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 @dessalines@lemmy.ml.
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.
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 @nutomic@lemmy.ml 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.
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.
Because our greatest influxes of new users come not when we develop new features, but when lemmy gets cross-posted somewhere, or when reddit messes up in such a way that communities want to migrate somewhere else. This current influx is due to something reddit did, not lemmy's developers.
I do this type of cross posting all the time, sometimes it can get over 1000 upvotes and sometimes it can get 0 and i don't really know what is the number of upvotes it will get before posting, one thing i do know is that if i find an open source project with interesting properties (such as a design or features i think are good) I might post it, and if i see a project with good features i will upvote it (which will give it more exposure).
Sure, but there are other open source reddit alternatives , as they say success happens when preparation meets opportunity and and those users shopping for a new platform might go to other alternatives or they might decide that despite the disadvantages of reddit the other platforms are not a better option.
So the root cause of all these gains is good features and designs, I won't say marketing is meaningless , having a post with a summary of attractive developments people could post on reddit/hackernews once or twice a year could be useful.
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).
On the number of users shrinking, I'll say that I quit using lemmy for several months, mostly due to losing hope on it. But after Reddit banned third party apps, I decided to come back.
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.