This is an attempt to explain Lemmy and Lemmygrad in a way that is easy for newcomers to understand.

What is Lemmy?

Short answer: Lemmy is a selfhosted and decentralized social link aggregation and discussion platform. Similar to Reddit, but not controlled by a single organization.
Long answer:

Lemmy is a selfhosted and decentralizated social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top. The UI and community, post, comment, and vote system is very similar to sites like Reddit, so much so that Lemmy is often referred to as a “reddit clone” or “reddit alternative”. Unlike Reddit however, Lemmy is decentralized and does not rely on a single server from one company; and Lemmy’s development and essentially all Lemmy instances are not for profit and not headed by corporations, but by small teams of individual people.

Lemmy is written mainly by @[email protected] and @[email protected], who are both Marxist-Leninists. The server is written in Rust using the library, Actix-web, and has the benefit of being fast, efficient and lightweight.

Lemmy is built around the concept of federation. In a nutshell, that means there are many independent instances (which anyone can host) that all share data with each other using some common internet protocol. The protocol that Lemmy uses is called ActivityPub, which also powers similar projects such as Mastodon and Pleroma. Basically, whenever a user on one instance does something, like create a post, comment or community; or vote on a post or comment, that information is copied over to all the instances that have decided that they want to receive content from that instance. Instances are uniquely identified by their domain name, and communities on other instances are identified by their unique name, followed by an @ character, and the domain name of the originating instance. For example, the user @[email protected] is AgreeableLandscape (me) from the instance lemmy.ml, and the community [email protected] is the communism community from the instance lemmygrad.ml.

The benefits of a federated social network is that it gives users freedom to choose exactly which instances they want to see. Different instances have different administrators, federate with (send and receive content from) or block different other instances, and generally have different atmospheres, cultures, languages, and popular ideologies. You can choose which instance is right for you, and make an account there if you’d like to participate in it. You can also create multiple accounts on different instances, for example, I have an account on lemmy.ml, as well as lemmygrad.ml.

You can find more information about Lemmy, as well as a list of popular instances, at our project homepage, https://join-lemmy.org/

What is Lemmygrad?

Short answer: It’s an explicitly leftist, mostly Marxist-Leninist, Lemmy instance.
Long answer:

Lemmygrad, identified by the domain name lemmygrad.ml, is an explicitly leftist and especially Marxist-Leninist oriented instance on the greater Lemmy network. It was created by Dessalines and Nutomic, the lead developers of the Lemmy project. It has everything from memes, discussion, media, learning, and more, all from a leftist perspective. Generally, it is expected that nearly everyone on Lemmygrad is far-left, and most are Marxist-Leninists. The instance is intended to serve as a safe haven for leftists, away from right-wing propaganda, misinformation, censorship, and anti-left attitudes.

Is Lemmygrad right for me?

Well, it’s impossible for me to give me a definitive answer, you’ll have to decide for yourself. But here are my personal thoughts as a Lemmygrad user:

  • If you are a communist, socialist, or Marxist-Leninist, then it is quite likely that this community could be a good fit for you, as most users here fall into that camp.

  • If you are an anarchist or other leftist, then Lemmygrad could still have things that you like and would be worth checking out, but the instance is less geared toward your political ideology, simply because most people here are not of those ideologies.

  • If you are not far-left, or simply don’t want your Lemmy browsing experience to be very political in general, then it is likely that you would find other Lemmy instances a better fit as most instances are not communist, and don’t even have an announced political/ideological affiliation. That’s the power of Lemmy, people can choose what instance is right for them. I recommend checking out a more general purpose instance, like Lemmy.ml, in that case.