Best European Alternatives to Reddit
Looking for a European alternative to Reddit? Reddit's 2023 API pricing changes and subsequent IPO pushed many users to seek alternatives. For those who value community ownership, privacy, and freedom from corporate control, federated and open-source alternatives offer compelling options.
We've curated the best privacy-focused community platforms. These alternatives provide the discussion and content discovery features you love while respecting your privacy and giving communities more control.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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1
European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA, the UK, Switzerland or Israel, and processes customer data in Europe or Israel. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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2
Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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3
Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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4
Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Vendors can pay for more visibility, higher up on the review pages; it never affects which tools are listed. Editorial policy
Why Choose a European Alternative to Reddit?
Community Owned
Communities control their own spaces without corporate interference.
Federated
Interact across different servers while keeping your data where you choose.
No Ads
Discussion spaces free from advertising and data harvesting.
Open Source
Transparent code you can inspect, modify, and self-host.
Best European Alternatives to Reddit
We've curated the best privacy-focused community platforms. Each alternative has been evaluated for features, privacy, and community health.
Lemmy
Federated link aggregator and discussion platform
Jodel
German anonymous feed tied to your city or campus, with Karma instead of profiles or followers
Mastodon
Free, open-source federated network run by a German non-profit, with thousands of independent servers
Flarum
Free MIT-licensed forum software governed by a Dutch non-profit foundation, extended by community add-ons
XenForo
English forum software sold as managed cloud with a choice of data centre, or as a $195 licence
WoltLab
German forum software running since 2001, sold as EU-hosted cloud plans or a one-time self-hosted licence
HumHub
Munich open-source social network software, free to self-host or managed in EU data centres
Wykop
Poland's homegrown link-sharing and discussion community, a long-running alternative to Reddit
Menéame
Spanish-language community news aggregator where users submit links, vote them to the front page and comment
Veridonia
Community-run European news feed with no ads or ranking, where random members vote on entries
Key takeaways
- Reddit sold access to the archive twice: Google in February 2024, reported at $60 million a year, and OpenAI in May 2024 at around $70 million.
- The $0.24 per 1,000 API calls quoted at the end of May 2023 and in force from 1 July is what closed Apollo, not a rule against third-party clients.
- Lemmy had roughly 48,600 monthly active users across about 455 instances in December 2025, down from a peak near 72,600 during the 2023 protest.
- Privacy is the weakest reason to leave Reddit, because everything you post there is public by design and stays public wherever you post it.
- Moving your reading is realistic; moving the fifteen-year archive of answers is not, and nobody should pretend otherwise.
Why people leave Reddit
Start with what this page is not about. Reddit is a public forum. Nothing you post there is private, no European alternative changes that, and a comparison page that opens with data protection is answering a question nobody asked.
What did change is ownership of the archive. In February 2024 Reddit signed a content-licensing agreement with Google reported at $60 million a year, and in May 2024 a second one with OpenAI reported at around $70 million.
That licensing sits in the line Reddit calls other revenue, which was $38.7 million against total revenue of $663.4 million in the first quarter of 2026 — not a tenth of the business, but not a rounding error either. The answers volunteers wrote for strangers became a product line, and the people who wrote them were not consulted and are not paid.
The second change was mechanical. Reddit quoted developers $0.24 per 1,000 Data API calls at the end of May 2023 and the price took effect on 1 July; Apollo closed on 30 June, the day before it started, with its developer estimating an annual bill around $20 million. A revised public content policy in 2024 then made bulk use of public Reddit data require a contract. The site got worse to read and harder to leave at the same time.
- Your comments became someone else's training corpus Two deals, signed fourteen months apart, turned twenty years of volunteer writing into licensed input for large language models. Reddit, Inc. was entitled to do it under the user agreement and it is a sound commercial decision. It is also the reason a lot of long-standing contributors stopped posting: the value they were adding stopped going to the community that asked for it.
