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.
I'm so tired of Reddit, so here I am trying this out!
I'm happy i'm finally here the website is also a way lighter than reddit
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?
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.
I did what I said... I put the "URL of the community" (https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy) into the search on my mastodon server.
It sounds like you found a shorthand.
I don't quite get it. How do you see posts from communities residing on other instances?
In the search type "!CommunityName" "@" "server.tld". an example [email protected]
Swap from "Local" view to "All". It's on the top of the web page and in a menu top-left on Jerboa.
Are communities unique? e.g. could you have a !gaming community on Lemmy.ml but have another !gaming community with different content on another server?
Yes, that can absolutely happen. In fact, that exact situation is happening right now with [email protected] and [email protected]
Not really an issue if you subscribe to both though.
In the longer term, I fully expect duplicate communities like that to resolve themselves with people predominantly using one over the other. EDIT: Or another possibility is that they might end up different due to moderation and rules (i.e: one is the memey gaming community and the other is the more serious one)
Twitter makes a series of bad and user-unfriendly decisions, causing many of it's users to flee to Mastodon. Now Reddit makes a series of bad and user-unfriendly decisions, causing many of it's users to flee to Lemmy. When will the big suits learn?
I think the elephant in the room is that endless year-over-year growth is unteneble and mathematically impossible. So as the suits get their hands on more and more, they are actually kind of stuck. That means e.g. reddit is unable to operate as normal, not necessarily because they lose money, but because they can't hit unrealistic targets.
Thanks for all you are doing! Very impressed with this and sorry I hadn't seen it before. But super happy it's here for the refugees!
Thank you so much for this! We just set up an instance as well, and we're going to play around with it more the next couple of days.
Thanks for having us here! I hope we can make Lemmy into a wonderful place as Reddit once was.
Lemmy looks great, I hope it manages to comes out on top on the upcomming battle of the reddit alternatives because due to it's decentralized nature it's pretty much impossible for lemmy to go south like reddit and digg.
The biggest issue with this platform for me, as someone who lurks more than posts, is the smaller user base and, consequently, fewer posts and communities. Otherwise, I love the decentralization, open source nature, and general community.
This reddit issue could be what pushes this platform forward. Will be interesting to see.
I also lurk a whole lot and thats my biggest issue as well. It looks like a lot of people talk about Lemmy when the topic of migrating from reddit comes up though, im hopeful that it takes off.
I've been on Lemmy for years now (before it could even federate!), but never really used it because there was nobody really here (and at the time there weren't any good Android apps - that's changed with Jeroba though).
The biggest competitor I've seen appears to be Tildes. I actually got an invite link to Tildes and have been trying it out.
The main difference is that Tildes is focused on high-quality discussion, trying to replicate old-school Reddit - before it went mainstream. Tildes purposely doesn't have memes or cat pictures, and comments are closer to paragraphs than anything else.
I think that's valuable... but I also know one of the big things that attracted people to Reddit were the memes. Not having memes is going to cause a lot of people to not want to stick around.
Lemmy is a lot more loose, so those people will be right at home. The main complaint I've seen from Reddit is that a lot of people are turned off when they see Lemmygrad as one of the most active instances, and they've been associating Lemmy with hardcore tankies.
i moved over to reddit from digg in 2007 during the whole digg v4 fiasco. migrating here feels very much the same. it's new, much smaller, works a bit differently (in a good way), and is still mostly undeveloped. This platform has a ton of potential as a reddit replacement, and, if they really do go through with pricing out the 3rd party apps, you'll likely see this place explode with traffic.
Reddit was once tiny too, with very little activity. Now its frustratingly the opposite.... a lot of bots, karma-farming, thinly-veiled advertising, copaganda, unpleasant and rude interactions.
I'd love to have back the feel of old-school forums, with smaller, tight-knit communities, and good content. While at the same time the fediverse gives us the opportunity to click the
All/ Global view, so we can see a wider universe of content.Oh yeah. I joined Reddit pretty early by most standards (2007/2008), and it was a much different place, especially before the big Digg migration in 2011. Not sure if I was just younger, but the default experience wasn't quite so intolerable as it is today.
I'm hoping this platform can be similar to those early days. I really like the community here. It's probably better than the early Reddit community. And the federated nature offers so many benefits compared to more traditional sites like Reddit.
