What is Lemmy?

Welcome everyone! Lemmy is a reddit like platform that is broken up into multiple websites rather than one website owned by a single company. Structuring Lemmy as multiple websites gives users more power and control over their content.

For example, lemmy.ml and beehaw.org are both Lemmy websites. Any single Lemmy website acts much like reddit would: you can create an account on the website, leave comments and subscribe to subreddits (Lemmy calls subreddits communities). The power of Lemmy is that two different websites are capable of allowing users to interact with users on the other.

Each unique Lemmy website is called an instance. For example lemmy.ml and beehaw.org are two different Lemmy instances. The approach of enabling websites to talk to each other is called federation. Federation is the opposite of centralization. For example, reddit is centralized in the sense that it is owned and operated by a single company who can force their will onto their users. On the other hand, if a single Lemmy website started acting outside the interest of their users, those users could start using a separate Lemmy website and still access all the same content.

Your Lemmy feed

Like reddit, when you visit a Lemmy instance, you’ll be presented with a feed of posts. Unlike reddit, these posts can come from any Lemmy instance that is federated (talks with) with your instance. For all the control that a federated platform gives you, the cost is that you need to do extra work to get each of these separate Lemmy instances to talk to each other.

Lemmy instances discover each other and start federating when a user from one instance subscribes to a community from another instance. That means when you’re looking at a specific Lemmy instance, the feed is comprised of posts from communities that all the users from that Lemmy instance have subscribed to.

You may filter this feed by looking at “Local" vs “All”, but “All” still only means all the communities that your Lemmy instance knows about. To teach your Lemmy instance about new communities, a user from your Lemmy instance must subscribe to that community.

How to use lemmy.directory?

Our goal is to try to provide a feed of the widest range of Lemmy communities possible, by subscribing our Lemmy instance to nearly every community on other Lemmy instances. This aggregation of communities can be seen by browsing our “All” feed. You can imagine us trying to be like reddit.com/r/all.

So what we offer you is simple: hang out on our “All” feed and see what the whole Lemmy fediverse has to offer. And if you find any new communities you’re interested in, bring them home to your Lemmy instance. By searching for a community on your home Lemmy instance and subscribing to it, you’ll add that community to your home instance’s feed. The best part is, doing so enables everyone else you share an instance with to also start seeing content from this new community.

Subscribing your home instance to new communities helps share them with more people & helps us to build community with each other.

If you don’t have a home instance, you don’t need one. You can just hang out here and browse “All” in the same way you could browse reddit. If you’d like to make an account to upvote or leave comments, take a look at join-lemmy.org to find an instance for you to make an account on. Then help grow that instance by subscribing to new communities you find here.

More community building

In addition to offering a robust feed, this instance also provides a few communities of our own. Please feel free to check out and post on !suggest@lemmy.directory, a place to ask for where to find communities matching your interests. We’d love support from others to answer people’s questions and point them to the right place!

We also offer !promo@lemmy.directory as a place to share out new communities you’re trying to build or advertise new Lemmy instances.

Lastly, feel free to create a post in !chat@lemmy.directory if you have any questions or feedback for us. Please especially leave a comment if you find any communities that we’re not tracking and that you think we should subscribe to. Or if you find any inappropriate communities that you recommend we unfollow or defederate from.

Can I make lemmy.directory my home instance?

For now, lemmy.directory user registration is closed. In preparation for Reddit’s blackout and in anticipation of an increase in the number of new Lemmy users, all of lemmy.directory’s resources are going towards serving an reddit.com/r/all style feed.

In the future we may consider opening registration.