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 @dessalines.

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.

Mordiken, (edited )

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.

thoro,

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.

Pepp3r,

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.

EnglishMobster,
@EnglishMobster@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

Pepp3r,

Yeah I've also been on Lemmy since before federation, just haven't been active because of the lack of engagement in general. I've considered getting an invite for tildes, I will probably check it out, but most of the other alts are mostly filled with the sort of racists that reddit has been banning the last few years, so Lemmy and tildes are I think the only viable options atm.

I like Lemmy more because personally I'm a fan of shitposting and memes and Lemmy seems to support that more. I hope that the popularity of Mastadon in relation to twitter will help redditors understand what Lemmy is, and they can look past the tankie stuff. There are already instances like beehaw that arent tankie but are pretty popular. I guess I just really hope we can move on from reddit but keep the community that made reddit feel special in the early days.

EnglishMobster,

@Pepp3r @EnglishMobster It's also interesting because of how it opens things up beyond other platforms. For example - I found your post on Mastodon, and I'm replying from my Mastodon account.

The interface isn't as nice as Lemmy... but it's certainly extremely interesting that this works! (Or at least... I hope it does!)

Pepp3r,

Yo that is so cool! I didn't even know that Mastadon and Lemmy could interact like this!

EnglishMobster,

And you even showed up as a reply to my comment on Mastodon! Very neat.

I knew it was theoretically possible, but I had never tried it before. The thing is from the Mastodon end I see everything as a feed of comments, as if I followed everyone who posted to a certain community.

That probably works fine for now, but as Lemmy grows and these communities get huge I could see it completely take over my Mastodon feed.

I kind of wish it would just show the top-level posts with some way of hiding the replies by default (kind of like Twitter), but I also know that's not how Mastodon really does things. Still pretty neat!

Pepp3r,

That is so interesting. I'm not actually on Mastadon yet (still on twitter, I know...) but I can click the fediverse icon on Lemmy on your comment and see this thread on Mastadon, it takes me to sunny.garden which I assume is your mastadon instance. This is really cool lol

EnglishMobster,

Theoretically it would also work for other Fediverse stuff, like PeerTube (YouTube replacement). I wonder if once Lemmy takes off we'll see PeerTube start gaining traction next.

Pepp3r,

That would be really cool to see. I use Newpipe for youtube on my phone and subscribe to Nebula, I would love to see an alt take over the market share that youtube has a stranglehold over

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

EnglishMobster,
@EnglishMobster@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

XLRV,
@XLRV@lemmy.ml avatar

I'm in the same situation, I've never posted or commented on Reddit, but I loved using it to find information, I searched on Reddit before any other website, there's many great niche communities that exists.

I hope that Lemmy could grow enough to become a serious alternative. I don't like what Reddit has become.

Mordiken,

IMO the one thing that should be possible to do on lemmy is for users from one server to be able to post and comment on another server within the lemmy network.

Posts and comment made by users from a different realm could be published as some variaton of "user@server", that way we could have multiple instances of "user" on the network, just on different servers.

CannotSleep420,

Everything you said is already possible. I’m commenting here from a different instance.

Mordiken,

That's great! :D

EnglishMobster,

Not only is what you say perfectly possible - you can also have people from Mastodon talk to you!

This is my Mastodon account. I've followed a couple Lemmy communities and I'm seeing their comments in my feeds, just like they were "real" Mastodon posts.

It doesn't work the other way around (so you can't follow me in Lemmy, for example), but it's pretty neat that it works as well as it does!

Mordiken,

Oh wow this is great!!

dessalines,

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.

thoro,

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

BrooklynMan,
@BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml avatar

the big Digg migration in 2011

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

thoro,

Oh yeah guess so. No idea why I always think it was 2011.

BrooklynMan,
@BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

thoro,

That's around the time I first went to Reddit, and I agree. I'm getting very similar feelings.

The growth of users could be what pushes me to open Lemmy more than Reddit. I'm already seeing more and more varied activity than I was seeing in previous visits.

BrooklynMan,
@BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml avatar

yeah, i saw that the Beehaw admin said that the had doubled their userbase in a day, and that their traffic had gone through the roof. Their server got the reddit hug of death for a few hours last night.

smallerdemon,

I had heard of Lemmy before the Reddit API debacle, same as I'd heard of Mastadon before the Twitter Elon debacle. Just as the Twitter debacle really pushed me toward using my existing Mastadon account, the Reddit debacle is pushed me toward actually finding a Lemmy server to join and signing up.

