Remote View

2y ago

Welcome Reddit refugees!

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 @[email protected].

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.

355 comments

Interestingly, Reddit was open-source between 2008-2017. I'm hoping we can kind of re-capture the feeling of old Reddit without botspam, adspam, and more focus on community and improving experience than on "premium features" and monetization.
- You mean to say you don't want to spend thousands on avatars?
  
  Hahaha that's one of those things. "Look at me, I spent a bunch of money to get a bored looking monkey face, it's exclusive!!!"
  
  Hey, if it kept the servers running, maybe that wasn't the absolute worst thing they've ever done

Lemmy looks great, I hope it manages to comes out on top on the upcomming battle of the reddit alternatives because due to it's decentralized nature it's pretty much impossible for lemmy to go south like reddit and digg.
- The biggest issue with this platform for me, as someone who lurks more than posts, is the smaller user base and, consequently, fewer posts and communities. Otherwise, I love the decentralization, open source nature, and general community.
  This reddit issue could be what pushes this platform forward. Will be interesting to see.
  
  You should have seen this place a week ago, it was very quiet. With all the new users its its getting a lot more active.
  
  Reddit was once tiny too, with very little activity. Now its frustratingly the opposite.... a lot of bots, karma-farming, thinly-veiled advertising, copaganda, unpleasant and rude interactions.
  I'd love to have back the feel of old-school forums, with smaller, tight-knit communities, and good content. While at the same time the fediverse gives us the opportunity to click the All / Global view, so we can see a wider universe of content.
  
  i moved over to reddit from digg in 2007 during the whole digg v4 fiasco. migrating here feels very much the same. it's new, much smaller, works a bit differently (in a good way), and is still mostly undeveloped. This platform has a ton of potential as a reddit replacement, and, if they really do go through with pricing out the 3rd party apps, you'll likely see this place explode with traffic.
  
  I also lurk a whole lot and thats my biggest issue as well. It looks like a lot of people talk about Lemmy when the topic of migrating from reddit comes up though, im hopeful that it takes off.
  
  I'm in the same situation, I've never posted or commented on Reddit, but I loved using it to find information, I searched on Reddit before any other website, there's many great niche communities that exists.
  I hope that Lemmy could grow enough to become a serious alternative. I don't like what Reddit has become.
  
  IMO the one thing that should be possible to do on lemmy is for users from one server to be able to post and comment on another server within the lemmy network.
  Posts and comment made by users from a different realm could be published as some variaton of "user@server", that way we could have multiple instances of "user" on the network, just on different servers.

Let me know how I can help. I brought a lot of traffic to reddit, just to find out reddit admins are more sensitive than the mods that work for free.
I spoke up how poorly their mobile app changed towards modding on mobile, instead of taking the issues at hand they limited my number of subbreddits I could moderate.
I have knowledge in automod if that's a feature here, also I am pretty fast at finding information.
TLDR - fuck reddit here to help.
- It sounds like you might be interested to host a new Lemmy instance. Right now the number of instances is still limited, and most of them cover niche topics. So it would definitely be good to have a Lemmy instance that is more mainstream. Hosting an instance requires some technical knowledge, but you can always ask for help in /c/lemmy_support or find someone else to take care of that aspect.
  
  Appreciate it, there is a lot more to the story. Will make a great read and will make it a lemmy exclusive, because right now reddit admins are trying to keep it hush hush.
  Can't wait to get it all written up, on a more appropriate name.

Imo lemmy seems to have more features than Reddit also, like editing post titles, having text alongside an image post, using third party apps (which will stop soon with Reddit) etc. Reddit is very slow to add updates that make sense, but lemmy moves fast and is a great piece of software.
- Thanks! We've been feature-crazy for its whole history... but I've kinda learned the hard way that none of that helps adoption. The users are the feature, and its the only reason people don't leave reddit, facebook, etc.
  What @[email protected] is doing with activitypub service interoperability is far more important than almost anything else we work on. Because at least mastodon and other services have an existing userbase that can plug into lemmy.
  
