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.
It’s going to grow exponentially once people find out how cool Lemmy is.
Curious - What led you to choose “.ml” (Mali) as the domain?
For the lemmy devs and the main server lemmy.ml they probably chose .ml because it’s free and also because they’re marxist-socialists maybe?
Ahh, Marxist-Leninists, you mean? That’s possible. As long as they keep the tankies over in LemmyGrad and they don’t start making the entire platform “tankie-only” then I’m good with that.
Oops, yeah. They have been okay with moderation etc, but for some time a lot of the few active posters were from lemmygrad.ml, which was annoying at times imo.
LOL yeah. Tankies are frustrating. As a communist myself, I don’t understand why they are so combative to newcomers or other branches of leftist thought. It’s like, very cultish and doesn’t do anyone any service, let alone the cause of socialism. I’m much more in favor of left-unity than most, it seems. Because I think I actually care about it, rather than just larping as a revolutionary.
yup