 | |
 | |
| Developer(s) | LemmyNet [1] |
|---|---|
| Initial release | May 5, 2019 [2] |
| Stable release | 0.19.5 / 19 June 2024 |
| Repository | |
| Written in | Rust, TypeScript |
| Type | Social news |
| License | AGPLv3 |
| Website | join-lemmy |
Lemmy is a 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.
Lemmy 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 [update] . [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 [update] . [8]
Lemmy is made up of a network of individual installations of the Lemmy software 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 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]
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 intended to reduce the use of third-party Reddit clients, community members discussed relocating to Lemmy and other Reddit competitors. [16] Reddit banned a user for promoting switching to Lemmy along with the r/LemmyMigration subreddit as a whole, leading to a Streisand effect after it garnered attention on sites like Hacker News. The ban was reversed a day later. [17]
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 them later relaunching as Sync for Lemmy [19] and Boost for Lemmy. [14] Multiple other apps and browser clients have been developed since the increase in users after the Reddit API service changes.
Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are unpaid volunteers. It is operated by Reddit, Inc., based in San Francisco.
Anki is a free and open-source flashcard program. It uses techniques from cognitive science such as active recall testing and spaced repetition to aid the user in memorization. The name comes from the Japanese word for "memorization".
Invidious is a free and open-source alternative frontend to YouTube. It is available as a Docker container, or from the GitHub master branch. It is intended to be used as a lightweight and "privacy-respecting" alternative to the official YouTube website. Many privacy preserving redirecting software as well as YouTube clients use Invidious instances.
Steve Huffman, also known by his Reddit username spez, is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, a social news and discussion website, which ranks in the top 20 websites in the world. He also co-founded the airfare search engine website Hipmunk, which shut down in 2020.
Friendica is a free and open-source software distributed social network. It forms one part of the Fediverse, an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers.
Distributed social network projects generally develop software, protocols, or both.
Some communities on the social news site Reddit are devoted to explicit, violent, propagandist, or hateful material, and have been the topic of controversy, at times receiving significant media coverage. Journalists, attorneys, media researchers, and others have commented that such communities play a significant role in shaping and promoting biased views of international politics, the veracity of medical evidence, misogynistic rhetoric, and other disruptive concepts.
Alien Blue, stylized as AlienBlue, was an iOS application for browsing Reddit developed by Jason "Jase" Morrissey. It was available for the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and had a special optimised "HD" version for the iPad.
pump.io is a general-purpose activity stream engine that can be used as a federated social networking protocol which "does most of what people want from a social network". Started by Evan Prodromou, it is a follow-up to GNU Social, and is designed to be more lightweight and usable for general data instead of just microblogging. The largest StatusNet instance at the time, Identi.ca, which was the largest StatusNet service and was run by Prodromou, switched to pump.io in June 2013.
Matrix is an open standard and communication protocol for real-time communication. It aims to make real-time communication work seamlessly between different service providers, in the way that standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol email currently does for store-and-forward email service, by allowing users with accounts at one communications service provider to communicate with users of a different service provider via online chat, voice over IP, and videotelephony. It therefore serves a similar purpose to protocols like XMPP, but is not based on any existing communication protocol.
The Button was an online meta-game and social experiment that featured an online button and 60-second countdown timer that would reset each time the button was pressed. The experiment was created by Josh Wardle, also known as powerlanguage. The experiment was hosted on the social networking website Reddit beginning on 1 April 2015, and was active until 5 June 2015, the first time that no user pressed the button before the timer reached zero. The game was started by a Reddit administrator.
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.
Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.
The fediverse is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub has become the main standard used in the fediverse, a popular network used for social networking that consists of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.
r/IAmA is a subreddit for question-and-answer interactive interviews termed "AMA". AMA interviewees have ranged from various celebrities to everyday people in several lines of work. Founded in May 2009, the subreddit has gone on to become one of Reddit's most popular communities.
Pleroma is a free and open-source microblogging social networking service. Unlike popular microblogging services such as Twitter or Weibo, Pleroma can be self-hosted and operated by anyone with a server and a web domain, a combination commonly referred to as an instance. Instance administrators can manage their own code of conduct, terms of service, and content moderation policies, allowing users to have more control over the content they view as well as their experience. It was named after the religious concept of pleroma, or the totality of divine powers.
Pixelfed is a free and open-source image sharing social network service. The platform uses a decentralized architecture which is roughly comparable to e-mail providers, meaning user data is not stored on one central server. It uses the ActivityPub protocol, allowing users to interact with other social networks within the protocol, such as Mastodon, PeerTube, and Friendica. Pixelfed and other platforms utilizing this protocol are considered to be part of the Fediverse.
Eugen Rochko is a Russian-born German software developer, best known as the creator of Mastodon, a decentralized open-source social networking platform consisting of a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and moderation policies.
In April 2023, the discussion and news aggregation website Reddit announced its intentions to charge for its application programming interface (API), a feature which had been free since 2008, causing a dispute. The move forced multiple third-party applications to shut down and threatened accessibility applications and moderation tools.