  Thanks! We’ve been feature-crazy for its whole history… but I’ve kinda learned the hard way that none of that helps adoption.
  How did you conclude that? do you have data that supports that conclusion?
  According to some metrics lemmy is growing, for example the number of instances grew by more then 92 percent, If you don't have big money for a marketing campaign that's probably how good organic "word to mouth" growth might look like.
  It's also not just about the quantity of features, it's best to try to aim at "killer features", marking new comments that haven't been read could be one, but maybe a UX study will provide better answers.
- A good thing about community-driven non-profit software is the features which get implemented are typically more in-line with what the users want, rather than adding commercial things like more ads and grifting gimmicks.
  It is a mix of 'has this! doesn't have that yet' and some rough edges because it is still young (well, 4 years is young compared to reddit's 19 years) and only has a handful of developers, many of them hobbyists. But it's great to see it already growing, and updates are a pleasant surprise rather than a cause for concern.
- The only problem with lemmy right now is lack of users.
  
  So it needs to tackle the root causes, what is causing the lack of users, hopefully like mastodon and the rest of the fediverse that will put him on a growth path (if it is not already is on one), the-federation shows the number of instances is growing but the number of active users is shrinking (but that could be due to some instances choosing not to show their users).
- Reddit did add the ability to add text to anything recently, but yeah, it's weird it took so long while they keep releasing useless new rot.

A very minor thing, but I really like that you can see the downvotes on posts like you used to be able to do on reddit. Is there any vote confuscation like reddit did/does or is it straight up what the votes are?
- Yup... I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers when reddit used to show full and real vote scores. They removed down-vote showing so long ago that a lot of people joined after, and had no idea that existed.
  And of course most US-based social media platforms have removed downvotes / dislikes entirely.
  
  reddit calls it "vote fuzzing", and claims it was to protect against fraudulent votes or whatever. i think it's bs and always have.
- No its showing the actual vote count.
- lemmy doesn't need to obfuscate votes like reddit, since you have to be approved to join it's way harder to make spam bot accounts

This is the way. As a bit of a Reddit-addict I hope Lemmy (and perhaps other interoperable projects one day?) will take off. Centralized social media sites appear to be doomed to inevitable self-destruction. Protocols can survive.
Like Mastodon and other ActivityPub applications however, it is the Federated nature which IMO still needs some work. Not being able to easily browse remote communities, posts, scores, comments, etc. from the comfort of my home instance (which will also be the only portal to the federated world visible to mobile applications) is a problem. On Mastodon I often don't see all replies, and likewise on Lemmy I don't see any comments to this post yet.
I hope ActivityPub apps figure out a way to better synchronize remote and local state so users won't keep seeing incomplete/fragmented views of Fedi content.
- Someone did create this Lemmy community browser, which searches all known instances for any community. It might be useful to integrate that into lemmy, or at least link to it, in some way, to help people discover communities not on their own instance already.
  
  Thanks for that link. I was looking for something like that.
- Its not so difficult to implement functionality that remote content can be fetched automatically on demand like you describe. It just takes a certain amount of work, and so far we are busy with other things. These things take time when there are only two developers funded with donations, and not some startup with millions in venture capital.
  
  Really.. I thought you two were loaded with billions of VC funds... ;P
  Yeah, totally understood. What Lemmy is today is already quite impressive! I'm just chipping in my thoughts of what I hope can happen eventually, as a more unified experience is something I think I'd enjoy, and it may help make the platform more accessible.
  If I had any spare time (sigh) I'd help code this up. Rust is neat.

