Lemmy is

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

for running self-hosted social news aggregation and discussion forums. The site has similar features to

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images ...

Hacker News Hacker News (sometimes abbreviated as HN) is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by the investment fund and startup incubator Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "any ...

. Lemmy instances are run by a large number of individuals or corporations, each with their own content moderation policies. Users on individual instances submit posts with links, text, or pictures to user-created boards called “communities”. Communities are user created and local to each instance, however they may be posted to from other instances. Using a system of upvotes and downvotes users can influence what content appears at the top of the main feeds and of each community. Moderation is conducted by admins of each instance and moderators of specific communities. Lemmy is part of the

Fediverse The fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is an ensemble of Federation (information technology), federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websit ...

which allows users from other platforms to interact with posts created by Lemmy users. ActivityPub is the protocol used to allow Lemmy instances to operate as a federated social network and allows users to interact with compatible platforms including

Mastodon A mastodon ( 'breast' + 'tooth') is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus ''Mammut'' (family Mammutidae). Mastodons inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of th ...

and

PeerTube PeerTube is a free and open-source, decentralized, ActivityPub federated video platform powered by WebTorrent, that uses peer-to-peer technology to reduce load on individual servers when viewing videos. Started in 2017 by a programmer known as ...

. Lemmy was created by the user Dessalines on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

and licensed under the Affero General Public License. It is crowdfunded by individual donations and also receives funding through

NLnet The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the Internet throughout Europe in the 1980s. In 1997, the foundation sold off its commercial networking operat ...

's NGI0 Discovery Fund.

Overview

Lemmy comprises

user-generated content User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...

and discussions about the content in an

internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

. According to Lemmy, all 61 instances of Lemmy have a collective 1.2 thousand monthly active users. The "lemmyverse" is broken up into instances, which can be hosted by anyone, and further subdivided into communities. The most popular instances are lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, each with approximately 320 monthly active users. Registering an account on any particular instance is free and may require an email address or approval by the admin of the instance. Registering an account allows you to create and post to communities. Accounts on ActivityPub-compatible software are able to interact with Lemmy posts but may not be able to post to communities directly. Communities are user-created forums for discussions. They are an integral part of Lemmy, as you must post your link, image or discussion to a specific community. Community names begin with c/ in the URL and are uniquely mentionable using this format: !community@instance. Client apps for mobile devices include Jerboa and Lemmur for

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

, and Remmel for

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

References

{{Fediverse Fediverse Free and open-source software Free software Web applications