Lemmy

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.

Visit join-lemmy.org to browse Lemmy instances or install your own.

Lemmy is entirely open source and funded exclusively by donations. The maintainers dessalines and nutomic have been working on it full time for the past years thanks to generous support by the NLnet foundation. Now that this support is coming to an end, the project is increasingly relying on donations from individual users to fund development. Your donation allows the developers to fully focus on making Lemmy better for everyone.