- The clients that made it readable were priced out Apollo, rif and the rest were not killed by a policy against third-party apps. They were killed by an arithmetic: $0.24 per 1,000 calls against apps that make a great many calls. Thousands of subreddits went dark in protest in June 2023 and the pricing stood. Whatever you read Reddit with today is what survived that decision.
- Crawling the site now needs a contract The public content policy Reddit adopted in 2024 shut the door behind the licensing deals. Automated access to public Reddit content is blocked by default and permitted by agreement, which means the searchable, quotable public record that made Reddit useful to everyone else is now gated at the crawler. That affects researchers and archivists more than it affects you, and it is the clearest signal of what the company thinks the content is for.
- A public company has to keep finding revenue Reddit listed on the NYSE in March 2024. Since then have come identity checks for UK users under the Online Safety Act from July 2025 using a passport or a selfie through Persona, which the UK regulator is now examining, and content licensing whose remaining committed revenue runs out in 2027 and will be renegotiated. None of these is outrageous on its own. Together they describe a direction, and the direction is why people start reading about Lemmy.
What you have to replace, not just match
Work out which Reddit you use, because the two halves have completely different replacement odds.
The first is the live one: a handful of subreddits you read daily, where the point is the conversation happening now. That is replaceable, and Lemmy does it competently.
The second is the archive. Reddit is where the answer to an obscure error message from 2017 lives, and that is not a community you can move — it is fifteen years of accumulated specifics, and no federated network has an equivalent. If your Reddit use is mostly arriving from a search engine, you are not leaving Reddit whatever you do about your account.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Lemmy | Distributed | Free, open source | Depends on the instance you join |
| #2 | Jodel | Berlin, Germany | Free, ad-supported; no premium subscription tier published on jodel.com | EU (Germany) |
| #3 | Mastodon | Germany | Free, community funded | EU (Germany) for the project; instances vary |
| #4 | Flarum | Netherlands | Free and open source under the MIT licence; self-hosted, no vendor price list | EU (Netherlands) |
| #5 | XenForo | London, United Kingdom | Cloud Starter $60/month, Standard $100/month, Business $250/month, Enterprise on request; optional branding removal +$30/month; self-hosted licence $195 with one year of support and updates; prices exclude VAT | United Kingdom (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #6 | WoltLab | Düsseldorf, Germany | Cloud Starter €35.95/month, Professional €71.95/month and Business €224.95/month, all billed annually; Enterprise quoted; self-hosted licence from €129.99 one-time | EU (Germany) |
| #7 | HumHub | Munich, Germany | Community Edition free under AGPLv3 and self-hosted; Professional Edition from €144/month with optional managed hosting at €36/month; Enterprise on request; 10% off for annual billing | EU (Germany) |
| #8 | Wykop | Poznań, Poland | Free; the service's own terms state access to content and functionality is provided at no cost, with no premium "Pro" tier published | EU (Poland) |
| #9 | Menéame | Madrid, Spain | The legal notice states that MENEAME COMUNICACIONS S.L makes the site available to internet users free of charge. No paid or premium plan is published on the site. The cookie policy lists advertising cookies, so the service appears to be funded by advertising. | EU (Spain) |
| #10 | Veridonia | Alcochete, Portugal | eu-eea |
How each alternative compares to Reddit
- Which law reaches it. Depends on the instance you join. Reddit is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Depends on the instance, or self-hosted.
- Source code. Open source, where Reddit is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR on EU-hosted instances.
Best for: People whose Reddit is three technical communities rather than a search engine
Lemmy reproduces the structure exactly: communities, up and down votes, threaded comments, moderator tools, a front page assembled from what you subscribe to. Anyone who used Reddit in 2015 can use it without instruction, and the AGPL-3.0 licence means the software is free and the deployment is somebody's choice rather than a company's asset.
