Lemmy
Developer(s)LemmyNet[1]
Initial releaseMay 5, 2019 (2019-05-05)[2]
Stable release
0.19.0 / 15 December 2023
Repository
Written inRust, TypeScript
TypeSocial news
LicenseGNU Affero General Public License, version 3.0
Websitejoin-lemmy.org Edit this on Wikidata

Lemmy is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social news aggregation and discussion forums.[3][4][5] These hosts, known as "instances", communicate with each other using the ActivityPub protocol.

History

Lemmy software was created by the user Dessalines on GitHub in February 2019[6] and licensed under the Affero General Public License.

In a 2020 post, Lemmy's co-creator Dessalines wrote about the origin of the name Lemmy. "It was nameless for a long time, but I wanted to keep with the fediverse tradition of naming projects after animals. I was playing that old-school game Lemmings, and Lemmy (from Motorhead) had passed away that week, and we held a few polls for names, and I went with that."[7]

According to the Fediverse statistics website the-federation.info, there were less than 100 instances of Lemmy prior to June 2023, increasing to 1521 instances of Lemmy with a total of 66,000 monthly active users as of 27 July 2023.[8] The most popular instances were lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, each with 27,000 and 4,000 monthly active users respectively, as of 27 July 2023.[8]

Description

Lemmy is made up of a network of individual installations of the Lemmy software known as "instances" that can intercommunicate. This departs from the centralized, monolithic structure of other social media platforms.[9] It has been described as a federated alternative to Reddit.[10]

Users on individual instances submit posts with links, text, or pictures to user-created forums for discussion called "communities".[3] Discussion is in the form of threaded comments. Posts and comments can be upvoted or downvoted[9] though the ability to downvote can be disabled by the admins of each instance.

Communities are local to each instance, however users may subscribe to communities, create posts and leave comments across instances. Moderation is conducted by the administrators of each instance and moderators of specific communities.[9][11] Community names begin with c/ in the URL (e.g lemmy.ml/c/simpleliving)[3] and are uniquely mentionable using the !community@instance format.[12]

On each instance, a front page presents the user with popular posts from several communities.[13] These posts can then be filtered according to origin: posts from the instance the user is on, or from all federated instances. It can also be made to only show posts from communities the user has subscribed to.[9]

Lemmy instances are generally supported by donations.[14]

Relations with other social networks

ActivityPub is the protocol used to allow Lemmy instances to operate as a federated social network. It allows users to interact with compatible platforms such as Kbin[9] and Mastodon.[15]

In June 2023, following the announcement of Reddit API service changes that would make the continued use of most third-party Reddit clients unfeasible, community members discussed relocating to Lemmy and other Reddit competitors.[16] In an effort to stop the discussion of such migrations, Reddit banned a user for promoting switching to Lemmy along with theplatform migration on a user and '/r/LemmyMigration' community as a whole. Reporting on sites such as Hacker News about the bans promoted the use of Lemmy only further via the Streisand effect, leading to the reversal of the bans a day later.[17]

Third-party software

Prominent third-party Reddit clients Sync and Boost which had shut down due to changes to the pricing of Reddit's API began working on Lemmy clients,[14][18] with Sync later relaunching as Sync for Lemmy.[19] Furthermore, multiple apps and browser clients have been developed since the increase in users after the Reddit API service changes.

References

  1. ↑ "LemmyNet". GitHub. Archived from the original on December 24, 2022. Retrieved December 24, 2022.
  2. ↑ "Release v0.0.5 Release". GitHub. May 5, 2019. Archived from the original on June 6, 2023. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
  3. 1 2 3 Beth Skwarecki (June 23, 2023). "The Four Best Reddit Alternatives". Lifehacker. Wikidata Q119860986. Archived from the original on June 23, 2023.
  4. ↑ "Lemmy". NLnet. Archived from the original on December 23, 2022. Retrieved December 23, 2022.
  5. ↑ "Lemmy Documentation – Introduction". Lemmy. Archived from the original on June 19, 2023.
  6. ↑ "Commits". GitHub. February 14, 2019. Archived from the original on June 7, 2023. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
  7. ↑ "Lemmy's origin story".
  8. 1 2 "the federation – a statistics hub". the-federation.info. Retrieved June 17, 2023.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 Max Eddy (July 25, 2023). "Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?". PCMag.
  10. ↑ "Top 11 Best Open Source Forum Software to Self Host [2021]". It's FOSS. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  11. ↑ "Korben.info: Lemmy – Le clone de Reddit libre et fédéré". Korben.info (in French). Archived from the original on November 29, 2021. Retrieved December 3, 2021.
  12. ↑ "Getting started with Federation". Lemmy documentation. Archived from the original on February 4, 2023. Retrieved January 14, 2023.
  13. ↑ "6 User-Friendly Reddit Alternatives That Prioritize Privacy and Community". MakeUseOf. June 22, 2023.
  14. 1 2 "These are the best Reddit alternatives". Android Police. July 7, 2023.
  15. ↑ "2021-11-17 – Lemmy Release v0.14.0 – Federation with Mastodon and Pleroma". join-lemmy.org. Retrieved November 30, 2023.
  16. ↑ David Meyer (June 15, 2023). "Twitter's inability to pay its rent is more urgent than building 'Twitter 2.0'". Fortune. ISSN 0015-8259. Wikidata Q119626980. Archived from the original on June 17, 2023.
  17. ↑ Amaar Chowdhury (June 8, 2023). "Reddit temporarily ban subreddit and user advertising rival platform". VideoGamer.com. Wikidata Q119626864. Archived from the original on June 17, 2023.
  18. ↑ "These were the top 12 Reddit apps for Android and iOS". Android Police. July 3, 2023.
  19. ↑ "Sync for Reddit returns as Sync for Lemmy". Android Police. August 3, 2023.
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