There is a critical mass of users needed to drive posting and interactions for any online platform like this. It's a delicate balance. Further large growth is when you may start seeing the culture degrade, the dreaded eternal September. Maybe the federated structure will allow this platform to avoid that.
I do think this Reddit issue is definitely an opportunity to attract that critical mass of users though. I think you're on top of that.
Looking forward to seeing how it goes
fyi, that was in fall of 2010. although, I suppose, more people continued migrating into 2011, but the mass exodus was almost immediate in 2010. I remember how reddit had trouble handling all of the new traffic, much like lemmy instances are now, lol
You should have seen this place a week ago, it was very quiet. With all the new users its its getting a lot more active.
Haha, I was here 3 years ago, before Federation even worked. It was very slow, to say the least. ;)
It's been my first time back since 2020, and it's kind of wild to see it taking off. I'd imagine it'll only grow as the enshittification of Reddit continues.
I am very curious what's going to happen to the larger instances like lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org. Lemmy.ml was struggling to load for me a bit earlier; come July 1st when everyone gets their access cut off I'm very curious how slammed this'll be.
I'm 51 and started using the internet before HTML was a thing. This feels polished but also old school in a usenet / mud / telnet kind of way.
I'm liking it a lot.
A very minor thing, but I really like that you can see the downvotes on posts like you used to be able to do on reddit. Is there any vote confuscation like reddit did/does or is it straight up what the votes are?
Yup... I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers when reddit used to show full and real vote scores. They removed down-vote showing so long ago that a lot of people joined after, and had no idea that existed.
And of course most US-based social media platforms have removed downvotes / dislikes entirely.
Thanks, happy to be here!
Someone point me to the nsfw instance that allows porn. I just don't see lemmy being a viable alternative to reddit at this point.
This is the first thing I tried to find, tbh. I agree it won't be a viable alt without.
I think thats against the rules for some reason. Probably because they don't want to moderate all that
Let me know how I can help. I brought a lot of traffic to reddit, just to find out reddit admins are more sensitive than the mods that work for free.
I spoke up how poorly their mobile app changed towards modding on mobile, instead of taking the issues at hand they limited my number of subbreddits I could moderate.
I have knowledge in automod if that's a feature here, also I am pretty fast at finding information.
TLDR - fuck reddit here to help.
It sounds like you might be interested to host a new Lemmy instance. Right now the number of instances is still limited, and most of them cover niche topics. So it would definitely be good to have a Lemmy instance that is more mainstream. Hosting an instance requires some technical knowledge, but you can always ask for help in /c/lemmy_support or find someone else to take care of that aspect.
Thanks! Looking forward to seeing Lemmy grow :)
How are you guys responding to the OP? I am only able to to reply to comments on here. I'm confused lol
There is a text box just under the post with a "Post" button, at least for me:
I was using Jerboa and it was buggy as hell. Just using the mobile web at the moment. Hopefully the infinity (or Apollo Dev) will get things going over here.
If you're on Jerboa there should be a text box with three dots in it on the right side below the main post.
I was on Jerboa and I didn't see that. On the mobile web now. I heard there's an alpha for Jerboa so I may try that one instead.
Edit - I am on the alpha and I can see it now.
Thanks for the warm welcome. This is my first time exploring anything fediverse related, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around how all this works. All I know is that I'm really dissatisfied with the decision making that is going on at Reddit, and if there comes a day where I can no longer use my beloved Apollo to access their service, that will most likely be where I officially dip out.
Thanks for the welcome. :-)
Is there a guide on how to get started here? Searching for posts and communities, posting and commenting etiquette, etc.?
For example, when searching for communities focusing on movies, I found 3 communities named “movies”. How are these different?Which one should I be browsing?
If there isn’t such a guide, I can spend some time exploring and write one.
Docs here
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.
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 @[email protected] 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 ![email protected] 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 ![email protected] 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.
Anybody know if we had a spike of new users and activitiy here after reddit's announcement?
I joined lemmy like a week before reddit's announcement after checking it every now and then for months. I didn't see so many comments and upvotes on posts last week.
We definitely did have a spike in registrations here at least. One of the only ways people find out about lemmy is when it gets cross-posted. We could really use more news articles about it tho on open-source / privacy related spaces.
@BlazingFlames6073 @nutomic I at least joint because of reddits announcement, but I think the real wave will come when the technical subreddits go dark.
