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