(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 @[email protected] : 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 @[email protected] , 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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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
Voat died because they had the explicit policy of not moderating anything, it was a spamfest, even people crying the didn’t want moderation couldn’t stand it lol.
One could moderate their own community on voat and ban people from it, but nobody cared to even make communities that were not about either reddit or very grotesque racist content. It eventually died because quite frankly your right, people don’t even want to touch a website like that with a proxy because it was way too hot and probably monitored by intel agencies. I know I stopped posting there once it turned into that, wasn’t worth the personal risk of my ip being associated with that. But I think it was two things combined. The out of control content, but also the fact nobody used it other than to post extreme content, so if you banned the extreme content you would be left with nothing at all anyway.
Voat still around? That was a cesspool of nazis lmao
Shut down awhile ago.
Thank you! A user guide is sorely needed, I’m still overwhelmed by all this new stuff lol, I’m sure I’m not the only one.
You absolutely are not the only one - it’s going to take some time to get used to Lemmy! Something someone else said in another thread: just make sure to keep participating! The more that happens, the faster this community can grow!
So if I understand correctly, there is are multiple Lemmy Servers. Each server has communities which are equivalent to subreddits. You can access communities that were created through other servers.
Is there a benefit to joining a specific Lemmy Server? Or is it the same experience no matter which server you join from?
Some instances are quite specific topic-wise, so for example mander.xyz is focused mostly on science stuff. In this case if you joined their instance, your local feed would be full of science discussion, and that might be something you want. If you’re just choosing between more general instances then there’s really no major difference, just pick one that has rules you vibe with.
I see, so each Lemmy Server is like a central hub for a collection of similar communities.
AFAIK some servers can block other servers. But as long as the instance (server) you are on does not block the other servers/instances you want to see it should not matter as far as I know.
How do I know what’s blocked?
But replace lemmy.ml with the link of your instance, e.g. lemmy.world
That seems to tell you what instances are linked, but how do I know what was blocked or was there just no blocked instances? I’m still so lost here. Lol
Well for the lemmy.ml site I linked it clearly states at the bottom (if you scroll down) the ones that are explicitly blocked. For lemmy.world I’m not sure but I guess nothing is explicitly blocked but rather some instances are not linked? Someone correct me please
As far as I can tell, lemmy world has many instances linked, and none (so far) blocked.
Also, I’d be curious to know why certain instances are being blocked. I’m sure there’s a good reason, but blocking people off from entire instances at the server owner’s discretion is less ideal to me than making my own decision about what I do and don’t want to see.
Apart from the topic (if it’s not a general instance) and admins, it can also matter for performance: if the server can barely manage the number of users it currently has, if it’s close to you geographically (I don’t know if it’s a huge deal, but a server right next to you will always get your messages faster than one on the other side of the world).
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.
Is there some way to stop Lemmy from refreshing under my nose. I’m trying to click a link, or read one and it just scrolls away.
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?
As far as I know there’s no setting. I think (or hope) it’s just a bug, and the devs are working on fixing it.
The website is still kind of buggy, still pretty early stages.
This is fixed with 0.18 iirc, which is gonna be released soon. It’s not a bug, it’s an old feature that’s now annoying because of the increased userbase :)
Thank you for this. It feels a little like collective moving day 😆
The part that was confusing to me is even if I choose “All” when searching for communities, it doesn’t find communities I know exist on other instances. This post helped clear it up for me (I have to search for it by link to add it), so thanks! I am worried this is going to trip up a lot of people though.
On Reddit subreddits are self moderated. Are communities on Lemmy self moderated or does all moderation happen at the instance level?
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 😂
Don’t know if this is of any use to anyone, but someone posted link to Lemmy documentation, which includes markdown instructions and more. I’ve not actually read it all yet, but here’s the link anyway: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/02-media.html
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
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