head to head · open source
Lemmy vs postmarks
Lemmy has 14,659 GitHub stars, 973 forks, 129 open issues and last shipped yesterday. postmarks has 547 stars, 43 forks, 78 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Lemmy leads on adoption by 2,580% (14,659 vs 547 stars). Lemmy is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0; postmarks is written in JavaScript under MIT. Lemmy has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, postmarks 8%. Lemmy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (activitypub), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Lemmy | postmarks | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 547 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-05-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 973 | ⑂ 43 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lemmy if
- You weight community size — 15K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick postmarks if
- You want the postmarks feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and postmarks fits your workflow better
About Lemmy
English Español Русский 汉语 漢語 日本語 Lemmy A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse. Join Lemmy · Documentation · Matrix Chat · Report Bug · Request Feature · Releases · Code of Conduct About The Project Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse. For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one…
read the full Lemmy overview →
About postmarks
Postmarks About this project Postmarks is a bookmarking site that you own yourself and can connect the Fediverse, interacting with other Postmarks sites as well as Mastodon/FireFish/any text based ActivityPub platform. You can read more about it here: Getting Started Ethos Future Ideas The site allows the owner to add, edit and delete bookmarks, but only if a valid login is provided. Check the setup below to understand how to do that! Setting up your site To set your app up: Create a .env file in the root of the project. Add the line PUBLIC BASE URL= to your .env where \ is the hostname of your instance. Add the…
read the full postmarks overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lemmy or postmarks more popular?
Lemmy has 14,659 GitHub stars and postmarks has 547. Lemmy has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lemmy and postmarks free?
Both are open source. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and postmarks under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lemmy and postmarks?
Lemmy is written in Rust and postmarks in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Lemmy or postmarks?
Choose Lemmy if you want the larger community (14,659 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose postmarks if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.