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.ml.
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.
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.
You mean to say you don’t want to spend thousands on avatars?
Hahaha that’s one of those things. “Look at me, I spent a bunch of money to get a bored looking monkey face, it’s exclusive!!!”
Hey, if it kept the servers running, maybe that wasn’t the absolute worst thing they’ve ever done
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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 ) English4•1 year ago
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
Oh yeah guess so. No idea why I always think it was 2011.
- BrooklynMan ( @BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml ) English10•1 year ago
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.
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 ) English3•1 year ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
@Pepp3r @EnglishMobster@lemmy.ml 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!)
Yo that is so cool! I didn’t even know that Mastadon and Lemmy could interact like this!
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!
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.
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.
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!
Oh wow this is great!!
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.
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 @nutomic@lemmy.ml 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.
Thanks! We’ve been feature-crazy for its whole history… but I’ve kinda learned the hard way that none of that helps adoption.
How did you conclude that? do you have data that supports that conclusion?
According to some metrics lemmy is growing, for example the number of instances grew by more then 92 percent, If you don’t have big money for a marketing campaign that’s probably how good organic “word to mouth” growth might look like.
It’s also not just about the quantity of features, it’s best to try to aim at “killer features”, marking new comments that haven’t been read could be one, but maybe a UX study will provide better answers.
Because our greatest influxes of new users come not when we develop new features, but when lemmy gets cross-posted somewhere, or when reddit messes up in such a way that communities want to migrate somewhere else. This current influx is due to something reddit did, not lemmy’s developers.
Because our greatest influxes of new users come not when we develop new features, but when lemmy gets cross-posted somewhere
I do this type of cross posting all the time, sometimes it can get over 1000 upvotes and sometimes it can get 0 and i don’t really know what is the number of upvotes it will get before posting, one thing i do know is that if i find an open source project with interesting properties (such as a design or features i think are good) I might post it, and if i see a project with good features i will upvote it (which will give it more exposure).
when reddit messes up in such a way that communities want to migrate somewhere else.
Sure, but there are other open source reddit alternatives , as they say success happens when preparation meets opportunity and and those users shopping for a new platform might go to other alternatives or they might decide that despite the disadvantages of reddit the other platforms are not a better option.
So the root cause of all these gains is good features and designs, I won’t say marketing is meaningless , having a post with a summary of attractive developments people could post on reddit/hackernews once or twice a year could be useful.
A good thing about community-driven non-profit software is the features which get implemented are typically more in-line with what the users want, rather than adding commercial things like more ads and grifting gimmicks.
It is a mix of ‘has this! doesn’t have that yet’ and some rough edges because it is still young (well, 4 years is young compared to reddit’s 19 years) and only has a handful of developers, many of them hobbyists. But it’s great to see it already growing, and updates are a pleasant surprise rather than a cause for concern.
The only problem with lemmy right now is lack of users.
So it needs to tackle the root causes, what is causing the lack of users, hopefully like mastodon and the rest of the fediverse that will put him on a growth path (if it is not already is on one), the-federation shows the number of instances is growing but the number of active users is shrinking (but that could be due to some instances choosing not to show their users).
On the number of users shrinking, I’ll say that I quit using lemmy for several months, mostly due to losing hope on it. But after Reddit banned third party apps, I decided to come back.
Reddit did add the ability to add text to anything recently, but yeah, it’s weird it took so long while they keep releasing useless new rot.
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.
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.
It sounds like you might be interested to host a new Lemmy instance. Right now the number of instances is still limited, and most of them cover niche topics. So it would definitely be good to have a Lemmy instance that is more mainstream. Hosting an instance requires some technical knowledge, but you can always ask for help in /c/lemmy_support or find someone else to take care of that aspect.
Appreciate it, there is a lot more to the story. Will make a great read and will make it a lemmy exclusive, because right now reddit admins are trying to keep it hush hush.
Can’t wait to get it all written up, on a more appropriate name.
This post alone now has as many upvotes as I saw someone on Reddit claim Lemmy had total users.
The number of users must be growing exponentially at this point. Woo.
- BrooklynMan ( @BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml ) English12•1 year ago
I’d love to see the numbers on that
https://lemmy.perthchat.org/pictrs/image/7929b17d-7219-4ffd-ae1c-d36febf3cf72.jpeg
This is from yesterday. Wonder what it looks like today.
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!
This is the way. As a bit of a Reddit-addict I hope Lemmy (and perhaps other interoperable projects one day?) will take off. Centralized social media sites appear to be doomed to inevitable self-destruction. Protocols can survive.
Like Mastodon and other ActivityPub applications however, it is the Federated nature which IMO still needs some work. Not being able to easily browse remote communities, posts, scores, comments, etc. from the comfort of my home instance (which will also be the only portal to the federated world visible to mobile applications) is a problem. On Mastodon I often don’t see all replies, and likewise on Lemmy I don’t see any comments to this post yet.
I hope ActivityPub apps figure out a way to better synchronize remote and local state so users won’t keep seeing incomplete/fragmented views of Fedi content.
Someone did create this Lemmy community browser, which searches all known instances for any community. It might be useful to integrate that into lemmy, or at least link to it, in some way, to help people discover communities not on their own instance already.
Thanks for that link. I was looking for something like that.
Its not so difficult to implement functionality that remote content can be fetched automatically on demand like you describe. It just takes a certain amount of work, and so far we are busy with other things. These things take time when there are only two developers funded with donations, and not some startup with millions in venture capital.
Really… I thought you two were loaded with billions of VC funds… ;P
Yeah, totally understood. What Lemmy is today is already quite impressive! I’m just chipping in my thoughts of what I hope can happen eventually, as a more unified experience is something I think I’d enjoy, and it may help make the platform more accessible.
If I had any spare time (sigh) I’d help code this up. Rust is neat.
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?
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 ) English5•1 year ago
reddit calls it “vote fuzzing”, and claims it was to protect against fraudulent votes or whatever. i think it’s bs and always have.
No its showing the actual vote count.
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.
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.
Nice to hear that.
Personally, I do feel like there’s some more activity and you can see a spike in “Active users ratio” here, too: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
The other graphs are all pointing downward, even for statistics that should pretty much always be going up, so I’m guessing, they’ll only start becoming useful once the current collection period closes…? I don’t quite know how these statistics work either. 🙃The-federation.info is unfortunately a bit unmaintained, https://fediverse.observer is a much better site overall, for all fediverse projects. Here’s the stats for lemmy.
Thanks a bunch for providing a graph link. I wasn’t sure where to look lol.
@BlazingFlames6073 @nutomic I at least joint because of reddits announcement, but I think the real wave will come when the technical subreddits go dark.
Something I just found out in the Settings page that I wish existed in every social media site: you can turn off scores!
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.
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).
I was just wondering about the total count, great to find the reasoning right here.
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
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.
Lemmy is fun!
slides £20 over to the reddit enhancement suite team to come over
That would really be awesome. I feel like Lemmy needs some UX improvements. It also needs an iOS mobile app
It also needs an iOS mobile app
There is mlem (only on TestFlight yet).
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.
If Apollo was only open source, one could probably even port it. Heck, if there’s enough momentum from Reddit to Lemmy, it might become attractive for the dev.
I’ve been messing around with some userscripts and custom CSS to help improve the UX a bit (and make the UI a bit more compact), I bet we could get some people together to work on a “Lemmy Enhancement Suite”
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.
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!
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 diesLmao. I cannot believe that you wrote a whole song for that.
- BrooklynMan ( @BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml ) English1•1 year ago
This makes me sad. man, it was fun while it lasted…