Lemmy is fun!
slides £20 over to the reddit enhancement suite team to come over
That would really be awesome. I feel like Lemmy needs some UX improvements. It also needs an iOS mobile app
There is mlem (only on TestFlight yet).
It has potential. Hopefully the creator of Apollo is able to jump in on that somehow and make it better. Heck, I'd love to help out with it myself.
This post alone now has as many upvotes as I saw someone on Reddit claim Lemmy had total users.
Hello! Also a reddit refugee here. I was thinking of making the switch before all this since reddit needs an increasing array of tweaks & add-ons just to be usable (RES, old reddit redirect, custom ublock filters etc.) so this seemed like a good time to start migrating.
Fingers crossed that the rapid decline of "mainstream" social media, news, forum sites leads to more widespread adoption of the fediverse. The internet used to be so good before we were all under the Boot...
anyway, hi y'all. I'd say I'm happy to be here, but I'm not... I'm just so disheartened at what our internet has become. BUT - I am hopeful. I think we're experiencing growing pains as a society and this is but one side effect of that; I truly believe the future is on our side, here.
either that, or we all return to monke and THAT is how we free ourselves of the collective brain rot that is web2.0 and beyond. :)
anyway, cheers to a Good Internet. may it still be possible. <3
In many ways, this is just going back to a time before these giant US centralized services took over all our communications platforms. The internet used to be small, independent forums and communities, with more accountability, a lot less trolling, and less bots.
Cancelled my Reddit premium renewal (it's 10 months away but still...) and donated with the link above.
Hello everybody! I was a Digg refuge, now I'm a Reddit refuge. This is pretty neat that its not funded by a company and relies on volunteers. I think this is going to be a good place. I was wondering if there is an app for IOS?
Would love a native iOS application. Maybe @[email protected] could be convinced as the brilliant creator of Apollo!
Imo lemmy seems to have more features than Reddit also, like editing post titles, having text alongside an image post, using third party apps (which will stop soon with Reddit) etc. Reddit is very slow to add updates that make sense, but lemmy moves fast and is a great piece of software.
Thanks! We've been feature-crazy for its whole history... but I've kinda learned the hard way that none of that helps adoption. The users are the feature, and its the only reason people don't leave reddit, facebook, etc.
What @[email protected] is doing with activitypub service interoperability is far more important than almost anything else we work on. Because at least mastodon and other services have an existing userbase that can plug into lemmy.
How did you conclude that? do you have data that supports that conclusion?
According to some metrics lemmy is growing, for example the number of instances grew by more then 92 percent, If you don't have big money for a marketing campaign that's probably how good organic "word to mouth" growth might look like.
It's also not just about the quantity of features, it's best to try to aim at "killer features", marking new comments that haven't been read could be one, but maybe a UX study will provide better answers.
Because our greatest influxes of new users come not when we develop new features, but when lemmy gets cross-posted somewhere, or when reddit messes up in such a way that communities want to migrate somewhere else. This current influx is due to something reddit did, not lemmy's developers.
@nutomic @caos is this the year of the linux desktop (lemmy)? ^^
This is the way. As a bit of a Reddit-addict I hope Lemmy (and perhaps other interoperable projects one day?) will take off. Centralized social media sites appear to be doomed to inevitable self-destruction. Protocols can survive.
Like Mastodon and other ActivityPub applications however, it is the Federated nature which IMO still needs some work. Not being able to easily browse remote communities, posts, scores, comments, etc. from the comfort of my home instance (which will also be the only portal to the federated world visible to mobile applications) is a problem. On Mastodon I often don't see all replies, and likewise on Lemmy I don't see any comments to this post yet.
I hope ActivityPub apps figure out a way to better synchronize remote and local state so users won't keep seeing incomplete/fragmented views of Fedi content.
Someone did create this Lemmy community browser, which searches all known instances for any community. It might be useful to integrate that into lemmy, or at least link to it, in some way, to help people discover communities not on their own instance already.
Does Lemmy have any rss support?
Yes, click the rss button on your fron page or communities.
By the way, the feed reachable via the RSS button in the account inbox has been broken for me, for a couple weeks. Probably should've reported that earlier...
It uses URLs like this: https://lemmy.ml/post/971001/comment/442247
Which, if I load it in my browser gives me an error
404: TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'send').If I simply remove the "post/971001/", it loads the intended comment: https://lemmy.ml/comment/442247
Open an issue in lemmy-ui if you would.