Fingers crossed that the rapid decline of "mainstream" social media, news, forum sites leads to more widespread adoption of the fediverse. The internet used to be so good before we were all under the Boot...
anyway, hi y'all. I'd say I'm happy to be here, but I'm not... I'm just so disheartened at what our internet has become. BUT - I am hopeful. I think we're experiencing growing pains as a society and this is but one side effect of that; I truly believe the future is on our side, here.
either that, or we all return to monke and THAT is how we free ourselves of the collective brain rot that is web2.0 and beyond. :)
anyway, cheers to a Good Internet. may it still be possible. <3
- In many ways, this is just going back to a time before these giant US centralized services took over all our communications platforms. The internet used to be small, independent forums and communities, with more accountability, a lot less trolling, and less bots.

Anybody know if we had a spike of new users and activitiy here after reddit's announcement?
I joined lemmy like a week before reddit's announcement after checking it every now and then for months. I didn't see so many comments and upvotes on posts last week.
- We definitely did have a spike in registrations here at least. One of the only ways people find out about lemmy is when it gets cross-posted. We could really use more news articles about it tho on open-source / privacy related spaces.
  
  Nice to hear that.
- Personally, I do feel like there's some more activity and you can see a spike in "Active users ratio" here, too: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
  The other graphs are all pointing downward, even for statistics that should pretty much always be going up, so I'm guessing, they'll only start becoming useful once the current collection period closes...? I don't quite know how these statistics work either. 🙃
  
  The-federation.info is unfortunately a bit unmaintained, https://fediverse.observer is a much better site overall, for all fediverse projects. Here's the stats for lemmy.
  
  Thanks a bunch for providing a graph link. I wasn't sure where to look lol.
- @BlazingFlames6073 @nutomic I at least joint because of reddits announcement, but I think the real wave will come when the technical subreddits go dark.

I'm 51 and started using the internet before HTML was a thing. This feels polished but also old school in a usenet / mud / telnet kind of way.
I'm liking it a lot.

Lemmy is fun!
slides £20 over to the reddit enhancement suite team to come over
- That would really be awesome. I feel like Lemmy needs some UX improvements. It also needs an iOS mobile app
  
  It also needs an iOS mobile app
  There is mlem (only on TestFlight yet).
  
  I've been messing around with some userscripts and custom CSS to help improve the UX a bit (and make the UI a bit more compact), I bet we could get some people together to work on a "Lemmy Enhancement Suite"

I've had my account only for about 30 minutes and I can see this fully replacing reddit for me. Here's to the future!
- Do you know how to create new sublemmys? I want to copy my favourite subreddits and tell people to migrate here. Do I need to buy a literal server?
  
  If you're talking about the equivalent of a subreddit here on lemmy.ml, that's just called a "community". Click the "Create Community" link up at the top of the site. If you want to create your own whole Lemmy site with its own communities you can do that too, but you'd have to read the documentation on that.
- Yeah same here, Reddit is my social media mindless scrolling app and I'm really happy I have a promising looking alternative

 undefined

    
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how upvotes used to make me smile
And I knew if I just got rollin'
That I could help keep users scrollin'
And maybe there'd be content for a while

But July 1st makes me shiver
With far less content to deliver
Bad news on the frontpage
I can no longer engage

I can't remember if I erupted
When I read apps would be disrupted
But disappointment interrupted
The day that Reddit died

So bye, bye, old Reddit API
Stuck with Huffman through some updates but the updates were shite
And them good ole boys were snortin' gonewild 'n smite
Postin' this'll be the day that it dies
This'll be the day Reddit dies

Did you read the TOS?
And do you have faith in mods success
If users still engage with subs?
Now do you believe in open access?
Can ads save your failing assets?
And could you be less avarice heedless schlubs?

