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.

creek,

Thanks for the warm welcome. This is my first time exploring anything fediverse related, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around how all this works. All I know is that I'm really dissatisfied with the decision making that is going on at Reddit, and if there comes a day where I can no longer use my beloved Apollo to access their service, that will most likely be where I officially dip out.

Arfuirl,

Thanks for the welcome, hope this alternative its actually good and with freddom , without the degeneration of Reddit

AccurateGoose,

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?

asexualchangeling,

So long as a significant portion of users stay and pay, they probably won't tbh

nothacking,

I think they know and don't care. First they make a good platform to attract users, then exploit the users and run away with the money. They know that making moves like this will eventually kill the platform, and don't care; They can always make a new platform under a different name and repeat. This happens to all platforms owned by publicly traded companyes, because they are obliged to make money for the shareholders.

oishiiburger,

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.

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.

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.

swarrior216,

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?

Surreal, (edited )

Would love a native iOS application. Maybe @christianselig could be convinced as the brilliant creator of Apollo!

018118055,

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

elight,

Good idea! Done!

TerrorBite,
@TerrorBite@meow.social avatar

@nutomic I'm a heavy Reddit user, but exclusively through a third party client, and now I'm considering signing up for Lemmy. In the meantime, let's see if I can participate from here?

TerrorBite,
@TerrorBite@meow.social avatar

Well that seemed to work

Haunting_Tale_5150,

Show me your ways! I am new to this

TerrorBite,
@TerrorBite@meow.social avatar

Also I followed @lemmy (which for you is !lemmy I think?) under the assumption that it would boost new posts from that community into my feed.

What it actually did was boost every single comment on every single post into my feed.

TerrorBite,
@TerrorBite@meow.social avatar

I have to browse Lemmy's web interface to view posts, then to reply I can copy the link to a post or comment, and paste that into the search bar of my Mastodon instance. This loads the post/comment as a Mastodon post which I can then reply to.

From there, everything (notifications, replies, etc) works like any other Mastodon thread on my end.

Haunting_Tale_5150,

Alrighty thanks! Now time to figure out the easiest way to cross post. So far Casskey and Akkoma are a no go lol. Guess it's time to make a vanilla mastodon.

haunting_tale,

@Haunting_Tale_5150 @TerrorBite test

Haunting_Tale_5150,

Nice! Now I have a way to lemmy when its down/on the go until some apps are ready

caffinz,

Thanks for the welcome! I was a little standoffish about signing up but then found an app for it and it honestly feels like reddit should at this point. (For those curious, it's Jerboa for Lemmy on the play store)

Ilikemoney,

I'm hoping this new influx of users helps to improve jerboa over time. It pretty as it is, but some areas could use attention.

Deiv,

I wonder if there are any other app alternatives. This one is nice, but lacks most features that many of the 3rd party apps had for Reddit

cascadia,

Lemmur is another one I've heard recommended for Android.

asexualchangeling,

Lemmur is no longer being maintained, I'd love it if some of the apps that are about to not work on reddit anymore switched to lemmy though coughinfinitycough

jarfil,

That's a pity, I had Lemmur installed and was wondering why it wouldn't workm IMHO a better name for a Lemmy app than "jerboa".

asexualchangeling,

Yeah I tried it too before I found out, imo one thing lemmy really needs is a selection of usable apps like mastodon has and reddit is about to throw away

ikiru,

Thank you all for welcoming us!

bankimu,

Yeah this is great. Reddit was also formed like this before they lost their way. I love that lemmy is open source and... is it decentralized? Have to read. Either way I really like that this is yet a small community but the posts are smart and the comments are interesting. I think this will be great.

iod,
@iod@lemmy.ml avatar

yes it's decentralized. And also federated, meaning it can interact with other software like Mastodon or kbin

jarfil,

How does the interaction work?

iod,
@iod@lemmy.ml avatar

Well if you have a mastodon account, which works far more like a twitter feed, you can also subscribe to a lemmy community on any instance and you'll get all posts and comments from that sub as a mastodon post in your timeline. it's a bit not very useful i'd say in its current implementation but hey, pretty cool.

you can also post to any kbin community and interact with the comments but that's far closer to the reddit model so a bit less alien.

privacyphreak,

Happy to see a federated version of what Reddit should be. Keep up the good work!

calcifer,

Hello there

d3Xt3r,
@d3Xt3r@lemmy.ml avatar

General Kenobi!

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. :)

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!

lg9001,

Hi everyone! Thanks for the safe haven, I don't want to see Reddit gradually kill itself anymore. Glad to be here!

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