Lemmy (software)

Lemmy is a free and open-source self-hosted, federated social link aggregator and discussion forum created in 2019. Lemmy is comprised of a number of individual servers, or instances, which collectively form what is known as the Lemmyverse. Lemmy serves as an alternative to corporatized services such as Reddit. Lemmy instances do not contain advertisements and do not collect user information beyond what is necessary.

Functioning

Federation

Lemmy is compatible with ActivityPub which is a federation protocol used by many other projects (such as Mastodon or Peertube). Websites powered by Lemmy are known as instances.

This means that it is possible to interact with other instances which run Lemmy or, since an update in 2021, even with a Mastodon or Peertube user, all from one's home instance, which is the instance they created their account on. This is similar to phone calls, where it is possible to call someone that does not have a contract with your phone company.

Each Lemmy instance comes with an empty blacklist by default, which allows them to block other instances from interacting with them.

Communities

As a link aggregator, Lemmy functions similarly to Reddit with communities in which people can post text or pictures (or both at the same time). Other users can then comment in those posts, which become threads (similar to forums).

Users

Similar to Reddit, users have the ability create accounts. Depending on the instance, however, one may have to submit an application and have it manually approved by moderators in order to have an account registered.

Once their account is created, users can subscribe to a community so that posts from that community will appear in their Subscribed view.

There are three views:

• Subscribed, which shows communities one is subscribed to (including federated communities on other instances),
• Local, which shows all communities from the instance one is on, and
• All, which acts like Local but additionally shows all communities from all federated instances

Users are able to create communities on their home instance and become its moderator.

Administration and moderation

Lemmy instances possess an administration team, which is able to act on the whole instance as moderators. Moderators are different from administrators in that the former can only act on their own communities, and not on the whole instance. This means also that while moderators can only ban people from their community, administrators can ban people from the whole instance.

Usage

Since mid-2023, Lemmy has grown radically in its number of users, largely as a result of user-hostile changes to the Reddit API around that time which prompted a large-scale "migration" of Reddit users to alternative mediums.

Currently, the most popular instances of Lemmy are Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, Beehaw.org, and Lemmygrad.ml.

See also

• Mastodon
• Peertube