Well, I know that you're in need of clicks
'Cause I see you suckin' Newhouse dicks
You both killed third party apps
Man, I thought that you might give a crap

I was a lonely teenage software dev
With a git repository and a shit to give
But I knew those apps wouldn't live
The day that Reddit died

I started singing bye, bye, old Reddit API
Stuck with Huffman through some updates but the updates were shite
And them good ole boys were snortin' gonewild 'n smite
Postin' this'll be the day that it dies
This'll be the day Reddit dies

Now for ten years we'd moved on from Digg
And greed grows fast for a ventured pig
But that's not how it used to be
When the users came for the cats and memes
From apps made by the community
And content that came from you and me

Oh, and while those cats were growing old
The number crunchers grew too bold 
The communities dismissed
Now everyone is pissed

And while Lemmy federates with Marx
The concept knocks it from the park
It's time to migrate to an ark
The day that Reddit died

So bye, bye, old Reddit API
Stuck with Huffman through some updates but the updates were shite
And them good ole boys were snortin' gonewild 'n smite
Postin' this'll be the day that it dies
This'll be the day Reddit dies

Lmao. I cannot believe that you wrote a whole song for that.

Something I just found out in the Settings page that I wish existed in every social media site: you can turn off scores!
- Yup! Hiding scores is absolutely better for our psychology. Constantly checking feedback numbers can be like a drug sometime.
  We devs have a responsibility to not go along with all of the addictive UI patterns that silicon valley pays psychology-phds to help them develop. So there are some things we've chosen not to display, like total karma counts on your profile.
  
  In all my years of being online I've come to really dislike "activity counters". Forums, as much as I'm nostalgic about them, used to have member ranks based on post counts, which also encouraged spamming. Then we've got these points systems in every social media website, making things even worse.
  I'm glad devs like you are giving us a way to opt-out from it. Hopefully we can wean off enough people that it won't be a feature anymore (in the future).
  
  I was just wondering about the total count, great to find the reasoning right here.

Just created an account because Reddit official app is a big no no for me. I really liked Infinity, and since I never use Reddit on my desktop, this is the only way for me to browse it without getting mad. I'm really interested to see where it all goes

Good to see this place. Hope to see it grow.

Pleasure to be here, honestly will probably keep using this too even if they backpedal the third party apps.
- I've already started to wean myself off reddit, ad I just know they're going to go through with pricing out the 3rd-party apps. There's a lot of communities here, and people keep creating new ones. It's like how reddit was in the early days.
  i like it here.
  
  Glad you like it so far.
  One thing that would really be helpful, is to take a lot of those existing hobby communities on reddit, that are kind of the only reason to use the site, and ask their moderators if they'd be interested in making communities here or on another instance, or running their own lemmy servers. We'd be glad to help out with either.
- Glad to have you!
  Even if reddit does backpedal on API access, there are so many other terrible things about it, that we should just be contributing our time elsewhere.

I have a pretty good feeling that lemmy.ml is going to be the next reddit.com. Sure, there's different instances of the federation, but this one seems more developed than most of the others.
you can mention or message anyone on any website using their address.
So someone on a Mastadon community of servers could ping me in their server/website and I'd get a notification?
And can posts on one Lemmy server also show up in another Lemmy server? Like could a post be made here, braodcast into the lemmy-verse, and appear on another Lemmy website?
- Yeah, it looks like it. I saw a message yesterday from someone posting a toot on Mastodon that showed up here, and I replied and they confirmed they got it. So I think they're all connected somehow.
  
  Yup, posting this from Mastodon. I love this integration. Curious to see what's possible with this.
- Correct, they just have to @ you.

Twitter makes a series of bad and user-unfriendly decisions, causing many of it's users to flee to Mastodon. Now Reddit makes a series of bad and user-unfriendly decisions, causing many of it's users to flee to Lemmy. When will the big suits learn?

Hi all! Happy to be here. Been thinking about moving to an open source federated reddit-like for a while now, and the imminent death of RiF is what finally pushed me to sign up. Spent the last hour or so poking around different communities, and like what I see.
- Glad to have you!
  Federation is really our best hope to beat these US tech giants. People making instances and connecting with each other, and cultivating communities here and on other instances.
  At some point I think the fediverse / lemmyverse will reach a critical mass where there's enough good content, that people won't feel the need to open up reddit at all.
- One neat thing is that because Lemmy is ActivityPub, your posts show up on anything that follows the ActivityPub protocol (like Mastodon).
  Speaking of which - hello from Mastodon!
  
