Free Lemmy instance hosting

Written by @nutomic, 2022-03-17

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a selfhosted 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.

To see how it works in practice, you can browse the list of existing Lemmy instances.

Free instance hosting

After two years of full-time development, Lemmy is in a very usable state. The main problem facing the project now is a lack of users, and low awareness of the project. To remedy this, we the Lemmy developers are launching a new promotion initiative. We will host selected instances for free, for one year. This can be about any topic, like video games, art, or a general forum for your country. The only exception is politics (there are many political instances already).

The main purpose of this initiative is to promote the Lemmy project, so that more people will use it. For this reason, you should have a plan for growing and promoting the instance. For example, posting about it on your existing blog, posting on other forums, or inviting friends and colleagues. Paid advertising is unnecessary. Additionally, the topic should not be too narrow, but have relatively wide appeal.

At this time, most existing Lemmy instances and users are concentrated in Europe and North America. For this reason, we especially want to encourage people from other parts of the world to apply, and create instances for their own regions. All languages can be used.

If you are interested, send an email to contact@join-lemmy.org (in English) with a summary of the instance you want to create, how you plan to promote it, and some relevant details about yourself. The deadline is on 2022-04-18.

If the application gets accepted, you will be an administrator, which involves a few responsibilities. First of all, you need a domain (the address under which the site can be reached, like join-lemmy.org). Then you will have to configure the instance name, description, rules, and a few other settings. And finally, you will be responsible for the moderation, which means removing spam, banning trolls, and dealing with other unwanted content. As the number of users grows, it makes sense to add more administratos to help with these things. After one year (or earlier at your request), we will transfer all the data to you, so that you can run the instance yourself. Then you need a server to install Lemmy on (or find someone else to help).

Remember, if your potential instance doesn’t meet the criteria or is not accepted, you can always setup your own. People will be happy to help with any problems in our Matrix channel or /c/lemmy_support forum.

Please consider sharing this announcement with others who might be interested.