Lemmy

---

A link aggregator / reddit clone for the fediverse.

Lemmy Dev instance for testing purposes only

This is a very early beta version, and a lot of features are currently broken or in active development, such as federation.

Front Page	Post

📝 Table of Contents

• Features
• About
  • Why's it called Lemmy?
• Install
  • Docker
    • Updating
  • Ansible
  • Kubernetes
• Develop
  • Docker Development
  • Local Development
    • Requirements
    • Set up Postgres DB
    • Running
• Configuration
• Documentation
• Support
• Translations
• Credits

Features

• Open source, AGPL License.
• Self hostable, easy to deploy.
  • Comes with Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes.
• Clean, mobile-friendly interface.
  • 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 #.
  • Notifications, on comment replies and when you're tagged.
  • 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.
  • 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.
• High performance.
  • Server is written in rust.
  • Front end is ~80kB gzipped.
  • Supports arm64 / Raspberry Pi.

About

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.

Why's it called Lemmy?

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

Made with Rust, Actix, Inferno, Typescript and Diesel.

Install

Docker

Make sure you have both docker and docker-compose(>=1.24.0) installed:

mkdir lemmy/
cd lemmy/
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dessalines/lemmy/master/docker/prod/docker-compose.yml
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dessalines/lemmy/master/docker/prod/.env
# Edit the .env if you want custom passwords
docker-compose up -d

and go to http://localhost:8536.

A sample nginx config, could be setup with:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dessalines/lemmy/master/ansible/templates/nginx.conf
# Replace the {{ vars }}
sudo mv nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/lemmy.conf

Updating

To update to the newest version, run:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dessalines/lemmy/master/docker/prod/docker-compose.yml
docker-compose up -d

Ansible

First, you need to install Ansible on your local computer (e.g. using sudo apt install ansible) or the equivalent for you platform.

Then run the following commands on your local computer:

git clone https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy.git
cd lemmy/ansible/
cp inventory.example inventory
nano inventory # enter your server, domain, contact email
ansible-playbook lemmy.yml --become

Kubernetes

You'll need to have an existing Kubernetes cluster and storage class. Setting this up will vary depending on your provider. To try it locally, you can use MicroK8s or Minikube.

Once you have a working cluster, edit the environment variables and volume sizes in docker/k8s/*.yml. You may also want to change the service types to use LoadBalancers depending on where you're running your cluster (add type: LoadBalancer to ports), or NodePorts. By default they will use ClusterIPs, which will allow access only within the cluster. See the docs for more on networking in Kubernetes.

Important Running a database in Kubernetes will work, but is generally not recommended. If you're deploying on any of the common cloud providers, you should consider using their managed database service instead (RDS, Cloud SQL, Azure Databse, etc.).

Now you can deploy:

# Add `-n foo` if you want to deploy into a specific namespace `foo`;
# otherwise your resources will be created in the `default` namespace.
kubectl apply -f docker/k8s/db.yml
kubectl apply -f docker/k8s/pictshare.yml
kubectl apply -f docker/k8s/lemmy.yml

If you used a LoadBalancer, you should see it in your cloud provider's console.

Develop

Docker Development

Run:

git clone https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy
cd lemmy/docker/dev
./docker_update.sh # This builds and runs it, updating for your changes

and go to http://localhost:8536.

Local Development

Requirements

• Rust
• Yarn
• Postgres

Set up Postgres DB

 psql -c "create user lemmy with password 'password' superuser;" -U postgres
 psql -c 'create database lemmy with owner lemmy;' -U postgres
 export DATABASE_URL=postgres://lemmy:password@localhost:5432/lemmy

Running

git clone https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy
cd lemmy
./install.sh
# For live coding, where both the front and back end, automagically reload on any save, do:
# cd ui && yarn start
# cd server && cargo watch -x run

Configuration

The configuration is based on the file defaults.hjson. This file also contains documentation for all the available options. To override the defaults, you can copy the options you want to change into your local config.hjson file.

Additionally, you can override any config files with environment variables. These have the same name as the config options, and are prefixed with LEMMY_. For example, you can override the database.password with LEMMY_DATABASE_PASSWORD=my_password.

An additional option LEMMY_DATABASE_URL is available, which can be used with a PostgreSQL connection string like postgres://lemmy:password@lemmy_db:5432/lemmy, passing all connection details at once.

Documentation

• Websocket API for App developers
• ActivityPub API.md
• Goals
• Ranking Algorithm

Support

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 Patreon.
• Sponsor List.
• bitcoin: 1Hefs7miXS5ff5Ck5xvmjKjXf5242KzRtK
• ethereum: 0x400c96c96acbC6E7B3B43B1dc1BB446540a88A01
• monero: 41taVyY6e1xApqKyMVDRVxJ76sPkfZhALLTjRvVKpaAh2pBd4wv9RgYj1tSPrx8wc6iE1uWUfjtQdTmTy2FGMeChGVKPQuV

Translations

If you'd like to add translations, take a look a look at the English translation file.

• Languages supported: English (en), Chinese (zh), Dutch (nl), Esperanto (eo), French (fr), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv), German (de), Russian (ru), Italian (it).

lang	done	missing
de	100%
eo	86%	number_of_communities,preview,upload_image,formatting_help,view_source,sticky,unsticky,archive_link,stickied,delete_account,delete_account_confirm,banned,creator,number_online,replies,mentions,forgot_password,reset_password_mail_sent,password_change,new_password,no_email_setup,language,browser_default,theme,are_you_sure,yes,no
es	95%	archive_link,replies,mentions,forgot_password,reset_password_mail_sent,password_change,new_password,no_email_setup,language,browser_default
fr	95%	archive_link,replies,mentions,forgot_password,reset_password_mail_sent,password_change,new_password,no_email_setup,language,browser_default
it	96%	archive_link,forgot_password,reset_password_mail_sent,password_change,new_password,no_email_setup,language,browser_default
nl	88%	preview,upload_image,formatting_help,view_source,sticky,unsticky,archive_link,stickied,delete_account,delete_account_confirm,banned,creator,number_online,replies,mentions,forgot_password,reset_password_mail_sent,password_change,new_password,no_email_setup,language,browser_default,theme
ru	82%	cross_posts,cross_post,number_of_communities,preview,upload_image,formatting_help,view_source,sticky,unsticky,archive_link,stickied,delete_account,delete_account_confirm,banned,creator,number_online,replies,mentions,forgot_password,reset_password_mail_sent,password_change,new_password,no_email_setup,language,browser_default,recent_comments,theme,monero,by,to,transfer_community,transfer_site,are_you_sure,yes,no
sv	95%	archive_link,replies,mentions,forgot_password,reset_password_mail_sent,password_change,new_password,no_email_setup,language,browser_default
zh	80%	cross_posts,cross_post,users,number_of_communities,preview,upload_image,formatting_help,view_source,sticky,unsticky,archive_link,settings,stickied,delete_account,delete_account_confirm,banned,creator,number_online,replies,mentions,forgot_password,reset_password_mail_sent,password_change,new_password,no_email_setup,language,browser_default,recent_comments,nsfw,show_nsfw,theme,monero,by,to,transfer_community,transfer_site,are_you_sure,yes,no

If you'd like to update this report, run:

cd ui
ts-node translation_report.ts > tmp # And replace the text above.

Credits

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