LemmyNet/lemmy

Building a federated alternative to reddit in rust

About The Project

Front Page	Post

Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Raddle, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you’re interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.

For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.

The overall goal is to create an easily self-hostable, decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators, outside of their corporate control and meddling.

Each Lemmy server can set its own moderation policy; appointing site-wide admins, and community moderators to keep out the trolls, and foster a healthy, non-toxic environment where all can feel comfortable contributing.

Note: Federation is still in active development and the WebSocket, as well as, HTTP API are currently unstable

Why’s it called Lemmy?

• Lead singer from Motörhead.
• The old school video game.
• The Koopa from Super Mario.
• The furry rodents.

Built With

• Rust
• Actix
• Diesel
• Inferno
• Typescript

Features

• Open source, AGPL License.
• Self hostable, easy to deploy.
  • Comes with Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes.
• Clean, mobile-friendly interface.
  • Only a minimum of a username and password is required to sign up!
  • User avatar support.
  • Live-updating Comment threads.
  • Full vote scores (+/-) like old Reddit.
  • Themes, including light, dark, and solarized.
  • Emojis with autocomplete support. Start typing :
  • User tagging using @, Community tagging using !.
  • Integrated image uploading in both posts and comments.
  • A post can consist of a title and any combination of self text, a URL, or nothing else.
  • Notifications, on comment replies and when you’re tagged.
    • Notifications can be sent via email.
    • Private messaging support.
  • i18n / internationalization support.
  • RSS / Atom feeds for All, Subscribed, Inbox, User, and Community.
• Cross-posting support.
  • A similar post search when creating new posts. Great for question / answer communities.
• Moderation abilities.
  • Public Moderation Logs.
  • Can sticky posts to the top of communities.
  • Both site admins, and community moderators, who can appoint other moderators.
  • Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments.
  • Can ban and unban users from communities and the site.
  • Can transfer site and communities to others.
• Can fully erase your data, replacing all posts and comments.
• NSFW post / community support.
• OEmbed support via Iframely.
• High performance.
  • Server is written in rust.
  • Front end is ~80kB gzipped.
  • Supports arm64 / Raspberry Pi.

Installation

• Docker
• Ansible
• Kubernetes

Support / Donate

Lemmy is free, open-source software, meaning no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.

• Support on Liberapay.
• Support on Patreon.
• Support on OpenCollective.
• List of Sponsors.

Crypto

• bitcoin: 1Hefs7miXS5ff5Ck5xvmjKjXf5242KzRtK
• ethereum: 0x400c96c96acbC6E7B3B43B1dc1BB446540a88A01
• monero: 41taVyY6e1xApqKyMVDRVxJ76sPkfZhALLTjRvVKpaAh2pBd4wv9RgYj1tSPrx8wc6iE1uWUfjtQdTmTy2FGMeChGVKPQuV

Contributing

• Contributing instructions
• Docker Development
• Local Development

Translations

If you want to help with translating, take a look at Weblate.

Contact

• Mastodon
• Matrix

Code Mirrors

• GitHub
• Gitea
• GitLab

Credits

Logo made by Andy Cuccaro (@andycuccaro) under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.