The difference that matters against Reddit is who takes the commercial decisions. There is no board, no listing and no licensing department, so the question of whether twenty years of comments should be sold to a model vendor simply never arrives at anyone's desk. Instances are run by people and small collectives, usually funded by donations, and an instance that starts behaving badly can be abandoned for another without losing the communities you follow.
Now the honest half. December 2025 put Lemmy at roughly 48,600 monthly active users across about 455 instances, down from a peak near 72,600 during the 2023 protest. Technology, privacy, Linux, open source and several European language communities are alive. Almost everything else is not, and the long tail of specific answers that makes Reddit worth arriving at from a search engine does not exist here and will not for years.
What Lemmy does better than Reddit
- Nobody can license your comments to a model vendor, because no company owns the instance you posted them on
- The API is free and open, so clients are limited by what developers build rather than by $0.24 per 1,000 calls
- AGPL-3.0 and self-hostable, so a community can own the server it lives on instead of renting space on a listed company's platform
- An EU-hosted instance puts your account data, reading history and messages under GDPR with an identifiable operator
- No advertising, no paywalled communities and no identity check at the door
Where Lemmy is a step down from Reddit
- Roughly one thousandth of Reddit's active population, with the gap widest in exactly the niche subjects Reddit is useful for
- No equivalent of the fifteen-year archive that search engines send you to
- Search across a federated network is materially worse than Reddit's single index
- Mobile clients are competent but none matches what Apollo was before it closed
- Moderation quality is set by whoever runs your instance, and a neglected instance is worse than a busy subreddit
Standout against Reddit. It is the only place where the question "should we sell this to an AI company" has no one to ask it, because the archive belongs to whoever is hosting it and they are usually paying for it themselves.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Reddit is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Source code. Closed source, as Reddit is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Students and residents who want what is happening nearby, not a topic archive
Jodel answers a different question than Reddit. Reddit organises talk by subject across the whole world, while Jodel organises it by place: your city or campus is the community, and anyone nearby can post. There are no usernames or follower counts, and a Karma score is the only persistent signal. If you used Reddit for local subreddits, this is the closest structural fit.
On ownership and governance the contrast is plain but limited. The Jodel Venture GmbH is a Berlin company registered in the Berlin commercial register, not a listed US corporation, and its app is free and ad-supported with no premium tier published. It is still one company running one product. Nobody else can host a Jodel server, so the archive and the rules belong to the operator, as they do on Reddit.
The weaknesses are real. Jodel has no topic communities, no long threads and nothing a search engine would send you to, so it cannot replace Reddit as a reference source. Anonymity also means moderation relies on local voting and the operator, with no accountable identity behind a post. Some analytics and support data still reaches US processors under standard contractual clauses, which the tool page records.
What Jodel does better than Reddit
- A German GmbH in the Berlin commercial register operates it, rather than a US-listed company
- Karma replaces follower counts, so posting is not a performance for an audience
- Feeds are tied to a place, which suits questions about your own city or campus
- No premium tier is published and the app is free, ad-supported
- Anonymous posting without a persistent public profile attached to your history
Where Jodel is a step down from Reddit
- No topic communities, so it cannot replace subject subreddits
- Centralised, with no self-hosting, federation or portable account
- Anonymity makes moderation harder than on named-account forums
- Content stays local and is not a searchable long-term archive
Standout against Reddit. It treats the place you are in as the community, which is the one thing Reddit's topic model never offered.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany) for the project; instances vary. Reddit is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Depends on the instance you join, or self-hosted.
- Source code. Open source, where Reddit is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: People who want a following-based timeline on servers they or their community choose
Mastodon is not a Reddit clone, and it helps to say so first. It is a microblogging network built on follow relationships, with posts of 500 characters by default, not a set of voted topic communities. What it shares with the alternative is the governance idea: no single company holds the archive, because accounts live on independently run servers that talk through ActivityPub.
That changes who decides things. Software development sits with Mastodon gGmbH, a German non-profit, while each server sets its own moderation rules and chooses what to block. If one operator turns out badly, you can move your account and followers to another server. On Reddit, the company that holds the content also sets the licensing terms, and no user can take the community elsewhere.
