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.

Cromutorium,

Just joined because of all the reddit shenanigans. Quick question: I'm posting from the beehaw instance and am wondering what happens to my account if the instance goes down? Does it just disappear?

sexy_peach,

yes. Your account is tied to the server that it lives on. You could make another account called myUsernameBackup on another server, or even with the same name. Just as with e-mail.

Cromutorium,

Ah okay sounds good. Guess I won't get too attached to this account just yet!

sexy_peach,

I think beehaw will last, don't worry. They have been very well managed for the last year.

CrabAndBroom,

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.

dessalines,

One of the benefits of both the back end and front end(s) of lemmy being open source, is that we can build in these wanted features directly, rather than relying on hacks that sit on top of the site.

Mir,

I don't quite get it. How do you see posts from communities residing on other instances?

Barbarian,

Swap from "Local" view to "All". It's on the top of the web page and in a menu top-left on Jerboa.

AineLasagna,

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?

Barbarian, (edited )

Yes, that can absolutely happen. In fact, that exact situation is happening right now with !gaming and !gaming

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)

AineLasagna,

I would like to know this as well. In Mastodon, I’m pretty sure you could access all Toots regardless of server, but communities seem to be locked to the server.

Bryggyth,

Thanks for the welcome! I'm loving the idea of the fediverse and I really hope lemmy can help recreate some of the enjoyment I used to get from Reddit.

AbSoluTc,

Thanks! Just signed up and moved over from Reddit. Really hope theirs a Lemmy app in the works

Barbarian,

If you're on Android, Jerboa works pretty well.

AbSoluTc,

Thanks, on iOS

annath,

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.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Paste the beehaw community url into the search box on lemmy.ml, then you can interact directly with it.

annath,

I tried searching for https://beehaw.org/c/literature and it didn't find anything.

iod,
@iod@lemmy.ml avatar

Try searching simply for "literature" it shows up. for some reason the full fediverse doesnt work for me either

Haunting_Tale_5150,

Searching other communities can be hit or miss. Sometimes going back to the home page, then going to search and inserting the link works if it didn't the first time.

zergling_man,

Might as well shill my client, clemmy here. 🕶

XLRV,
@XLRV@lemmy.ml avatar

Idk why but I can't access your link

zergling_man,

worksforme. What's it failing on?

XLRV,
@XLRV@lemmy.ml avatar

The site is stuck loading, I'm on mobile btw

MathAndBall,

Liking Lemmy so far. Looks and feels really similar to Reddit but also unique in its own way.

Informapirata,
@Informapirata@lemmy.ml avatar

This morning we had as many new subscriptions to feddit.it as we usually have in a week! Have you also noticed the same peak on lemmy.ml?

Who knows... maybe after the Dunkirk of Twitter users landed on Mastodon, we would have a small migration of Reddit users...

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Definitely. lemmy.ml previously had like one new user per day, now its a few dozen per day.

GuyDudeman,
@GuyDudeman@lemmy.ml avatar

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?

sexy_peach,

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?

GuyDudeman,
@GuyDudeman@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

sexy_peach,

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.

GuyDudeman,
@GuyDudeman@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

sexy_peach,

yup

Link,
@Link@lemmy.ml avatar

What is a 'tankie'?

Edit: Apparently a Stalinist or someone who defends the USSR sending tanks to Hungary to smash the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

GuyDudeman,
@GuyDudeman@lemmy.ml avatar

Yeah, that's a simplified way to explain it. Basically it's communists who are perfectly ok with genocide, as long as it's against a certain class of people rather than a certain race or religion. And it's also an attitude thing. It's like - they know they're in the wrong, so instead of being willing to have a discussion about the ethics of murder, they would rather just kick you out of the forum (and it's always just a forum - you'll never find these people in real life - in real life they're normal, regular people who are reasonable - it's just online when they Role Play as Lenninist/Stalinist/Maoist Revolutionaries). They delude themselves into thinking that they're the ones who are the "realistic/pragmatic" ones, and that those of us who think we can achieve communism through peaceful means or achieve a non-hierarchial/non-authoritarian social system are naive children (hence them calling us "anarkiddies" etc.). When in reality, they are the childish ones who insist on calling people names and wallowing in their cynicism and not allowing those of us with "cooties" into their little online treehouses.

It's like they've completely absorbed and fallen into the CIA PsyOp effort to divide the left - to silo out those who are willing to commit murder to achieve their goals (or at least pretend they do online), and separate them from the rest of the left, in their own little enclaves online, where they can be monitored and tracked.

It's funny how they've done this to themselves, honestly. They could have so many friends, if only they were friendly.

JetpackJackson,
@JetpackJackson@lemmy.ml avatar

Thanks for the welcome! This place seems really cool and I really like it here so far, I hope I can contribute some way in the future.

FaceDeer,

Not so much a question, as a couple of comments. One is of course a hearty thank you to the devs who've put so much work into creating something like this. Long ago I was an avid Usenetter, and while Reddit replicates a lot of the feel of Usenet its underlying structure is tragically centralized and closed. Lemmy feels a lot more like the Usenet of old and I would be very happy seeing it take off.

The other is: you've got a month left to iron out as many kinks as possible. :) The real flood isn't going to start until Reddit actually shuts off those APIs, because humans are lazy and I bet most just clicked through the announcement their third-party app gave them and figured they'd worry about it later. I've seen threads on Reddit where there was a lot of odd negativity about Lemmy and a lot of it seemed to come down to a confusing interface or stylistic complaints, those seem like things that can be addressed in a hurry and might be worth focusing on. I'm brand new here myself so I'll see if I can spot some to comment about more specifically in the future, but I'm sure you've got a backlog with that sort of thing in it anyway.

And if Reddit ultimately bans NSFW content, as they keep seeming to be edging towards, the flood will become a deluge. But that will likely be a separate phase of their enshittification process than the API thing, so who knows when that will be.

jarfil,

What would be some good NSFW places on Lemmy? Asking for a friend.

FaceDeer,

No idea, I'm afraid. And I'm happy that this is going to go down in my personal history as the first response I've received to a Lemmy comment. :)

lemming,

Welcome everyone ;)

WhoRoger,

Hello there

SubArcticTundra,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

Hii! Guess what this is my first comment! I'm sure we'll look back to this comment one day.

RoundSparrow,

It would seem nice to have an instance of Lemmy that focus on TV shows, films, music, bands, comics, etc

I'm watching the SIlo TV series currently (new episode today), etc.

Anyone working on this?

sexy_peach,

you could post to !entertainment for example :)

Give it a week and more general communities will work fine

SkyNTP,

I notice the link you posted. You use !entertainment but the URI is different, looks like a traditional webpage link: https://beehaw.org/c/entertainment. When I click on it in Jerboa, it opens the browser and it looks like beehaw.org is down (hug of death?).

What software currently recognizes !entertainment ? I guess Jerboa doesn't handle this type of link yet or is jumping to another instance beyond the scope of federation of an app like Jerboa?

sexy_peach,

It's linked to https://beehaw.org/c/entertainment, like you said. I don't think there is a way to link in a way where every server links it to their local view of that community.

Maxcactus,

Wherever you go, there you are.

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