The Lemmy Guide
Because Roni Laukkarinen has helped popularize Mastodon in Finland by writing several blog posts and hosting a big instance, I decided to write my own guide about Lemmy. My motivation for writing the original Finnish version was that even though interest towards Lemmy was increasing, there were no guides in the language. Of course in English the situation is different, but I decided to write one regardless. I had previously made a thread about using Lemmy on Mastodon, but I don't like long threads on a microblogging platform. I have to practice what I preach, so here is an extensive guide as a blog post. In addition to guiding, I also touch on Lemmy's short history and my own experiences as an instance admin.
Like the Finnish original, this may also become a living document.
Table of contents
- Background
- Choosing an instance
- Communities
- Recommended communities
- Lemmy and Mastodon
- Mobile apps
- Miscellaneous
- Conclusion
Background
Lemmy is an open source decentralized message board platform that started development in 2019. The platform's format largely imitates Reddit, also called a "social news aggregator". Similarly to Reddit, all discussion happens in user-created communities. The users can send messages to the communities, these can be links, pictures or just text. These messages can be commented on, and they can be given up- or downvotes. Moderators can be appointed to communities, and they then deter spam and trolls with their tools.
Decentralization is both Lemmy's biggest difference with Reddit and a similarity with Mastodon. Reddit is a centralized platform operated by an American company, where the users are in the company's own "walled garden". Reddit can use their users' data for analytics and advertising purposes as it pleases, change its terms and conditions as it pleases and of course do whatever to ensure the shareholders' satisfaction as it pleases; no matter if it means crippling the overall user experience. Because Lemmy is decentralized and open source, no single entity owns it.
Just like Mastodon, also Lemmy is made of servers called instances where the users and communities reside. User of one instance can interact with users and communities from other instances, and vice versa. This interaction and networking is called federation. An example could be the telephone network and telecom operators: customer of Orange can use their phone to call a customer of AT&T or Sprint. Lemmy can also be seen similar to the archaic Usenet. The federation of Lemmy instances is called "the Lemmyverse", and the federation of all decentralized platforms is called "the Fediverse". More on Mastodon's interoperability with Lemmy later.
Similarly to Usenet, Lemmy also experienced its own Eternal September -like rush of new users in summer 2023. After telling about plans of going public, Reddit announced plans to make their previously free API chargeable. Because there were many third-party apps that used said API, their developers would have been charged at worst millions of dollars for its use. Many developers decided to stop the development of their apps altogether instead. Reddit's users got angry: many community admins decided together to lock up their communities for several days, and the protesting continued long after that in various forms. Reddit's actions can be seen as part of a larger phenomenon of commercial platforms degrading, also called "enshittification" coined by the author Cory Doctorow.
The following user rush into Lemmy was unprecedented, and the following Fediverse Observer's graph of my instance Sopuli's user statistics may speak for itself. It's erect!
Lemmy had problems with performance and scaling to large amounts of users at the time. Lemmy.ml, the instance of Lemmy's developers, was among the biggest, and because of both performance problems and facilizating decentralization they decided to lock registration temporarily for new users. Many instances got lots of new users, and Beehaw for example doubled its user count in one day. The founders of Mastodon.world founded Lemmy.world which gained over 20 000 users in June alone and which is nowadays the biggest Lemmy instance with over 176 000 users. So around this time the biggest instances that facilitated decentralization and evened the pressure brought by new users were founded.
Sopuli also got under pressure. I had to rescale Hetzner's VPS and add more storage space several times as Sopuli could crash often due to high user counts or slow down significantly. Due to crashes and constantly monitoring the instance I thought at times about "do parents of small children live like this?" The worst was over, as user counts stabilized, new instances were formed and the Reddit revolt faded. Performance problems and latency could happen even after that, until in June 2024 I decide to migrate Sopuli to Hetzner's dedicated server.
It appears that a new user rush is on the horizon due to Reddit's flashes of genius and political reasons. Reddit's /r/popculture community got locked up because Reddit's admins added a new tule that would mean automatic bans for users upvoting messages where violence is advocated. For example upvoting a Guardian article has been ban-worthy, and messages containing the name "Luigi" are set for later inspection due to possible advocation of violence. This has obviously angered Reddit users, many of which seem to have found Lemmy. While writing this, Lemmy broke the previous record of 54 000 monthly active users that was set during summer 2023.
Political reasons are about the US president Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the desire of the country's technology giants to kiss their rings. This has in turn motivated people to find European alternatives for American platforms. The interest towards Mastodon and the Fediverse has increased, and Lemmy has been also found this way. Lemmy has also gained interest in Finland recently, as several Facebook groups have founded parallel Lemmy communities and one new Finnish instance has been founded. We're living in interesting times!
Choosing an instance
Just like when choosing a phone operator for calling people, choosing a Lemmy instance doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Of course there are differences between instances, such as user base, speed, rules and available alternative frontends. One can also think about whether one is interested in some particular topic or just about everything. For general-purpose discussion the easiest choice are the biggest Lemmy instances, such as the previously mentioned Lemmy.world, Lemm.ee and Sh.itjust.works.
The Lemmy Explorer site is handy for choosing an instance. One can browse instances, search them or select them according to different tags.