The cost is structure. There are no voted threads, no per-topic front page and nothing that gathers a subject into one searchable place, so deep technical Q&A will not be found here. Server choice also confuses newcomers, and moderation quality varies from one operator to the next. Federation with Lemmy means you can follow its communities from a Mastodon account, which partly bridges the gap.
What Mastodon does better than Reddit
- A German non-profit steers the software, so no shareholder or licensing department exists
- Accounts can move between servers, taking followers with them
- Each server writes its own moderation rules, so communities govern themselves
- AGPL-licensed and open, so anyone can run a server and clients are not gated by API pricing
- No advertising and a chronological timeline, so no ranking system decides what you see
Where Mastodon is a step down from Reddit
- No voted topic communities or threaded discussion like subreddits
- Subjects are scattered across servers, with no single searchable archive
- Choosing a server is confusing for new users
- Moderation quality varies between operators and some servers close
Standout against Reddit. It is the largest example of a social network where the community, not a company, holds the infrastructure.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Netherlands). Reddit is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Wherever you host it.
- Source code. Open source, where Reddit is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Groups that want their own forum, archive and rules rather than a space on someone else's site
Flarum replaces a subreddit rather than Reddit. You install it on your own hosting and run a forum with categories, tags, groups, permissions and moderation tools, and the community lives at your own domain. That is the most direct answer to the ownership problem: the threads and the member list sit on a server you control, not inside a platform whose terms can change.
Governance is simple and clear. Stichting Flarum, a Dutch non-profit registered with the Chamber of Commerce, maintains the software under the MIT licence, and there is no commercial tier to upsell. There is no vendor-hosted plan on flarum.org and no published SLA, so you or your community must handle hosting, backups and PHP upkeep. Search engines can index your threads, which keeps the archive findable.
What you give up is the audience. A forum starts empty, and nothing like Reddit's front page brings strangers to it, so you must recruit members yourself. Many features depend on community-built extensions, whose maintenance varies. There is also no membership, dues or mobile app layer. It suits a group that already knows each other more than a public square.
What Flarum does better than Reddit
- You own the archive, the member list and the rules on your own domain
- A Dutch non-profit foundation maintains it, with no investors or licensing deals
- MIT licence with no per-user or page-view fees
- Moderators are your own community, not volunteers working inside a company's rules
- Threads are indexable by search engines on a site that you can keep for decades
Where Flarum is a step down from Reddit
- No built-in audience, so you must recruit every member
- You need your own hosting, backups and someone who can manage PHP
- Many features rely on community extensions of uneven upkeep
- No vendor-hosted plan and no commercial SLA published
Standout against Reddit. It turns a subreddit into a site you own outright, at the price of building the audience from nothing.
- Which law reaches it. United Kingdom (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). Reddit is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Cloud customers choose the data centre location; self-hosted runs wherever you install it.
- Source code. Closed source, as Reddit is.
Best for: Operators who want proven forum software and will pay for support and a choice of hosting
XenForo is for moving a community off Reddit onto a site of its own. It is forum software, sold either as a managed cloud service or as a self-hosted licence, with a media gallery, resource manager and enhanced search in the suite. A community running it keeps its threads, member list and moderation rules on its own domain instead of inside a platform.
It is a commercial product from XenForo Limited, a company in England under Companies House, and the UK sits outside the EEA under an adequacy decision. That is a fairer trade than it sounds: the vendor owns the software, not your archive. Cloud plans run from $60 to $250 a month, priced in US dollars by page views and storage, and every cloud plan lets you choose the data centre.
Compared with Reddit the weakness is cost and effort. Reddit gives a community free hosting and an audience, whereas XenForo asks for a subscription or a $195 licence and gives no new members. The self-hosted licence includes one year of support and updates, after which a paid extension applies. It is not open source, although the licence gives access to the source code.
