Lemmy

Lemmy is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social news aggregation and discussion forums. These hosts, known as "instances", communicate with each other using the ActivityPub protocol. History Lemmy software was created by the user Dessalines on GitHub in February 2019 and licensed under the Affero General Public License. In a 2020 post, Lemmy's co-creator Dessalines wrote about the origin of the name Lemmy. "It was nameless for a long time, but I wanted to keep with the fediverse tradition of naming projects after animals. I was playing that old-school game Lemmings, and Lemmy (from Motorhead) had passed away that week, and we held a few polls for names, and I went with that." According to the Fediverse statistics website the-federation.info, there were less than 100 instances of Lemmy prior to June 2023, increasing to 1521 instances of Lemmy with a total of 66,000 monthly active users . The most popular instances were lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, each with 27,000 and 4,000 monthly active users respectively, .