I'm 57 (58 next month), so I was in my mid-20s when the Internet of the 90s really started to form. What was crazy was being in college and wandering over to labs on campus that had access to the latest protocol, https, and seeing Mosaic for the first time and kind of fantasizing about that being the future of the internet. ...and it was. But not always for the better or for the benefit of people. By the time I moved to San Francisco (not for dot com myself, but my spouse was in grad school) in 1999 the dot com boom was in full peak force about the crest the edge of the wave and completely bust in a couple of years (and hoo boy did it). The commercialization of the internet was utterly and completely underway during that early 2000s period, but I was still sort of shuffling around telnet based BBSes and still pulling a lot of my files with FTP. GOPHER was long gone by then, though, and usenet was always more of a hardcore user area in my personal circles (mainly due to the the fact of how overwhelming and disorganized it could be to me, which is so incredibly laughable now).

The promise of those early telnet and early web days almost completely disappeared and a lot of those people who saw the internet as a democratizing force either did find a way to make money from it or they just found jobs and turned into Makers during the 2000s. Now it feels like a lot of those Maker folks have started to find ways to come back to the internet in ways that bypass commercialization in order to have methods of having communities that aren't targets for bigots and fascists to intrude on safe spaces that a lot of people felt like they had found initially.

And it DEFINITELY feels like a lot of tech nerdy Millennials and Gen-Z have completely tired of the commercialized internet entirely and are inventing and finding ways to control their own communities. And friends... I fucking love it.

TerrorBite,
@TerrorBite@meow.social avatar

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.

ephemeral404,

that moved me. you sir, made my first day at Lemmy awesome

fchaverri,

@smallerdemon @nutomic it really puts things into perspective not being fed ads constantly, I stopped using Twitter since March and I definitely notice a relief...

Same thing with the algorithms 'suggesting' content: I prefer to browse the content by myself

TheLemmiestLemmy,

The algorithms are what I'll miss the least. I used Apollo for Reddit so I didn't see ads, but Reddit telling me what I'm going to see whether I want to or not really irritated me.

naoseiquemsou,

Thank you for taking your time to write about your experiences with the early internet. This is the kind of deep and informative comments that I loved fom the good days of reddit, but that seem to be slowly being killed.

Seeing your comment here was like a relief. I hope lemmy flourishes and becomes what reddit was.

Haunting_Tale_5150,

And it DEFINITELY feels like a lot of tech nerdy Millennials and Gen-Z have completely tired of the commercialized internet entirely and are inventing and finding ways to control their own communities.

I'm early gen z and it's so disheartening to see what's happening. I remember a time when people would fight for the right to post youtube poops, or when people went to war over uncredited reposts on ebaums world. For a while, there was no fighting. Things go bad? Oh just rest it off. Thankfully I think stuff like this is a return to form. Fight to keep the internet free and creativity high!

pleasemakesense,

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?

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

No its showing the actual vote count.

ImOnADiet,

lemmy doesn't need to obfuscate votes like reddit, since you have to be approved to join it's way harder to make spam bot accounts

dessalines,

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.

BrooklynMan,
@BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml avatar

reddit calls it "vote fuzzing", and claims it was to protect against fraudulent votes or whatever. i think it's bs and always have.

KelsonV,

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

thepiguy,

The number of users must be growing exponentially at this point. Woo.

BrooklynMan,
@BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml avatar

I'd love to see the numbers on that

thepiguy,

https://lemmy.perthchat.org/pictrs/image/7929b17d-7219-4ffd-ae1c-d36febf3cf72.jpeg

This is from yesterday. Wonder what it looks like today.

Obi,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

Wow even though some people here have been around a while, having joined yesterday I'll still feel like I'll have gotten in on the bottom floor if Lemmy takes off!

_JB, 
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
AF0105,

Lmao. I cannot believe that you wrote a whole song for that.

BrooklynMan,
@BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml avatar

This makes me sad. man, it was fun while it lasted...

jeta,

Just created an account because Reddit official app is a big no no for me. I really liked Infinity, and since I never use Reddit on my desktop, this is the only way for me to browse it without getting mad. I'm really interested to see where it all goes

nullthegrey,

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!

SubArcticTundra,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

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?

DarraignTheSane,

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.

SubArcticTundra,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

Ahh good I was afraid it was one community per server. Will try thanks

SubArcticTundra,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

Also, do you know how to view communities from multiple servers in the Jeboa app?

DarraignTheSane, (edited )

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 @sexy_peach 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:

  • Subscribed - List posts only from communities you're subscribed to
  • Local - List posts only from communities in this Lemmy instance/server
  • All - List posts from all (federated) Lemmy instances/servers

So, selecting "All" at any given time will show you posts from all servers that are federated (share creds) with Lemmy.ml.

sexy_peach, (edited )

you can search for !communityName 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 !news 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.

SubArcticTundra,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

Ahh great thanks for this!

XPost3000,

Yeah same here, Reddit is my social media mindless scrolling app and I'm really happy I have a promising looking alternative

ArtVandelay,

Something I just found out in the Settings page that I wish existed in every social media site: you can turn off scores!

dessalines,

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.