Could you create the issue? I don't use GitHub and I just won't spend half an hour to create a throwaway mailbox + account, to paste some text into the appropriate place.
Here's the issue text, as I would formulate it, and a screenshot, if you want it:
Account Inbox RSS-Feed has broken URLs
The feed reachable via the RSS-button in the account inbox has been broken for a couple weeks.
It uses URLs like this: https://lemmy.ml/post/971001/comment/442247
Which, if loaded in a browser, gives an error:
404: TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'send').If the section “post/971001/” is removed from the URL, it loads the intended comment: https://lemmy.ml/comment/442247
Steps to reproduce:
<Lemmy-instance-URL>/inbox, e.g.: https://lemmy.ml/inboxThis issue was reported by https://lemmy.ml/u/Ephera .
Hi all! Happy to be here. Been thinking about moving to an open source federated reddit-like for a while now, and the imminent death of RiF is what finally pushed me to sign up. Spent the last hour or so poking around different communities, and like what I see.
Glad to have you!
Federation is really our best hope to beat these US tech giants. People making instances and connecting with each other, and cultivating communities here and on other instances.
At some point I think the fediverse / lemmyverse will reach a critical mass where there's enough good content, that people won't feel the need to open up reddit at all.
One neat thing is that because Lemmy is ActivityPub, your posts show up on anything that follows the ActivityPub protocol (like Mastodon).
Speaking of which - hello from Mastodon!
I just wasted a ton of time trying to create an account here and it not working before realizing that I already made one nearly 3 years ago. Fun times. At least I'm here now. I'm also really scared/frustrated with the direction Reddit is going.
How many people will you actually miss from Reddit once this takes off?
People? A few, but maybe they will come here too.
Communities? A large number. Hopefully some of them will make the switch also if they haven't already
Welcome!
Testing, is this on?
Hello and thanks!
💗
Hi there!
I have a question about managing communities on different servers. I may be misunderstanding how this works, coming from Reddit, but I wanted to ask...
I have subscribed to a few different communities here on lemmy.ml
However, I noticed for example that there is no "literature" community on lemmy.ml, but there is on beehaw.org.
Is there a way I can get all my subscribed communities to show up in one subscribed feed? It looks like I have to constantly switch between sites to access different communities, which is very inconvenient, especially when using Jerboa.
Paste the beehaw community url into the search box on lemmy.ml, then you can interact directly with it.
Something I just found out in the Settings page that I wish existed in every social media site: you can turn off scores!
Yup! Hiding scores is absolutely better for our psychology. Constantly checking feedback numbers can be like a drug sometime.
We devs have a responsibility to not go along with all of the addictive UI patterns that silicon valley pays psychology-phds to help them develop. So there are some things we've chosen not to display, like total karma counts on your profile.
Few different questions/comments
When creating my username, it seemed to spin endlessly if I had any minuses in my name? Is that a known issue or maybe it was just having issues with demand and coincidentally worked when I removed any minuses?
Are upvotes/downvotes federated like posts are or are you only able to see the upvotes from your instance?
Also for looking for communities are you supposed to be able to change how it sorts them? Because it looks like you should be able to click on the columns, however, clicking on those (at least in Firefox) doesn't seem to do anything
Minus is not allowed, only underscore. But it should show an error, can you open an issue for that in lemmy-ui repo?
Votes are federated.
And community sort options are probably not implemented, I think theres an issue for that in lemmy-ui.
Looks like there's already a similar issue for the endless spinning thing when errors occur https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/988
Thanks for the welcome! Hopefully Lemmy will grow with the Reddit changes, I wanted to join a while back but the lack of users held me back; since the news I decided to join anyway, and hopefully others will do the same!
One question: I'm browsing via Lemmy app downloaded straight from GitHub, but some posts don't show the comments, even though I see there are several and if I use the browser everything is there. Bug? User error? Thanks in advance!
It might have something to do with the language settings introduced with the latest update?? It's unintuitive for me.
No idea, I'm here since a couple of days lol
If you go to the settings on the webpage ( https://lemmy.ml/settings ), is "Undetermined" enabled in the language menu?
The posts you're seeing might also simply have comments in languages that you don't know (and have rightfully disabled in the settings).
Thanks for the help! I checked and English is enabled. The comments I was referring to are in English so I don't think it's that. Thanks!
You could try to enable english and undetermined, maybe those posts you're missing don't have a language set?
I too find it very confusing.