  👋

I just wasted a ton of time trying to create an account here and it not working before realizing that I already made one nearly 3 years ago. Fun times. At least I'm here now. I'm also really scared/frustrated with the direction Reddit is going.
- Welcome!
- How many people will you actually miss from Reddit once this takes off?
  
  People? A few, but maybe they will come here too.
  Communities? A large number. Hopefully some of them will make the switch also if they haven't already

Hi everyone, I heard about the legendary digg exodus many times (I joined reddit in 2013). I have to say it's strange to be a part of this one.
Are there any good iOS clients for lemmy? I found https://github.com/uuttff8/Remmel but it looks like it hasn't been updated in a while, and it's also not available on most of the app stores.
- I'm an Android user, but /u/parentis_shotgun on Reddit mentioned mlem as the IOS app.
  I'm using jerboa.
  
  I'm digging Jerboa
  
  thank you!

Hi, newbie here :-) How do we see all the posts on a topic like technology, but not just on Lemmy.ml where I happened to join, but from all over the "fediverse"? Could there be big discussions going on on other servers I'd just miss? How to get the complete bird's eye view on a topic across all of Lemmy?
- yep. Topics, tags or whatever else that groups up related communities would be useful. For now this isnt supported but i'd also say while lemmy is still small, subbing to all subs that interest you here and on beehaw should be enough not to miss much imo.

Thanks for the welcome! Hopefully Lemmy will grow with the Reddit changes, I wanted to join a while back but the lack of users held me back; since the news I decided to join anyway, and hopefully others will do the same!
One question: I'm browsing via Lemmy app downloaded straight from GitHub, but some posts don't show the comments, even though I see there are several and if I use the browser everything is there. Bug? User error? Thanks in advance!
- It might have something to do with the language settings introduced with the latest update?? It's unintuitive for me.
  
  No idea, I'm here since a couple of days lol
- You should open an issue in that apps repository.
  
  You're right lol for some reason I thought you were the maintener for Jerboa lol my bad!

if we can get more reddit users to try this, people would make the switch.
- Yes the account creation process just needs to be more frictionless ideally
  
  I'm reading threads on Reddit with people that act like it's the most complicated task ever, like come on just pick anything. On one hand I guess it acts as a filter of sorts but on the other it's a fact that it'll slow down adoption. Maybe there should be a text in big friendly letters that says it's not a big deal, just choose any and get started. Maybe even a randomised button where it just selects it for you? Maybe it could ask a couple of questions to the user to determine the best suited server?
  The other big one is the whole part about having communities existing under multiple servers. It's nice that I can go subscribe to communities from any server but it does complicate things a lot if I just want to see everything from subject X, and fragments the userbase further. Right now it's ok because there's only a few servers and communities are focused on large topics but down the line when Lemmy gets big and we have communities for niche topics, it'll definitely be a headache. There needs to be a way to simplify this even if it's on the user's side.

I joined because of the reddit changes. I'm not going to PAY for a service that should be free, especially when you consider that they're already making a bucket load from users as it is. I foresee reddit dying very soon. No one is going to pay for an API. Well not many, anyways.
- deaddit

Question for everyone, where is lemmy getting linked from? (besides me in that apollo thread yesterday)
- I found it in the big AskReddit thread. Someone made a list of alternatives and this was at the top. It also seemed like the one least likely to have the problems reddit has (and had).
  
