head to head · open source
Lemmy vs talkyard
Lemmy has 14,599 GitHub stars, 966 forks, 129 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. talkyard has 1,812 stars, 129 forks, 127 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Lemmy leads on adoption by 706% (14,599 vs 1,812 stars). Lemmy is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0; talkyard is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. Lemmy has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, talkyard 7%. Lemmy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (chat, reddit), 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 | talkyard | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Rust | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-07-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 966 | ⑂ 129 |
| 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 talkyard if
- You want the talkyard feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and talkyard fits your workflow better
About Lemmy
Lemmy is a link aggregator and forum platform for the Fediverse, written in Rust and released under the AGPL 3.0 license. It supports communities where users subscribe to forums, post links and discussions, vote, and comment. Each server can operate independently while remaining federated through ActivityPub, so users on one server can interact with users and communities on other servers.
read the full Lemmy overview →
About talkyard
Talkyard is a community discussion platform written in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL 3.0. It describes itself as forum software with chat and anonymous comments, and its topics connect it to StackOverflow style questions and answers, Slack style chat, Discourse style forums, Reddit style voting, and Disqus style blog comments.
read the full talkyard overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lemmy or talkyard more popular?
Lemmy has 14,599 GitHub stars and talkyard has 1,812. Lemmy has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lemmy and talkyard free?
Both are open source. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and talkyard under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lemmy and talkyard?
Lemmy is written in Rust and talkyard in TypeScript. 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 talkyard?
Choose Lemmy if you want the larger community (14,599 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose talkyard if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.