What XenForo does better than Reddit
- A community owns its archive and member list on its own domain
- Moderation rules and governance are set by the operators, with no outside licensing deals
- Cloud customers choose the data centre location on every plan
- Paid support and a REST API, where Reddit's API is priced per call
- Self-hosted licence at $195 with source code access
Where XenForo is a step down from Reddit
- Costs money from the first day, in US dollars, while Reddit hosting is free
- Brings no audience, so members must be recruited
- Not open source, and support after year one needs a paid extension
- UK company outside the EEA under an adequacy decision
Standout against Reddit. It gives a community its own site on mature software, with a visible price instead of an advertising or licensing model.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Reddit is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Cloud hosting in Germany, stated on the pricing page.
- Source code. Closed source, as Reddit is.
- Independently checked. GDPR/DSGVO compliant, daily backups, SSL.
Best for: Communities that want a paid, supported forum on German infrastructure instead of a subreddit
WoltLab suits a community that has outgrown a subreddit and wants its own forum. Along with forums it offers a blog, calendar, filebase and gallery, and the discussion lives at your domain. The archive, member accounts and moderation rules belong to the operator, which is the plain contrast with a platform that can license your content to others.
WoltLab GmbH is registered in Duesseldorf and has run since 2001, with hosting, support and billing kept in Germany. Cloud plans start at €35.95 a month billed annually, and there is a one-time self-hosted licence from €129.99. Prices are published at every tier. That is the opposite of Reddit's model, where the community pays nothing and the company earns from its content instead.
The honest limits are cost, audience and openness. A paying forum has no built-in readership, and growing one takes sustained effort. The self-hosted option is a commercial licence rather than open source, so you cannot freely modify it. The interface reads closer to a classic forum than a modern feed, and entry-tier storage and request caps are modest.
What WoltLab does better than Reddit
- Your community owns its archive on German infrastructure, not inside a listed company's platform
- Pricing is published in euros, with a one-time self-hosted licence from €129.99
- Moderation and governance are set by your own team
- A German GmbH with a commercial register entry has operated continuously since 2001
- Daily backups and a stated 99.5% SLA on higher cloud plans, which a subreddit cannot offer
Where WoltLab is a step down from Reddit
- Not free, while a subreddit costs nothing to start
- No built-in audience or front page to attract strangers
- Not open source, the self-hosted option is a commercial licence
- Classic forum interface and modest entry-tier caps
Standout against Reddit. It is a paid, supported German forum that returns ownership of the archive to the community that wrote it.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Reddit is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Managed hosting in German and EU data centres under ISO 27001; data stored in Germany per the terms.
- Source code. Open source, where Reddit is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. Hosting provider ISO 27001.
Best for: Organisations and groups that want a closed network with spaces, files and events
HumHub answers a narrower question than Reddit. It is social network software for companies, associations, universities and nonprofits, with profiles, spaces, a feed, files and events, not a public discussion site. A group that used a private subreddit or a Discord-like space can move onto a network it hosts itself, with the Community Edition free under AGPLv3.
That matters for governance. HumHub GmbH & Co. KG in Munich develops the software, but the open licence means you can run it yourself or buy managed hosting in German and EU data centres, and the terms state data is stored in Germany. Reddit users cannot take their community to another host. A HumHub community can change provider while keeping its own data.
It is not a substitute for public discussion. The thread model is not designed to be indexed by search engines, so the answers it holds stay inside the group and do not accumulate as a public record. The Professional Edition starts at €144 a month, with managed hosting at €36 a month extra. There is no dues or donation handling either.
What HumHub does better than Reddit
- AGPLv3 Community Edition that you can host and keep yourself
- Switch between managed hosting and your own servers without losing the data
- A German vendor with a commercial register entry and storage stated as Germany
- Spaces give each group its own members, rules and moderators
- No advertising and no company that can license the content to others
Where HumHub is a step down from Reddit
- Not built for public, search-indexed discussion
- Professional Edition from €144 a month before hosting
- No audience or discovery between networks
- No dues or donation handling
Standout against Reddit. It lets a group run a private network on open-source software it can host or move at will.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Poland). Reddit is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Source code. Closed source, as Reddit is.
