Lemmy

Lemmy is a self-hosted, federated, free and open source social link aggregation and discussion platform. It was named after the lead singer from Motörhead, the old school video game Lemmings, the Koopa Troopa from the Super Mario series, and the furry rodent.

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. 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.

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.

See also

• Lemmygrad

External links

• Yerbamate source code
• GitHub source code
• Licensing