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 !risa@startrek.website. Instead of linking to https://startrek.website/c/risa, you'd link to https://lmmy.to/c/risa@startrek.website. 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're authoring a Lemmy frontend or browser extension, feel free to rewrite links to lmmy.to automatically!
Are you snooping on us? How can I tell what info you're gathering?
Well, the source is here.
How can I help?
I'm looking for someone to make the landing page to actually look nice, since I don't have the skills to make it so.