  Ahh I see, here's that thread.
- I found Lemmy in many comments about Reddit alternatives, Lemmy seems nice, I hope it will grow :)
- I saw an AskReddit thread about Reddit alternatives and someone mentioned Lemmy. No link, but I found it through DDG.
- I saw it mentioned on r/BoostForReddit in a thread about the api hike
- The API mess was just the recent kick in the pants I needed to jump over when I learned about the r/piracy back up
- I saw it in the PrivacyGuides subreddit, they're trying out an instance here too from the sounds of it.
  
  yeah they're at [email protected]. Already on their own server (lemmy.one) :)
- There were some people in the Apollo discussion mentioning it. It's also in a stickied thread on various alternatives in /r/RedditAlternatives. That's where I found Lemmy and started browsing before joining up.
- Twitter, same as an alternative for reddit. Keep up the good work! 🫶

Happy to give Lemmy a try! I had a bit of an adventure setting up my instance, but I think I've got it all working now :) Hopefully I'm now "here" to others on the Fediverse!
- You're posting from zueslink, to a community on lemmy.ml and I'm replying from blahaj.zone. You're federating :)
  
  Excellent, that is great news - thanks! :D

How do communities work across instances? Among other things, can a community have a moderator on another server? Would the top mod need to be on the same server?
- Basically, a user on any lemmy instance can subscribe to a group on any lemmy instance (as long as the instance admin hasn't blocked the other instance). So then they see activity on that group on their home instance.
  Moderators are appointed by the sub creator, and they can come from any instance. But of course, an instance admin can block/ban/delete content from their own instance, even if they aren't a moderator. The difference is, the moderators moderation action will federate to other instances, but the instance admins will not.
  
  The difference is, the moderators moderation action will federate to other instances, but the instance admins will not.
  Unless the admin and community are on the same instance, then admin actions will federate. Not so easy to explain...
- Mods can be on any server. A community is on a server, i.e. community a [email protected] and [email protected] are two different communities. You could follow one, none or both.
- From the user perspective, communities work pretty seamlessly. Hi from szmer.info for example!
- Among other things, can a community have a moderator on another server?
  Would the top mod need to be on the same server?
  Yes
  No

This morning we had as many new subscriptions to feddit.it as we usually have in a week! Have you also noticed the same peak on lemmy.ml?
Who knows... maybe after the Dunkirk of Twitter users landed on Mastodon, we would have a small migration of Reddit users...
- Definitely. lemmy.ml previously had like one new user per day, now its a few dozen per day.
  
  It's going to grow exponentially once people find out how cool Lemmy is.
  Curious - What led you to choose ".ml" (Mali) as the domain?

Would be nice to have all 3rd party apps adhering to lemmy that would be a bg fuck you to reddit and would bring so many people here.
- It's about time. They will

I'm very impressed with Lemmy and the fediverse in general. What a promising future for social media, especially after a decade of capitalism and centralisation slowly eroding the integrity of every commercial equivalent.

Someone point me to the nsfw instance that allows porn. I just don't see lemmy being a viable alternative to reddit at this point.
- I think thats against the rules for some reason. Probably because they don't want to moderate all that
  
  Yep, we don't have time to moderate that. This is a mostly dev-run instance, which means time spent moderating, is time not spent coding.
- This is the first thing I tried to find, tbh. I agree it won't be a viable alt without.
- Is there any?
  
  don't think there is

Dumb question i can't find an answer to: You see a post in a different Lemmy server than your own, and if you try to answer it says you're not logged in, because you're not in that server. How do i see posts/communities through your server so that i can vote or comment? Don't see a clear answer to this in the docs, or have missed it completely.
Edit: Partially answering myself: Go to the "search" box of your instance and put the name of the community you want in the format "[email protected]", it should show you that community through your server. Will update if/when i find an answer for direct posts that does the same.
- Its the same for posts or comments, you need to paste the url in the search bar of your instance. For this you should copy the url from the colorful fedilink icon.

Will there be flairs for sub Lemmings?
- There is an open issue, contributions welcome!
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1456

@[email protected] would you be able to provide any general guidance for potential community/sub-reddit/sub-lemmy creators or admins on the trade-offs involved in starting a new community (on an existing instance) vs starting a new instance?
I figure for those new to free and federated social, the case for starting an instance might not be clear, and could, provided technical abilities are available, be an attractive and useful option for some.
- Creating a community on an existing instance is less effort. However it means that the instance admins have full control over your community, and you have to follow their rules. There is also no way to automatically migrate a community to another instance. Having your own instance gives you full control over the rules/moderation, and also lets you apply custom themes or change instance configuration (eg signup mode).
  
