Lemmy review: a self-hosted Reddit alternative

NSFW content in Lemmy

A whole community or a single post can be tagged NSFW. Each member sets separately whether to show that content and whether to blur it. One admin setting turns NSFW content on or off for the whole server, with no plugin to add.

How Lemmy federation works

Lemmy servers talk to each other over ActivityPub, the way email moves between providers. A member on your server can follow a community hosted elsewhere, and your server then receives its posts and images, while your members’ posts go out to subscribed servers. Admins can federate only with an allowlist of named servers, block specific ones, or switch federation off entirely and run Lemmy as a standalone site.

What a Lemmy site looks like

Content lives in communities where people post links and text, vote them up or down, and reply in threads. There are no nested boards or signatures as on a classic forum. More than a dozen apps exist for iOS, Android, desktop and web through an open API. No company controls the project, it shows no ads and runs on donations.

Locking down a Lemmy server

Server settings are enough to keep the site to registered adults. Private instance mode limits reading to logged-in members. Registration can require an answer to an admin-written application question, or be closed. Community creation can be limited to admins, and a word filter and a legal information page are built in.

Installing Lemmy

Lemmy installs with Ansible, which the project recommends because it also eases updates, or with Docker. It uses about 150 MB of RAM in the default Docker setup, with negligible CPU. Managed hosts such as Elestio also offer it. The domain can only be changed before the server first federates. The stable release is 0.19.20 and 1.0 is in beta, so plan upgrades rather than rush them.

Strengths and limits of Lemmy