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Lemmy is a self-hosted, federated, free and open source social link aggregation and discussion platform.[1] It was named after the lead singer from Motörhead, the old video game Lemmings, the Koopa Troopa from the Super Mario series, and the furry rodent.
There are two explicitly communist Lemmy instances: Lemmygrad and Hexbear. Lemmygrad is dedicated to Marxism-Leninism,[2] and Hexbear is dedicated to left unity.[3]
The source code for Lemmy is hosted on yerbamate.ml and GitHub. Lemmy is licensed under the Affero GNU Public License version 3.
History
Formation
Lemmy was created in August 2019 by two communist developers known as Dessalines and Nutomic. Their goal for Lemmy was to provide an open-source alternative to Reddit that anyone could self-host and federate with other Lemmy instances, effectively exchanging content between platforms.
Growth
In the summer of 2023, Reddit increased its API prices, which destroyed third party apps and made many users defect to Lemmy.[4] Between June 1 and July 1, the number of active users in the past month increased from 1,334 to 50,961, an increase of more than 38 times. During the same period, the number of daily posts rose from 261,601 to 877,571.[5]
Federation
Lemmy is part of what is known as the Fediverse, a movement to make the web free, open source, and federated. Free can be understood as free in price as well as free from giant tech corporations such as Google, Meta (Facebook), and Twitter.
Federation allows an account made on one instance (one website using the Lemmy software) to interact in every way with another instance from their home instance.
Instances can block federation or individual instances if they do not wish to federate with them.
Since late 2021, Lemmy instances can also communicate with Mastodon (a federated micro-blogging software alternative to Twitter) and PeerTube (a federated video hosting platform, alternative to YouTube). This means that a user with a Lemmy account can subscribe to Mastodon accounts and see their content without ever leaving their home Lemmy instance.
Instances
As of 19 September 2024, there are 632 total instances of Lemmy[6] with 46,963 active monthly users and 1.46 million total user accounts.[7] The openly leftist instances Hexbear and Lemmygrad are the sixth and 13th most popular in terms of monthly active users, respectively.[6]
| Instance | Monthly active users[6] | Percentage of total active users |
|---|---|---|
| lemmy.world | 17,900 | 38.1% |
| lemmynsfw.com | 3,400 | 7.2% |
| lemm.ee | 3,200 | 6.8% |
| sh.itjust.works | 2,500 | 5.3% |
| lemmy.ml | 2,300 | 4.9% |
| hexbear.net | 1,800 | 3.8% |
| lemmygrad.ml | 555 | 1.2% |
External links
References
- ↑ Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse..
- ↑ @CriticalResist8 (2023-05-31). "Please note Lemmygrad is a Marxist instance (principally Marxist-Leninist)!" Lemmygrad: Announcements. Archived from the original on 2023-06-08. Retrieved 2023-06-15.
- ↑ "Hexbear". Hexbear. Archived from the original on 2023-08-03.
- ↑ @CriticalResist8 (2023-05-31). "Please note Lemmygrad is a Marxist instance (principally Marxist-Leninist)!" Lemmygrad: Announcements. Archived from the original on 2023-06-08. Retrieved 2023-06-15.
- ↑ "Stats for Lemmy". Fediverse Observer. Retrieved 2023-07-01.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "Instances". Lemmy Explorer. Retrieved 2024-09-19.
- ↑ "Stats for Lemmy". Fediverse Observer.