  Out of curiosity would it be possible to automatically migrate users on a technical level?
  And are there any plans to implement this feature?

I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, i.e, if is the "Gaming" community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org?
EDIT: Yes, this was answered here - https://midwest.social/comment/159796
- I believe so, yes. That's what it looks like to me.

Really excited to be here! Especially after reddit's new API rules.

Thanks for the welcome! I was a little standoffish about signing up but then found an app for it and it honestly feels like reddit should at this point. (For those curious, it's Jerboa for Lemmy on the play store)
- I wonder if there are any other app alternatives. This one is nice, but lacks most features that many of the 3rd party apps had for Reddit
  
  Lemmur is another one I've heard recommended for Android.
- I'm hoping this new influx of users helps to improve jerboa over time. It pretty as it is, but some areas could use attention.

I still think the fediverse is using language that most people don't understand. My cousins, let alone my parents, won't understand half of what's written there. Federation? ActivityPub? Instance?
The best comparison I've heard that everyone I've explained it to seems to comprehend is that the fediverse is basically email 2.0. You can send emails with only pictures, text, video, or all the aforementioned together. In order to do so, you need to pick a server, just like you do with email, but in the fediverse they aren't "google", "aol", "yahoomail", but "lemmy.ml", "feddit.it", "mastodon.social", "chaos.social", "kbin.social", "kbin.pub", and others.
You will notice that "lemmy.ml" and "feddit.it" look very similar, but have different names - that's because they run the same software called lemmy. "mastodon.social" and "lemmy.ml" look very different and have different features, and that's because (you guessed it!) they run different software (mastodon vs lemmy). It's just like GoogleMail runs different software than YahooMail, has very different features, but can communicate with each other.
The fediverse is the same, just with 2 major differences: it uses email 2.0 (aka activitypub) and the software is opensource. That means developers (or anybody who wants to for that matter) can see the source code of the software. This is unlike Google, Yahoo, Yandex, AOL, who keep their source closed.
In the fediverse, the different software focuses on different things. Lemmy presents the fediverse to you like reddit, mastodon like twitter, peertube like youtube, diaspora like facebook, and so on and so forth. The great thing is, they can all talk to each other using email 2.0 (aka activitypub)! Therefore somebody on a server using mastodon can view post made on a server running lemmy with a video hosted on a server running peertube and comment on that video, right from their server that runs mastodon!
So please, pick a server with the software and conditions you like and have fun on the fediverse!

Thank you for the welcome! I have heard a bit about Lemmy in the past and am exited to give it a try.

Happy to give Lemmy a try!
- Welcome!

Well, might as well register. Hopefully this works out for everyone involved. Sad that reddit is pushing people out, but a federated model is better in the end.

Get off my federated lawn!

Hello and thanks!
- 💗

I just joined Lemmy because I was suspended from Reddit. Reddit Admin team is overtly corrupt.

Cancelled my Reddit premium renewal (it's 10 months away but still...) and donated with the link above.

Is this the first post to hit over 200 upvotes?
- This one looks higher: https://lemmy.ml/post/89740
  
  Nice

Thanks for having me. Even before this API bullshit I was thinking about getting off reddit for something else. Looking forward to spending some time here!
- Glad to have you!

@nutomic Welcome Reddit Leavers
fixed it

Just joined because of all the reddit shenanigans. Quick question: I'm posting from the beehaw instance and am wondering what happens to my account if the instance goes down? Does it just disappear?
- yes. Your account is tied to the server that it lives on. You could make another account called myUsernameBackup on another server, or even with the same name. Just as with e-mail.
  
  Ah okay sounds good. Guess I won't get too attached to this account just yet!

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. :)

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