Best for: Polish readers who want a link and discussion site run in Poland
Wykop is the closest in shape to Reddit on this page: users submit links and posts, the community votes them up or down, and the result is ranked and tagged. The difference is who runs it. Wykop sp. z o.o. is a Polish company registered in Poznan, and its servers and moderation are Polish, so the archive is not in the hands of a US-listed company.
It is still one centralised company. You cannot run your own Wykop or move your account elsewhere, so the governance contrast with Reddit is about jurisdiction, not about who owns the content. The company has had outside investment, with a minority stake held by a Dutch fund. The service is free, and its terms state that access is provided at no cost, with no paid tier published.
The language is the limit. Content and interface are overwhelmingly Polish and there is no English version, so for most readers on this page it is a reference point rather than a destination. For a Polish speaker who wants a mature community with established moderation norms, it has far more depth than any newer federated site, which is why it earns a place.
What Wykop does better than Reddit
- Operated by a Polish company confirmed in the KRS and VAT registers, not a US-listed one
- Free to use, with no paid tier published in its terms
- Voting, tagging and community moderation closely match how Reddit works
- A long-running independent community with established moderation norms
- Content and moderation decisions are made under Polish jurisdiction
Where Wykop is a step down from Reddit
- Interface and content are overwhelmingly Polish, with no English version
- Centralised, with no self-hosting, federation or account portability
- A Dutch investment fund holds a minority stake
- A single company still controls the archive, as on Reddit
Standout against Reddit. It is the one alternative here built like Reddit and run independently, but only for Polish speakers.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Spain). Reddit is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Source code. Open source, where Reddit is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Spanish speakers who mainly use Reddit to follow voted news links
Menéame covers one part of Reddit: community-submitted links, up and down voting, and comment threads under each story. It does not have subreddit-style topic communities at Reddit's scale or the long archive of niche answers that Reddit is used for, so it replaces the news-reading habit rather than the whole site.
The difference lies in who runs it. MENEAME COMUNICACIONS S.L is a Madrid limited company whose legal notice names Spanish law and the Madrid courts, and its data protection text refers to the RGPD and the Spanish LOPD. Reddit, Inc. is a US-listed company. Menéame still runs advertising, and its cookie policy says so, so this is a change of operator and jurisdiction, not an ad-free service.
Compared with Lemmy, the other entry on this page, Menéame offers a larger, older-style single community with one front page and no instance choice, but no federation and no self-hosting of the live service. It is only useful if you read Spanish. For anyone else it is not a Reddit alternative at all.
What Menéame does better than Reddit
- A Spanish company under Spanish law and the Madrid courts instead of a US-listed operator
- Free to use with no paid tier published
- One central front page, so there is no instance to pick as with Lemmy
- Source code published under AGPL-3.0
- Votes decide what is promoted, which is the part of Reddit many people actually use
Where Menéame is a step down from Reddit
- Spanish only, while Reddit and Lemmy work in many languages
- Far fewer topic communities than Reddit's subreddits, and no comparable searchable archive
- Funded by advertising, with advertising cookies listed in its policy
- No federation or self-hosting of the live service, unlike Lemmy
Standout against Reddit. It keeps Reddit's link-voting loop under a Spanish operator, but only for readers of Spanish news.
- Which law reaches it. eu-eea. Reddit is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
Best for: Readers who use Reddit mainly to follow news links and prefer no ads or vote-ranked front page
Veridonia borrows one habit from Reddit, people sharing links and short texts in communities, and replaces the way a post earns its place. Instead of upvotes pushing items up a hot list, a panel of community members drawn at random answers one question, whether most people here would say the post is worth seeing. Cleared posts then appear in the order they were approved.
