this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2023
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Lemmy

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83 users here now

Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm happy i'm finally here the website is also a way lighter than reddit

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks, happy to be here!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Would love a native iOS application. Maybe @[email protected] could be convinced as the brilliant creator of Apollo!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cancelled my Reddit premium renewal (it's 10 months away but still...) and donated with the link above.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is the first thing I tried to find, tbh. I agree it won't be a viable alt without.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think thats against the rules for some reason. Probably because they don't want to moderate all that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@nutomic @caos is this the year of the linux desktop (lemmy)? ^^

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This post alone now has as many upvotes as I saw someone on Reddit claim Lemmy had total users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy is fun!

slides £20 over to the reddit enhancement suite team to come over

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would really be awesome. I feel like Lemmy needs some UX improvements. It also needs an iOS mobile app

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It also needs an iOS mobile app

There is mlem (only on TestFlight yet).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how upvotes used to make me smile
And I knew if I just got rollin'
That I could help keep users scrollin'
And maybe there'd be content for a while

But July 1st makes me shiver
With far less content to deliver
Bad news on the frontpage
I can no longer engage

I can't remember if I erupted
When I read apps would be disrupted
But disappointment interrupted
The day that Reddit died

So bye, bye, old Reddit API
Stuck with Huffman through some updates but the updates were shite
And them good ole boys were snortin' gonewild 'n smite
Postin' this'll be the day that it dies
This'll be the day Reddit dies

Did you read the TOS?
And do you have faith in mods success
If users still engage with subs?
Now do you believe in open access?
Can ads save your failing assets?
And could you be less avarice heedless schlubs?

Well, I know that you're in need of clicks
'Cause I see you suckin' Newhouse dicks
You both killed third party apps
Man, I thought that you might give a crap

I was a lonely teenage software dev
With a git repository and a shit to give
But I knew those apps wouldn't live
The day that Reddit died

I started singing bye, bye, old Reddit API
Stuck with Huffman through some updates but the updates were shite
And them good ole boys were snortin' gonewild 'n smite
Postin' this'll be the day that it dies
This'll be the day Reddit dies

Now for ten years we'd moved on from Digg
And greed grows fast for a ventured pig
But that's not how it used to be
When the users came for the cats and memes
From apps made by the community
And content that came from you and me

Oh, and while those cats were growing old
The number crunchers grew too bold 
The communities dismissed
Now everyone is pissed

And while Lemmy federates with Marx
The concept knocks it from the park
It's time to migrate to an ark
The day that Reddit died

So bye, bye, old Reddit API
Stuck with Huffman through some updates but the updates were shite
And them good ole boys were snortin' gonewild 'n smite
Postin' this'll be the day that it dies
This'll be the day Reddit dies
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