What Lemmy offers
Lemmy provides link posts and discussion with upvotes and downvotes, moderation tools, RSS and Atom feeds, themes, data erasure options, and federation with other Lemmy servers. It deploys with Docker or Ansible.
Alternatives / Hacker News
1 open-source alternative
1 Best Open Source Hacker News Alternatives in 2026
Looking for an open source Hacker News alternative? Only one project we verified fits: Lemmy, a self-hosted, federated link aggregation platform. It is the software behind many communities, not a single site with Hacker News's audience.
Written by Maxime DERAME
Last updated:
Best Hacker News alternatives at a glance
| Alternative | Best for | License |
|---|---|---|
| Lemmy | Federated link aggregator | AGPL-3.0 |
How we chose these Hacker News alternatives
We looked for open-source link aggregation and discussion software. We verified Lemmy's license, recent activity, stars, and deployment in its repository. See our methodology for the full criteria.
Important: audience
The software is free, but communities need members, so growth depends on you.
License details
Lemmy is AGPL-3.0.
Maintenance status
Lemmy had commits within days of this update.
Why look for a Hacker News alternative?
Hacker News is a single site run by one company, so its community and rules cannot be copied. Lemmy lets anyone run a community, but you start with no audience.
join-lemmy.org
Lemmy is an AGPL-3.0, self-hosted, ad-free forum and link aggregator that connects communities across the fediverse using ActivityPub, with upvote and downvote scoring, moderation tools, and federation. It can be deployed with Docker or Ansible, and you can join an existing server or run your own.
14.6K968AGPL-3.0Self-hosted
Pricing: Free and open source; run your own server or join an existing instance.
- Federated, with no single owner
- Voting and moderation tools
- Ad-free and self-hostable
- Much smaller audience than Reddit
- Discovery is harder across servers
Compare Hacker News alternatives
| Alternative | Type | License | Self-hosted | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lemmy | Link aggregator | AGPL-3.0 | Yes | Self-hosted communities |
Which one should you choose?
Want to run your own link aggregator
Lemmy offers voting, moderation, and federation with other servers.