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.
Few different questions/comments
When creating my username, it seemed to spin endlessly if I had any minuses in my name? Is that a known issue or maybe it was just having issues with demand and coincidentally worked when I removed any minuses?
Are upvotes/downvotes federated like posts are or are you only able to see the upvotes from your instance?
Also for looking for communities are you supposed to be able to change how it sorts them? Because it looks like you should be able to click on the columns, however, clicking on those (at least in Firefox) doesn’t seem to do anything
Minus is not allowed, only underscore. But it should show an error, can you open an issue for that in lemmy-ui repo?
Votes are federated.
And community sort options are probably not implemented, I think theres an issue for that in lemmy-ui.
Looks like there’s already a similar issue for the endless spinning thing when errors occur https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/988
I think your username was invalid. Unfortunately, the web UI currently doesn’t have client side validation for that to make the issue more transparent.