(I’m creating a starting guide post here. Have patience, it will take some time…)

Disclaimer: I am new to Lemmy like most of you. Still finding my way. If you see something that isn’t right, let me know. Also additions, please comment!

Welcome!

Welcome to Lemmy (on whichever server you’re reading this)

About Lemmy

Lemmy is a federated platform for news aggregagtion / discussion. It’s being developed by the Lemmy devs: https://github.com/LemmyNet

About Federation

What does this federation mean?

It means Lemmy is using a protocol (Activitypub) which makes it possible for all Lemmy servers to interact.

  • You can search and view communities on remote servers from here
  • You can create posts in remote communities
  • You can respond to remote posts
  • You will be notified (if you wish) of comments on your remote posts
  • You can follow Lemmy users/communities on other platforms that also use Activitypub (like Mastodon, Calckey etc) (There’s currently a known issue with that, see here

Please note that a server only starts indexing a server/community once it has been interacted with by a user of this server.

A great image describing this, made by @ulu_mulu@lemmy.world : https://imgur.com/a/uyoYySY

About Lemmy.world

Lemmy.world is one of the many servers hosting the Lemmy software. It was started on June 1st, 2023 by @ruud@lemmy.world , who is also running https://mastodon.world, https://calckey.world and others.

A list of Lemmy servers and their statistics can be found at FediDB

Quick start guide

Account

You can use your account you created to log in to the server on which you created it. Not on other servers. Content is federated to other servers, users/accounts are not.

Searching

In the top menu, you’ll see the search icon. There, you can search for posts, communities etc.

You can just enter a search-word and it will find the Post-titles, post-content, communities etc containing that word that the server knows of. So any content any user of this server ever interacted with.

You can also search for a community by it’s link, e.g. !Netherlands@lemmy.nl. Even if the server hasn’t ever seen that community, it will look it up remotely. Sometimes it takes some time for it to fetch the info (and displays ‘No results’ meanwhile…) so just be patient and search a second time after a few seconds.

Creating communities

First, make sure the community doesn’t already exist. Use search (see above). Also try https://browse.feddit.de/ to see if there are remote communities on other Lemmy instances that aren’t known to Lemmy.world yet.

If you’re sure it doesn’t exist yet, go to the homepage and click ‘Create a Community’.

It will open up the following page:

Here you can fill out:

  • Name: should be all lowercase letters. This will be the /c/
  • Display name: As to be expected, this will be the displayed name.
  • You can upload an icon and banner image. Looks pretty.
  • The sidebar should contain things like description, rules, links etc. You can use Markdown (yey!)
  • If the community will contain mainly NSFW content, check the NSFW mark. NSFW is allowed as long as it doesn’t break the rules
  • If you only want moderators to be able to post, check that checkbox.
  • Select any language you want people to be able to post in. Apparently you shouldn’t de-select ‘Undetermined’. I was told some apps use ‘Undetermined’ as default language so don’t work if you don’t have it selected

Reading

I think the reading is obvious. Just click the post and you can read it. SOmetimes when there are many comments, they will partly be collapsed.

Posting

When viewing a community, you can create a new post in it. First of all make sure to check the community’s rules, probably stated in the sidebar.

In the Create Post page these are the fields:

  • URL: Here you can paste a link which will be shown at the top of the post. Also the thumbnail of the post will link there. Alternatively you can upload an image using the image icon to the right of the field. That image will also be displayed as thumbnail for the post.
  • Title: The title of the post.
  • Body: Here you can type your post. You can use Markdown if you want.
  • Community: select the community where you want this post created, defaults to the community you were in when you clicked ‘create post’
  • NSFW: Select this if you post any NSFW material, this blurs the thumbnail and displays ‘NSFW’ behind the post title.
  • Language: Specify in which language your post is.

Also see the Lemmy documentation on formatting etc.

Commenting

Moderating / Reporting

Client apps

There are some apps available or in testing. See this post for a list!

Issues

When you find any issue, please report so here: https://lemmy.world/post/15786 if you think it’s server related (or not sure).

Report any issues or improvement requests for the Lemmy software itself here: https://github.com/LemmyNet

Known issues

Known issues can be found in the beforementioned post, one of the most annoying ones is the fact that post/reply in a somewhat larger community can take up to 10 seconds. It seems like that’s related to the number of subscribers of the community.

I’ll be looking into that one, and hope the devs are too.

  • rjc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    1 year ago

    Is there a way to turn off auto-refresh on the homepage’s posts? Sometimes its cool to drink from the firehose, but other times you’re trying to read titles of posts and they refresh and scroll off faster than you can keep up with. Would be great to have a auto/manual toggle for refreshing.

