Fedify vs Lemmy
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted social networks options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Fedify with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped pump.io Pleroma Friendica Firefish Bridgy Fed Takahe Microblog.pub snac Hometown Glitch-soc Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Hollo Ktistec Akkoma Honk Epicyon Iceshrimp
Compare Lemmy with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Forem Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Lobsters Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago Loomio Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB Elgg Friendica Mobilizon Phanpy Firefish OSSN Bridgy Fed Takahe Tildes snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc Soapbox Enigma 1/2 BBS Chirpy PieFed kbin Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Smithereen Discuit Postmarks Lemmy-UI Alternative Photon Mastodon Bird UI Wavelog Hollo Gathio Loops Snikket Ktistec Libremdb Mbin Trustroots Akkoma Gancio Honk Socialhome Hubzilla Epicyon Iceshrimp mlmym Wafrn GoBlog Hatsu BuddyPress Sphinx Relay noStrudel Mitra lemmyBB Lemmy-Easy-Deploy Friendiqa Hub Fedibird MeshChatX Streams Enafore Sublinks Throat Buddycloud Zap Nostr Relay Squeaknode Khatru Pyramid Catodon Route96 Osada usocial Tesseract AsmBB Bloat Forte GoToSocial Iceshrimp.NET Masto-FE (🦥 flavour) PeerTube search-index Snort yarn.social
Feature Fedify Lemmy Category Social Networks Social Networks License MIT AGPL-3.0 Language TypeScript Rust Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 256 MB 512 MB Deployment source docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 1,017 ★ 14,538 First released 2024 2019 Replaces Twitter Reddit
Why pick each one
Choose Fedify if… Released under the MIT license Active community (1k GitHub stars) Written in TypeScript Tiny footprint — runs in 256 MB RAM Fedify details Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details
Frequently asked questions Is Fedify or Lemmy better? Neither is universally better. Lemmy has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Fedify and Lemmy free and open-source? Yes. Fedify is licensed under MIT and Lemmy under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Fedify and Lemmy with Docker? Fedify: check the project docs for container support. Lemmy: yes.