The Lemmy project site also has a view for browsing instances. Also by pressing the Join Instance button an interactive view appears, and one can find a suitable instance according to interests and languages.
Communities
As Lemmy is a Reddit-like message board, communities are of course central. Community handles are in the form of [email protected]. When a community is put that way in a Lemmy discussion, it brings an user straight to it through their home instance, whereas posting a normal link brings them of course to different one. When sharing Lemmy links outside instances, there is a service Lemmyverse.link, through which one can create links with no ties into a particular instance. By using the service the user can set their own home instance, and when clicking the created links, they are brought into the link's content through their home instance.
User handles use the @ sign just like on Mastodon, so it's @[email protected].
There are three ways to find communities to subscribe to.
The first way is straightforward. Posts from the home instance's own communities can be found from the local timeline. By selecting All, one can browse posts from communities of instances federating with the home instance.
The second way is to go to the home instance's Communities view. Here one can browse subscribed, local or all communities in a list. Local communities mean the home instance's own communities, and all means communities from all the instances federating with the home instance. A variation of this is going to some other instance's Communities view, find an interesting community from there and copy its URL or handle into the home instance's search bar.
The third way is to use sites listing communities, the previously mentioned Lemmy Explorer is also greatly fitting for that. The user can search for communities, sort them and filter them according to instances. After that, the user can copy a community's handle and paste it to the home instance's search bar.
Recommended communities
Here I list some communities that I recommend for subscribing. These are not in any particular order.
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Lemmy and Mastodon
Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging platform whereas Lemmy is a Reddit-like message board. Due to these differences the interaction between these platforms is different. As communities are central for Lemmy, a Lemmy user can't follow individual Mastodon users or browse the timeline with tags. Because of communities, a Lemmy user doesn't need hashtags.
Fediverse groups are special accounts that the users can utilize in order to discuss certain topics. Communities from Lemmy instances show up as these kind of groups for Mastodon users. A group can be found by pasting its URL or handle into the search bar. The user can start following the group and its posts start to appear in the home timeline. This is similar to following tags or email groups. Here's [email protected] when viewed from Mastodon.
A group's posts and replies show up just like any other Mastodon user's toots that are boosted when published.
Posts in a group are just like any other toots with replies.
So how does one make a Lemmy post from Mastodon? Let's make a toot where the community's handle is mentioned (@[email protected]) and let's put the first row as a title. The toot can look like this for example:
Message title here Some text here. @[email protected]
Let's demonstrate this a little more. Here's a test post I made for demonstration purposes to [email protected] from Mastodon, and here's how it looks like on Lemmy.
Easy!
Mobile apps
On phone I just use Lemmy through a web browser, as the UI is responsive. Due to this, I am not an expert when it comes to mobile apps for Lemmy. Regardless, here are some mobile apps:
Jerboa is an Android app by Lemmy's developers. As the developers are naturally busy with Lemmy, it isn't being developed as actively as other apps. Based on Google Pay Store's reviews the app seems to be liked, and its user interface is considered streamlined.
Voyager is availaible for Android and iOS, and also for browsers. It supports, for example, multiple user accounts, swipe gestures and bookmarks. There are future plans for expanding the apps UI customization possibilities. The app has also gained good reviews on Google Play.
Mlem is an iOS exclusive designed for iPad. Even though the development is at an early stage, it's apparently considered the best Lemmy app for iOS.
More can be found from the Lemmy project page and even more from LemmyApps.
Miscellaneous
Just like with Mastodon, Lemmy doesn't have any recommendation algorithms for content. You are the recommendation algorithm! Because discussion is fragmented to different instances, things may feel a bit empty at first. Subscribe to communities that interest you, discuss and fill up your timeline.
For instance admins it's recommended to turn on membership applications and put some text as a question, just in case. There has been cases where a troll or spammer chooses an instance without membership applications and may move to next one after banning. Those instances usually become hotbeds of spam and get blocked by others.
One can up- and downvote content on Lemmy, but there is no user karma like on Reddit. On my opinion this is a good thing, as karma functions as a gamified way of increasing user engagement. This leads to negative behavior such as an artificial hierarchy between users and calculated content made for farming karma.
Conclusion
I have been hosting Sopuli since February 2021, which is four years. During this time, Lemmy has developed well and truly ahead: performance and usability have improved and I'd think the early problems hindering user experience are gone. The user rush of summer 2023 especially worked as a catalyst for improvements, as interest towards Lemmy increased and new instances were founded. Interest towards Lemmy seems to have increased again, which makes me more optimist towards the platform's future. Lemmy may have its shortcomings, but I see it as a good Reddit alternative.
Hosting my own Fediverse message board and thus being part of the change has felt rewarding, teaching and exciting. One often hears people lamenting about the Internet currently being a playground for large corporations and how forums are dead. The last few years have however shown how change is possible when people take the Internet platforms and infrastructure into their own hands. The more big corporations cripple their platforms in hopes of maximizing profits, the more people will move to the Fediverse and stay there. At the same time, the spirit of old Internet is returning and the change will likely have a positive impact on the real world. What's happening in the world right now may look bad, but we are living in promising times when it comes to the Internet.
Löydä minut fediversumista: / Find me from the Fediverse:
Mastodon: @[email protected] Lemmy: @[email protected]
