What is Lemmy?
From Lemmy's website:
Lemmy is a selfhosted, federated social link aggregation and discussion forum. It consists of many different communities which are focused on different topics. Users can post text, links or images and discuss it with others. Voting helps to bring the most interesting items to the top. There are strong moderation tools to keep out spam and trolls. All this is completely free and open, not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms.
Federation is a form of decentralization. Instead of a single central service that everyone uses, there are multiple services that any number of people can use.
A Lemmy website can operate alone. Just like a traditional website, people sign up on it, post messages, upload pictures and talk to each other. Unlike a traditional website, Lemmy instances can interoperate, letting their users communicate with each other; just like you can send an email from your Gmail account to someone from Outlook, Fastmail, Proton Mail, or any other email provider, as long as you know their email address, you can mention or message anyone on any website using their address.
Lemmy uses a standardized, open protocol to implement federation which is called ActivityPub. Any software that likewise implements federation via ActivityPub can seamlessly communicate with Lemmy, just like Lemmy instances communicate with one another.
The fediverse ("federated universe") is the name for all instances that can communicate with each other over ActivityPub and the World Wide Web. That includes all Lemmy servers, but also other implementations:
- Mastodon (microblogging)
- PeerTube (videos)
- Friendica (multi-purpose)
- and many more!
In practical terms: Imagine if you could follow a Facebook group from your Reddit account and comment on its posts without leaving your account. If Facebook and Reddit were federated services that used the same protocol, that would be possible. With a Lemmy account, you can communicate with any other compatible instance, even if it is not running on Lemmy. All that is necessary is that the software support the same subset of the ActivityPub protocol.
Unlike proprietary services, anyone has the complete freedom to run, examine, inspect, copy, modify, distribute, and reuse the Lemmy source code. Just like how users of Lemmy can choose their service provider, you as an individual are free to contribute features to Lemmy or publish a modified version of Lemmy that includes different features. These modified versions, also known as software forks, are required to also uphold the same freedoms as the original Lemmy project. Because Lemmy is libre software that respects your freedom, personalizations are not only allowed but encouraged.
Why host a Lemmy instance?
In addition to being a cool service that I can host for my friends, the whole Reddit API fiasco convinced me to create my own instance.
Reddit API fiasco?
Basically all 3rd-party reddit apps will be dead on July 1^st^, 2023 due to Reddit's proposed API pricing. Many users access Reddit via 3rd-party applications such as Apollo, RIF, baconreader, etc. Additionally old.reddit.com is presumed to be on the chopping block next.
The API pricing is ridiculous, like $1.2million per month, for these 3rd-party applications which is untenable for the developers.
Many subreddits are "blacking-out" the 12-14^th^ of June 2023 in protest. These 3rd-party apps are subjectively superior than the official reddit application which lacks many accessibility features and quality-of-life features that certain users depend on to access the site reliably.
Many Reddit users are looking to the fediverse (federated social media, e.g. mastadon) as an alternative to centralized social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter.
This same phenomenon occurred recently with Twitter due to Musk's take-over of Twitter where many turned to mastadon.social as an alternative.
Federated social media is an alternative to centralized social media where individuals can host/run instances of a specific service to subvert influences present within larger services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
Despite individual self-hosted instances, all instances of the fediverse can communicate with each other because of protocol adoption/standardization of W3C's ActivityPub protocol.