Contributing to Lemmy: Documentation

About three years ago I joined Lemmy, a Reddit-like link aggregator built on the fediverse (signup here), and have been occasionally active since. When the 2023 Reddit API controversy happened I jumped in to contribute a bit more to Lemmy’s development.

At that moment there were already tons of people contributing to the frontend code––more than the maintainers could easily handle. Despite all the active contributors, it seemed like few had updated the documentation so, I decided to help with that.

Over the week, I merged eight PRs across the LemmyNet/lemmy, LemmyNet/lemmy-ui, and LemmyNet/lemmy-docs repos.

I was happy to:

• setup better issue templates, to help the devs with the onslaught of new bug reports

• And add typo checking in the CI for the docs

• Fix a few small issues with the docs

The experience was really nice as the devs were fast and helpful in responding to my PRs despite being under a huge workload as they surged in popularity. I like Lemmy because it is easy to set up and hard to censor (due to being federated). I look forward to seeing how the fediverse will grow with platforms like Lemmy and kbin joining it.

A note: it has come to my attention that one of the maintainers of Lemmy has some political views that I don’t agree with. However, Lemmy is still contributing to the greater good and inherently designed so people can spin up a new instance if they have different opinions so I’m happy I was able to contribute in my small way.