(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.
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I made a picture to try and explain a few basic concepts (hopefully) in a simple way, if you think it can help, feel free to link it in the guide, if not it’s ok :)
That’s cool! Can I also just put the image in my post?
Sure! Do what you think it’s best :)
So this is more or less what decentralised means. Man, web3 is real
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.
As someone who used voat for awhiel here are my tips:
- 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.
- 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
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?
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.
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 😂
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
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
Remember that Mlem is only a very early pre-release; it will get better!
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?
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
How often is this updated? I’ve joined a few in the past 24 hours that aren’t listed on this aggregator.
See here for a discussion: https://lemmy.ca/post/603421
Whelp, this begs another question… how do you link to a post in another instance such that anyone can follow without getting logged out of their current account/instance?
I can’t figure it out 😅 Maybe it’s not possible yet?
Haha, me neither… I’m gonna post it to AskLemmy
by the way, as a workaround, you can search the post in your own instance to get a local link like https://lemmy.world/post/27299
BUT this isn’t instance-agnostic so it would again cause problems for someone who’s not on lemmy.world either
This is my only nitpick so far.
I’ve seen a couple lists of recommended communities on various instances so far. I’ll see if I can dig that up again.
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.
Please add this!
Seconded
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!
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?
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.
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?
So I think I’ve spotted a problem with how Lemmy’s federation actually works. I can give you several examples, but I’ve spotted that there are several ‘Technology’ communities that originate on different servers. They’re definitely different ‘communities’ because they have quite dissimilar subscriber numbers. That’s potentially going to cause a lot of confusion going forward - I really don’t want to have to subscribe to two or three of everything…
It’s not that dissimilar from what happens already on Reddit with lots of subs with similar names and topics.
Eventually, the best ones will prevail.
Yeah this is exactly how Reddit was back in 2010. It was the Wild West back then and similar subs fought to survive. Eventually the one with the best content will win out!
This is not a problem, it’s a feature. It is comparable to reddit having some subs about the same topic, only with different names. Just give it time and it will sort itself out. The best community(ies) will prevail. Subscribe and post and create content for now. Let’s kill reddit.
exactly! i assume it’s the intent - different hosts have different standards and vibes. but it is very strange and seems counterproductive. i assume someone intelligent has figured out why this is better
I think* the basic idea is that there’d be specialized hosts/instances for certain broader topics, OR just allowing to create close “communities” by disallowing cross-intance interactions.
It could be confusing for a while, but I think in time things will mostly normalize in one way or another and the concept of “rival subreddits” were already a thing.
*: I’m also new here, so all of this is just conjecture
I see in this post it says that Lemmy communities can be followed from a Mastodon instance. Can the opposite be done too? Could I follow a Mastodon account via Lemmy.world?
Sorry if this is a really silly question, the Fediverse is still very new to me!
Excellent post! Hello to all the reddit refuges… including myself lol
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?
