Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.
For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.
The overall goal is to create an easily self-hostable, decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators, outside of their corporate control and meddling.
Each Lemmy server can set its own moderation policy; appointing site-wide admins, and community moderators to keep out the trolls, and foster a healthy, non-toxic environment where all can feel comfortable contributing.
Features:
- Open source, AGPL License.
- Self hostable, easy to deploy.
- Comes with Docker and Ansible.
- Clean, mobile-friendly interface.
- Only username and password are required to sign up!
- User avatar support.
- Live-updating Comment threads.
- Full vote scores (+/-) like old Reddit.
- Themes, including light, dark, and solarized.
- Emojis with autocomplete support. Start typing :
- User tagging using @, Community tagging using !.
- Integrated image uploading in both posts and comments.
- Flexible posts can consist of a title and a combination of self text, URL, or nothing.
- Notifications, on comment replies and when you're tagged.
- Notifications can be sent via email.
- Private messaging support.
- i18n / internationalization support.
- RSS / Atom feeds for All, Subscribed, Inbox, User, and Community.
- Cross-posting support.
- Automatic related post search when creating new posts. Great for question / answer communities and reposts.
- Moderation abilities.
- Public Moderation Logs.
- Can sticky posts to the top of communities.
- Both site admins, and community moderators, who can appoint other moderators.
- Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments.
- Can ban and unban users from communities and the site.
- Can transfer site and communities to others.
Can fully erase your data, replacing all posts and comments.
NSFW post / community support.
- High performance.
- Server is written in rust.
- Front end is ~80kB gzipped.
- Supports arm64 / Raspberry Pi.
Lemmy enjoys growth as developers pivot from Reddit amid API charging controversy
Ituaf added Lemmy as alternative to WatchPeopleLive
jdeluxh added Lemmy as alternative to The Internet
Comments and Reviews
Lightweight interface that is fast like lightning as well as open source and federated. What is there not to love?
Probably the most well developed open source reddit alternative, with features added constantly.
reading posts incrementally is still too hard unlike reddit with reddit enhancement suite (which has a few other nice features that lemmy does not have yet).
Cool application but the user base sucks
indeed. full of radical commie.
Lemmy is just as fun and interactive as Reddit, but with better privacy and less trolls.
Federated alternative to Reddit
Documentation is non-existent; provided installation method doesn't work out of the box. Pathetic.
Great website with a great community, and it is the best Reddit alternative I found. The community is still small, but if you join, you'll find yourself enjoying the warm community feel. Site is very fast and simple to use as well.