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.
@nutomic@lemmy.ml 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?
It would be possible to implement that (Mastodon has it), but there are no current plans to implement it in Lemmy. After all its easy to create a new account.