With the new API pricing announced by Reddit, apps like Apollo—a third-party Reddit client—has now been slated to shut down on June 30th, due the financial infeasibility of allowing users to continue using it. Users and moderators—who are often managing communities for free—have gone on a site-wide protest against changes introduced, among other reasons.
As reports of an exodus from Reddit unfolds, software like Lemmy and /kbin, have been gaining popularity. In fact at the time of writing this, Lemmy has grown to become the fifth most popular software on the Fediverse.
What are Lemmy and /kbin?
According to the official Lemmy website:
Lemmy is a self-hosted 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.
And, according to the official /kbin website:
/kbin is an open source reddit-like content aggregator and microblogging platform for the fediverse.
Create and moderate communities, meet people with similar interests, and develop your passions.
In other words, both Lemmy and /kbin bring Reddit-like features to the Fediverse.
With support for WebFinger and ActivityPub, users of Mastodon, Calckey, Friendica, or any other ActivityPub and WebFinger software can easily follow Lemmy and /kbin users.
However, a feature that Lemmy and /kbin have, that Mastodon does not, are groups.
Joining groups from platforms that don't support groups
So you haven't joined neither /kbin or Lemmy yet, and hesitant to join either, but would still want to join a group on the Fediverse?
There's good news! A group in Lemmy and /kbin is just another ActivityPub actor.
Mastodon, Calckey, etc. are all implementations of ActivityPub. ActivityPub has the concept of an actor. Both users and groups are actors, and because actors can follow other actors, this means a user can follow a group!
Following a group has a very similar procedure to following a user.
When visiting a /kbin or Lemmy Group page, copy the adress from the address bar, and paste it into the search bar of your Fediverse software. You should see the group show up as an entity that you can follow.
Congratulations, you have now joined a group!
Once joined, you should see posts being reposted (a.k.a. boosted) by the group that you "followed" onto your timeline.
To post into the group, your post should tag the group's account address.