How would I run this on my computer so I can test edits to the source? I am working on implementing an issue I submitted (and I might also see if I can figure out kbin support as well), and I have tried to run the server using the command python3 lmmy.py, but it does not seem to do anything. I get no command line output, and I can not load the page.

Why does lmmy.to exist?

To solve the problem of directly linking to Lemmy communities from elsewhere and not having people end up where they can't post.

How can I use it?

Say you want to direct your friends on Mastodon to your favourite Lemmy community [email protected]. Instead of linking to https://startrek.website/c/risa, you'd link to https://lmmy.to/c/[email protected]. Anyone visiting your link gets redirected to their home server.

Note that, as a security measure, you can only link to instances that Fediverse Observer knows about; lmmy.to pulls a list of known Lemmy servers every hour or so and only redirects to those servers.

Do you own Lemmy?

No-one owns Lemmy; that's the nice thing about having a federated network. All links to lmmy.to contain enough information to manually rewrite them to point to a specific Lemmy server, so having a web server at the other end to do so automatically is just a convenience.

Indeed, if you