Obi,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

I was just wondering about the total count, great to find the reasoning right here.

ArtVandelay,

In all my years of being online I've come to really dislike "activity counters". Forums, as much as I'm nostalgic about them, used to have member ranks based on post counts, which also encouraged spamming. Then we've got these points systems in every social media website, making things even worse.

I'm glad devs like you are giving us a way to opt-out from it. Hopefully we can wean off enough people that it won't be a feature anymore (in the future).

RolandTheJabberwocky,

Pleasure to be here, honestly will probably keep using this too even if they backpedal the third party apps.

BrooklynMan,
@BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml avatar

I've already started to wean myself off reddit, ad I just know they're going to go through with pricing out the 3rd-party apps. There's a lot of communities here, and people keep creating new ones. It's like how reddit was in the early days.

i like it here.

dessalines,

Glad you like it so far.

One thing that would really be helpful, is to take a lot of those existing hobby communities on reddit, that are kind of the only reason to use the site, and ask their moderators if they'd be interested in making communities here or on another instance, or running their own lemmy servers. We'd be glad to help out with either.

BrooklynMan,
@BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml avatar

if we build it, they will come

dessalines,

Glad to have you!

Even if reddit does backpedal on API access, there are so many other terrible things about it, that we should just be contributing our time elsewhere.

Spidertax,

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 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

dessalines,

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.

Barbarian,

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.

EnglishMobster,

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!

dessalines,

👋

dessalines,

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.

seirim,
@seirim@lemmy.ml avatar

Hi, newbie here :-) How do we see all the posts on a topic like technology, but not just on Lemmy.ml where I happened to join, but from all over the "fediverse"? Could there be big discussions going on on other servers I'd just miss? How to get the complete bird's eye view on a topic across all of Lemmy?

Xer0,

I have a feeling this is kind of the way the fediverse will go. Click something that interests you, and it'll show every post across all instances / sites. Hopefully.

iod,
@iod@lemmy.ml avatar

yep. Topics, tags or whatever else that groups up related communities would be useful. For now this isnt supported but i'd also say while lemmy is still small, subbing to all subs that interest you here and on beehaw should be enough not to miss much imo.

div,

if we can get more reddit users to try this, people would make the switch.

SubArcticTundra,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

Yes the account creation process just needs to be more frictionless ideally

Obi,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

I'm reading threads on Reddit with people that act like it's the most complicated task ever, like come on just pick anything. On one hand I guess it acts as a filter of sorts but on the other it's a fact that it'll slow down adoption. Maybe there should be a text in big friendly letters that says it's not a big deal, just choose any and get started. Maybe even a randomised button where it just selects it for you? Maybe it could ask a couple of questions to the user to determine the best suited server?

The other big one is the whole part about having communities existing under multiple servers. It's nice that I can go subscribe to communities from any server but it does complicate things a lot if I just want to see everything from subject X, and fragments the userbase further. Right now it's ok because there's only a few servers and communities are focused on large topics but down the line when Lemmy gets big and we have communities for niche topics, it'll definitely be a headache. There needs to be a way to simplify this even if it's on the user's side.

dessalines,

Question for everyone, where is lemmy getting linked from? (besides me in that apollo thread yesterday)

CrabAndBroom,

I saw it in the PrivacyGuides subreddit, they're trying out an instance here too from the sounds of it.

sexy_peach,

yeah they're at !privacyguides. Already on their own server (lemmy.one) :)

gnoop,

There were some people in the Apollo discussion mentioning it. It's also in a stickied thread on various alternatives in /r/RedditAlternatives. That's where I found Lemmy and started browsing before joining up.

JuxtaposedJaguar,

I saw an AskReddit thread about Reddit alternatives and someone mentioned Lemmy. No link, but I found it through DDG.

banu,

Twitter, same as an alternative for reddit. Keep up the good work! 🫶

XLRV,
@XLRV@lemmy.ml avatar

I found Lemmy in many comments about Reddit alternatives, Lemmy seems nice, I hope it will grow :)

bahcodad,

I saw it mentioned on r/BoostForReddit in a thread about the api hike

AnotherOverHeaven,

Another boost user, welcome to Lemmy! The app is a lot like boost too imo, just without all the features currently.

I would wonder if the boost developer could get into contact with the app developer..

dessalines,

Welcome!

I also created jerboa, and based the UI mainly off of boost, because it is ( I should say was) my favorite reddit app. Boost was closed source tho, whereas jerboa is open. But I'd love to have them or anyone contribute if they can.

Imaginecat22,

I found it in the big AskReddit thread. Someone made a list of alternatives and this was at the top. It also seemed like the one least likely to have the problems reddit has (and had).

dessalines,

Ahh I see, here's that thread.

brokn,

The API mess was just the recent kick in the pants I needed to jump over when I learned about the r/piracy back up

elouboub,
elouboub avatar

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!

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