Apologies for the delay; got caught up working on a paper for university, but finally got around to writing my version of a megathread post. I understand if @[email protected] decides to keep the new one that was just posted instead, given my tardiness, but here’s what I came up with:

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a network of news aggregation and discussion forums, similar to Reddit. The platform has thousands of communities—Lemmy’s name for subreddits—covering a vast range of interests, ranging from common ones such as [email protected] to niche ones such as [email protected]. Lemmy’s federated structure means that users on one instance—the name for a server hosting Lemmy—can message users and subscribe to communities on hundreds of other instances as if all were on a centralized platform like Reddit.

Centralization incentivizes a platform’s owner to progressively increase monetization practices over time, as has occurred with Reddit, due to the inability of users to leave without losing access to valued content. Lemmy’s federated structure affords its users the flexibility of joining one instance and moving to another without losing access to their communities, discouraging the administrator of any instance from prioritizing profits over the best interest of users.

How do I join Lemmy?

Joining Lemmy is like making an email account: after making an account on one instance, you can message users and subscribe to communities across different instances. Although you can navigate the full instance list and choose one yourself, I suggest joining lemmy.ca (hosted in US), discuss.online (hosted in US), or sopuli.xyz (hosted in Germany), as they have high uptime rates and use Fediseer to defederate from spam instances. To maximize your Lemmy connection speed, choosing an instance hosted near to you is recommended.

As an alternative to the default user interface, third-party developers have created several Lemmy web apps for use in desktop and mobile browsers, as well as standalone apps for iOS and Android. Voyager is often recommended for mobile, having distinct web app, iOS, and Android versions available. Alternative web apps include Alexandrite and Photon, while alternative mobile apps include Arctic for iOS, Connect for Android, and Thunder for both iOS and Android.

(I started to write a paragraph about how a user from one’s home instance needs to subscribe to a community for it to become searchable, and was going to mention Lemmy Federate and Lemmyverse as solutions to that problem, but it might be too in-depth for an introductory post.)