it IS made by the devs, and it’s one of the original lemmy apps, it’s just not the “official” app.

That’s really cool to know about the other instances, can you explain how exactly the instances work? Like what are their purposes ?

ugh, omg, ok… so, lemmy looks like reddit and people use it kinda like reddit, but from a technical standpoint, it doesn’t work like reddit. Lemmy is a decentralized service that’s part of the Fediverse, which is a network of decentralized services which work on semi-interoperable protocols. You may have heard of Mastodon (like twitter) and Matrix (like Discord), which are also decentralized Fediverse services.

being a decentralized service means that, rather than having one, central sever which runs Lemmy (or mastodon or matrix, etc), anyone can download the server software and run it themselves, then federate their server with all of the others. they can sign up new users, and the software is designed to sync up all of the content (communities, posts, and comments) between ALL federated servers. this way, no single person or company can control the service, no one attack can bring it down, no single legal jurisdiction can seize its servers or have dominion over its users’ data… and the cost of running and maintaining its servers can be spread out amongst hundreds or even thousands of administrators rater than having to be run out of a single, multi-million dollar corporate datacenter.

plus, it’s all open-source and free. but it’s also code-immature. despite the fact that Lemmy’s been around of about 4 years, it’s development has been kinda slow until about 2 months ago because, until reddit decided to fuck itself, lemmy had, at most, about 20k users. since June 1, it’s grown to about 1 million active users across all of the know instances currently federated. Development has ramped up to mega-speed, however, it’s about as much as the devs can handle, and they’ve been going full-speed ahead for the last 2 months, releasing updates almost every 5-7 days, which is my lemmy.ml instance has closed their open registration policy and shit down new community creation just to lighten their moderation load. the admins of this instance are the lead devs for the lemmy project.

so, there are a lot of instances to choose from. lemmy.world is the only one big than this one— nice as big. it’s got a lot of problems right now with stability, possibly due to a sustained DDoS attack for the las week or two. it’s having problems federating content from other severs, so content these is kinda stale and may not reflect what you’d see on other instances, so I’d stay on this one if I were you. or check out lemmy.ee or one of the smaller instances.

also, check out the rules on other instances. some have different moderation rules and cultures, some of which you might like more or like less that here. some, like beehaw, are safe spaces and don’t allow downvoting, for example. others are dedicated to porn, while others (like this one) don’t allow porn at all. take your time looking around, but you can create as many accounts as you like.

Some instances, however, misbehave or have content deemed unsuitable y the community (abusive, bigoted, etc.) and they get de-federated. you can find a list of those for your instance if you go to https://lemmy.ml/instances and scroll down to where is says “Blocked instances”.