Every vote and decision sits on a public record that anyone can read, and a decision can be appealed to a fresh panel. The terms of use state that community feeds stay free to read and that advertising is never an option. Reading needs no account, and anonymous sign-in is supported. That is a different bargain from a front page ranked by engagement, which is the part of Reddit this tool addresses.
The contracting party is Astraplex Technologies, Lda in Portugal, with hosting on AWS in Ireland. The limits are plain: the site calls itself new and small, the feed is mostly European news in English, and the service is closed source. It will not answer an obscure error message from 2017, and it is a place to read the news, not a discussion archive.
What Veridonia does better than Reddit
- No ads, and the terms say advertising is never an option
- Nothing is ranked by votes, so there is no hot list to scroll
- Votes and moderation decisions are public and can be appealed
- Reading needs no account, and anonymous sign-in is supported
- Contracting entity in Portugal, hosted on AWS in Ireland
Where Veridonia is a step down from Reddit
- Far smaller audience, so many days the feed holds little
- Mostly European news in English, not thousands of topics
- Closed source, with no self-hosting or federation
- No deep archive of threaded answers to search for
Standout against Reddit. It swaps Reddit's upvote ranking for random community panels and a public record, but only as a small news feed.
What actually breaks when you switch
The first surprise is that leaving Reddit is a reading habit problem rather than an account problem. Cancelling takes a minute; the reflex of typing a question and adding the word reddit to it takes months to unlearn, and for a lot of people it never goes, which is fine as long as they stop pretending they have left.
The second is that nothing transports. There is no export from Reddit that a Lemmy instance ingests, so subscriptions are rebuilt by hand and saved posts have to be copied out before the account goes. Neither takes long, and both are irreversible if you close the account first.
The third is social and unavoidable. The communities you are leaving do not come with you, and posting into a quiet room after years in a loud one is discouraging in a way that no feature list prepares you for. The people who stick with it are the ones who arrive with something to contribute rather than something to consume.
Did everyone actually move to Lemmy after the 2023 blackout?
No, and the numbers are worth having in front of you before you commit. Lemmy peaked at around 72,600 monthly active users in mid-2023, when thousands of subreddits went private and the story was everywhere. By July 2024 that was closer to 64,900, and by December 2025 it had settled at roughly 48,600 across about 455 instances.
So the migration happened and then most of it drifted back. That is not a criticism of the software, which has kept shipping — 0.19.20 in July 2026, with a 1.0 release still in beta (beta 2 appeared in September 2026). It is a statement about what a discussion site is: value comes from other people being there, and a community of fifty thousand behaves differently from one of tens of millions.
What survives on Lemmy is the part that never needed scale — technology, Linux, privacy, open source, a few national communities. Go looking for a subreddit about a specific dishwasher model and you will find nothing.
Does leaving Reddit stop my posts being used to train models?
Only the ones you have not written yet, and only partly. Everything already posted is in the corpus that was licensed, and deleting a comment does not retrieve it from a model that trained on it. Deletion is worth doing on principle, but it is a gesture rather than a remedy.
What it does change is the flow going forward. Lemmy instances are independently run, so the licensing decision is taken by the person running your instance rather than by a company with quarterly revenue targets, and most of them have no commercial interest in selling anything.
Be honest about the limit, though: Lemmy content is public and federated, which makes it trivially scrapeable. The difference is that nobody is being paid for it, not that nobody can take it.
What does Lemmy genuinely do worse?
Search and discovery, by a wide margin. Reddit has a single index over everything; a federated network has many servers with partial views of each other, so finding a discussion you half-remember is harder and finding a community you did not know existed is harder still.
Mobile is decent rather than good. Jerboa is the project's own Android client and there are several third-party apps, many written by developers whose Reddit clients closed in 2023, but none of them is as finished as Apollo was.
