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.
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?
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.
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.