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.
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.
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!!!”
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.
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!
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.
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.
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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?
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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.
