On Lemmy
Lemmy has no central app to register. FounderReply logs in to whichever instance your account lives on, then drafts posts, comments and direct messages for your approval. Search reaches content federated from other instances, so one login covers conversations across much of the network rather than a single server.
On Lemmy
Lemmy work is slow work. You read communities on instances you had to find first, you write the comment out in full, and you come back two days later to see who answered.
The communities are spread across instances, and each instance shows a slightly different slice of the network. You search from your own, follow the federated results outward, and keep a list of the handful of communities that matter.
Lemmy reads carefully. A comment lands when it answers the question in front of it, says where you sit in plain words, and holds up for a reader who will open your whole history before replying.
Replies arrive over days, on threads mirrored across several instances at once. Staying in the conversation means checking back, reading what changed, and answering while the thread is still warm enough for anyone to be reading it.
Lemmy, as it looks
The thread, the reply and the message — drawn as Lemmy draws them, with the agent's draft arriving in each one. What you see here is what lands in your approval queue.
In the thread
The post, the comment that answers it, and your reply nested under it — each with its own vote pair and its own collapse toggle, the way Lemmy stacks a chain.
In a reply
Lemmy replies are markdown. The draft is written in the composer, rendered in the preview, and lands nested under the comment it answers once you send it.
In the inbox
Lemmy’s inbox carries replies, mentions and private messages together. A message to an account on another instance is written and sent from the one you log in to.
The case
Lemmy is where the self-hosting, privacy and open-source crowd went, and they are the people who try a developer tool first and tell everyone about it afterwards. The rooms are small, the threads are public web pages, and a careful answer still gets read.
Early adopters
The people who run their own servers, read the source and care where their data sits moved here on purpose. They pick up developer tools years ahead of the mainstream, and they bring the rest of their team with them when something works.
Open and indexed
A Lemmy thread is a plain public page that search engines and answer engines read. A comment you write today keeps arriving in front of people months later, in answer to a question asked long after you wrote it.
Small enough to read
A Lemmy community moves at human pace. The thread is short enough that people read it to the bottom, which means one careful answer carries further here than a week of posting carries on a feed that scrolls past.
The category is open
In most categories the questions here are still answered by users alone. The first founder who turns up, explains the trade-offs honestly and keeps turning up becomes the reference people link to when the question comes round again.
Getting connected
Four steps, and the second one is the only place you do anything. The credential below is the literal artefact the connect flow uses — not a marketing paraphrase of it.
FounderReply acts on the account you sign in with, under a connection you authorise yourself and can withdraw again from Lemmy whenever you like. It never makes an account of its own.
Lemmy has no central app registration and no OAuth. You supply an instance URL and your credentials once, and the instance JWT becomes the stored credential.
POST /api/v1/connect/lemmy
{
"workspace_id": "ws_…",
"instance_url": "https://lemmy.world",
"username": "yourname",
"password": "…"
}Discovery runs on that connection: it finds the Lemmy threads where you are a genuine answer and pulls the parent in with the draft, so you are approving a reply in context rather than a sentence with no thread attached. Reading is never gated.
Each action on Lemmy has its own level, and you can move any of them — including past where Lemmy’s own rules sit, once FounderReply has named the rule you are crossing and the account risk. Your setting is the one that applies, and every change is logged as yours.
Out of the box
One setting decides whether an action happens by itself: your own level for it, per network. Every action ships at what Lemmy's own rules allow, and you can move any of it — including past that line, once you have been told which rule it crosses. Read from the connector's capability flags and lib/autonomy.ts at render time.
| You start at | Lemmy’s own rules | |
|---|---|---|
| Publish your own postOriginal content from your connected account | Waits for your approval | Runs automatically |
| Reply on your own postsAnswering comments left on your content | Waits for your approval | Runs automatically |
| Direct messagePrivate messages to a person | Waits for your approval | Waits for your approval |
| Comment on someone else’s postThe highest-risk action on every platform | Off by default | Waits for your approval |
Lemmy instances ban spam and self-promotion at their own discretion and can defederate a server entirely. Publishing your own posts and replying on your own threads start unattended; commenting on strangers and sending DMs start held for a human.
The room
Lemmy is where a chunk of the technical Reddit audience went after 2023, organised the same way: topic communities, threaded comments, and a strong bias toward people who are visibly part of the community. Instances are run by volunteers, so the tolerance for marketing is lower and the tolerance for a genuinely useful answer is higher.
Every instance writes its own rules and its admins can ban an account or defederate a whole server. That makes the downside of a bad automated comment much larger than on a centralised platform: you do not lose a post, you lose access to a community and everyone federating with it.
The gate
Lemmy is reached with Per-instance login, on the account you connected. The agent reads freely, drafts in your voice, and stops at your queue — and whether a given action keeps stopping is a dial you own, per action.
FAQ
Ready when you are
The free plan connects one account, and nothing is published to Lemmy until you release it.
Free to start · Approval on by default · No card required