  • RarePepeCollector@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    1 year ago

    As someone who used voat for awhiel here are my tips:

    1. USE this platform, don’t use reddit. USE this platform and give it content. Content is basically the same as oxygen you can’t deprive it, POST often and comment OFTEN.
    2. Don’t dwell on reddit too much. Voat’s only active communities were about shit posting on reddit (they had a /v/MeanwhileOnReddit and a few banned communities and that was it, nobody used any other communities). Find your favorite community and build it. Build just 1 ideally, anymore is too thin. I am building up https://lemmy.world/c/frugal
  • major_third@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    When I’m on the homepage, I click “All” then sort by Hot. I get a nice list of posts from all over which is really good. But after a few seconds new posts take the top slots of hot and makes just scrolling through unusable. Is there a setting I’m missing for how to keep it from refreshing until I actually hit the refresh button?

  • atimholt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    Is there any way to keep the content of the front page from jumping around like crazy while I’m trying to use it? It almost looks like it’s updating live while just sitting there, but I can’t imagine someone implementing a busy website that way after giving the idea more than two seconds of thought.

  • gts@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    Having this pinned means I have to scroll past this and the other one e v e r y s i n g l e time I go to my homepage in the Mlem iOS app 😂

    • Targox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      How‘s the Mlem app? Does it by any chance hide the comment if you just click on it? That’s one of my favourite UX features on Apollo, not sure if the original crappy Reddit app had this too. I know that you can hide a comment by pressing in the “-“ button next to the person’s alias, but it’s tiny

      • gts@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        it’s ok so far, but unlike Apollo where you can get it to show the post title only it seems like it wants to expand everything. so there’s a lot more scrolling involved atm

        you can collapse comments in thread, but not collapse the OP if it’s a huge long one like this

  • Ginger Neko@lemmy.worldEnglish
    142·
    1 year ago

    I’m trying to upvote stuff and it keeps automagically unclicking it when I click. Do I need to do something different, like burn incense and melt an ancient AOL disk or something?

  • Bri Guy @sopuli.xyzEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    anyone know of an easier way to discover communities? it’d be nice to have like a list or something rather than searching blindly or going to each different server and seeing what’s available

  • KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    Suggestion: I think it might be good to add the https://browse.feddit.de/ to the homepage sidebar.

    I hope that somewhere in Lemmy’s development a system is added for federating/syncing each instance’s Known Community List with each other, so even if no one on lemmy.world is interacting with some.site “yet” lemmy.world knows *about *it and about its communities (just their basic name etc data, not the contents) because lemmy.ml, or whoever, has established a link with some.site and lemmy.world talks to lemmy.ml and gets the list info from them.

  • dirtySourdough@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for making this post! It answered a lot of my questions, but I still have a few more. So I made my account with this server, Lemmy.world, and I can connect with any other server/community I want to with this account. Awesome. What happens though if this server were to be taken offline? Would my account still exist? Is there anything that would be lost aside from the content on this server?

  • inamin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    as a newcomer to all things federated (I skipped mastodon as I never used twitter), the best piece of advice I have is to not overthink the whole federation idea. Just sign up with an instance or two (I signed up to kbin.social and lemmy.world). See which instance format suits you best. You will (should) be able to interact with all other communities/magazines etc. I started off liking the interface of kbin more, but find myself using lemmy.world. Just start searching for communities, find ones with decent userbases and start interacting. Feel free to down this to oblivion if I have the wrong take on this!

    • lemmytry@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      can you explain what you mean by instance format, I signed up with Lemmy world and just downloaded jerboa but what would be the difference if I had signed up somewhere else?

      • jndo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I think of instances like nations or countries. Every country has its own citizens, so you are citizen of lemmy world, like me. Every country also has its own communities (subreddits). the difference is you can also go see another countries communities. And like countries in real life, countries here can all have their own culture or flavour. At the moment it seems to be still early days so instance/national identity is still developing. But it has a lot of potential.

  • BeyonDespair@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Why the upvotes and downvotes are acting like crazy? I’m back after a few hours and I’m noticing that in all posts. Also, I’m noticing too that I can’t upvote anything.

  • inspxtr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    I’m having trouble finding a Lemmy community from another instance. For example cloudcomputing@lemmy.ml on the Jerboa app. I even added the bang “!” but that didn’t work either.

    On a tangential note, how do I follow people from across the fediverse, for example Mastodon?

  • figaro@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    1 year ago

    Excellent post! Hello to all the reddit refuges… including myself lol