And moderation varies by instance, which cuts both ways. A well-run instance is better moderated than a large default subreddit. A badly run one has nobody paying attention at all, and you find out which you joined after a few weeks.
Is the jurisdiction argument worth anything here at all?
A little, and it is narrower than the usual version. Reddit, Inc. is a Delaware corporation operating from San Francisco, with Reddit Netherlands B.V. among its subsidiaries and transfers out of the EEA resting on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. All of that is ordinary and none of it is about your comments, which are published anyway.
Where it bites is the account rather than the content: the email address, the IP addresses, the voting record, the private messages and the reading history. That is a behavioural profile of your interests, it is not public, and it sits with a US company.
On an EU-hosted Lemmy instance that profile sits under GDPR with an operator you can identify. If that distinction matters to you, it is a real gain. If you were expecting the argument to be about your posts, it is not.
Which one to pick
If your Reddit is a handful of technical communities you read every morning, Lemmy is a genuine replacement, and choosing an EU-hosted instance run by someone identifiable is most of the decision.
If your Reddit is what a search engine hands you when something is broken, nothing on this page replaces that, and the honest advice is to keep using it for that purpose while posting somewhere else.
And if you are leaving because of the licensing agreements specifically, understand what the move buys. It does not recover what has already been sold. It stops adding to it, and it puts the next fifteen years of what you write somewhere nobody has a revenue target for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Lemmy, because on this page it is the only one, and that is an honest answer rather than an evasive one. What deserves more thought than the software is the instance: pick one hosted in the EU, run by someone identifiable, that has been going long enough to suggest it will still be there next year. That choice decides your moderation, your jurisdiction and whether your account survives.
Because of the price, not a ban. Reddit put $0.24 per 1,000 Data API calls to developers at the end of May 2023, effective 1 July, which for a client making calls constantly is enormous — Apollo's developer put his annual bill at roughly $20 million and closed the app on 30 June, the day before the charge began. Thousands of subreddits went private in protest during that month and the pricing was not changed.
Google, announced in February 2024 and reported at $60 million a year, and OpenAI, announced in May 2024 and reported at around $70 million. Reddit books this under other revenue, which was $38.7 million against $663.4 million of total revenue in the first quarter of 2026. Its remaining committed licensing revenue runs to 2027, and Reddit has said publicly that it expects to charge more on renewal.
You can, and it will not undo the licensing. Content already supplied under those agreements has been supplied, and a model that trained on a comment does not forget it when the comment disappears. Deleting still removes the comment from the live site and from future crawls, which is a reasonable thing to want for its own sake. Treat it as tidying, not as recall.
For broad technical subjects, yes. For anything narrow, no. Roughly 48,600 monthly active users across about 455 instances in December 2025 supports active communities in technology, Linux, privacy, gaming and a few national languages, and supports almost nothing beyond that. The question to ask is not whether Lemmy is big but whether the three communities you actually read exist there.
There is no European region to choose and no residency setting. Reddit, Inc. is incorporated in Delaware and operates from San Francisco, it has a Dutch subsidiary in its group, and transfers of personal data out of the EEA rest on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. For published comments this is irrelevant. For your email address, IP history, votes and private messages it is the whole picture.
They stay on Reddit. There is no export that any Lemmy instance imports, so subscriptions get rebuilt by hand and saved posts are best copied out to a bookmark file or a notes app before you go. Most people find the rebuilding takes twenty minutes and reveals that two thirds of what they were subscribed to had not been read in a year.
Yes, and for a club, a user group or a company it is often the better answer. Lemmy is AGPL-3.0 and runs on a modest European server, and running it yourself means your community is not a tenant of anybody, federating or not. The cost is the same as any self-hosted service: updates, backups, spam, and being the person who answers when it breaks.
Logged-out browsing still works and search engines still index a great deal of it, but the door has been closing since 2024, when the public content policy made automated bulk access require an agreement. The practical advice is to stop treating Reddit as a stable archive you can always come back to, and to save anything you genuinely rely on.
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