Lemmy.world starting guide
Lemmy.world starting guide
(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.
RIF transplant. Happy to be here. Thank you for the tutorial looking forward to start playing catchup
Thanks this helps a lot. Coming over since they massacred by boy rif
Could you sticky a donation link on the top of this community? Or put it in the community-info section?
OK
How can i help donate and support lemmy.wold and the greater Lemmy ecosystem?
Could you update this to point out one of the major differences that most Redditors won't expect?:
When using ActivityPub Upvotes and Downvotes are public to every service that reads into it (such as Kbin).What is the philosophy behind downvotes? Downvote non-productive/bad faith comments or downvote things you do not like?
Let's hope it's the former.
So lemmy uses ActivityPub, right? But can it connect with mastodon or gnu social that also use it?
Yep! But it will display differently on every platform. Kbin and Lemmy are similar enough to work well. You can follow Lemmy users through Mastodon for example.
I made a userscript (Lemmy post) which rewrites all links everywhere (not only on Lemmy) to always point to your home instance. It helps a lot with subscribing to communities and in general makes browsing the web and finding Lemmy links nicer.
Might be a good idea to reach out to some of the client devs to see if they can integrate your script into their clients if you're up for it.
The biggest clients I've found so far seem to be Lemmy, mlem and wefwef.
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.
No, but they’re gonna remove the live updates altogether in the next release.
that should be a good thing for bandwidth, particularly as the early servers struggle to keep up with influx of new users
Is there anywhere to follow the dev news for lemmy or see when the next release is scheduled?
May I suggest to add a link to donate in order to contribute to the financial efforts behind Lemmy.world? @ruud@lemmy.world
It's on the frontpage.
Great write up, I appreciate this as I get stuck into Lemmy.
Does the 'local' tab just refer to posts from your home instance, eg; .world?
Yes
ty for this
I don't know why you were at 0 votes for this, but thanks for taking this on! I think a lot of folks will benefit.
Edit: vote count is probably incorrect and just due to being from a newer instance!
Sorry to bother you, but I wanted to test whether I could post a comment here.
And a reply?
It looks like Lemmy.world communities do not get regularly indexed on search engines. Is this because of the system architecture, or is it for some other reason?
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 :)
Is there a karma system?
On the default Lemmy web UI, no. But some apps aggregate an account's votes and call them "Score", so it does exist but not many can see it.
That's good, since opinions can be posted without fear of mass down-voting.
that info graphic was great! thanks for posting this
I can't seem to create an account on lemmy.world directly (though I appear to be able to access via lemmy.ca). When I enter all my details on the sign up and click the button - it just spins for ever. I have tried a few times a day over the last 3 days. Any idea what could be the problem? I was able to sign up on beehaw and lemmy.ca with no issues. Is it a known issue - or are sign ups on hold?
Also have experienced all of what you describe.
you need to verify your email. the captcha is broken so it breaks the login. verifying email fixed it for me
I had the same problem when I signed up. Have you verified your email address? My verification email went to spam, so I nearly missed it. As soon as I followed through with it, my login worked.
As far as I know, yes. It's like asking can I switch from Hotmail to Gmail? Make an account on Lemmy.world, and you should still be able to follow your favorite community hosted in lemmy.ca
Some Fediverse platforms (e.g. Mastodon) allow you to migrate your account from one server to another. By doing this, you keep your account details, post history, subscriptions, etc. and your followers get redirected to your new account. Lemmy does not currently support this, but it may someday.
Hi, thanks for the post. This bit confuses me: "Please note that a server only starts indexing a server/community once it has been interacted with by a user of this server."
How does a user interact with a server for the first time, for lemmy.world to start indexing it?Search for it
all your requests go to your home server. When you search for a community on another server, your home server (in this case lemmy.world) will do the magick behind the scenes: find the right lemmy server, find the right community, grab the core data and show it to you. It will also remember that you are interested in that foreign server/community and will index it locally. Your requests will still go to the local server and it will do its best to pre-cache as much as possible from remote server for you.
Also, I know it's typed out somewhere, but I can't find it and couldn't understand it anyway. Could someone explain to me as if I'm technologically useless and just a bit dense generally, how to connect with communities on other instances? Something about copying links and pasting them somewhere? I'm on jerboa if that means anything.
The FediDB site does not list lemmy.worlds hosting location, what country is the site hosted in?
ETA: I'm inclined to think the Netherlands based off of some quick googling, but confirmation would be nice.
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?
Just press once and wait.
How do I disable new posts from appearing dynamically? Right now i sort posts by whatever but after a short time new posts starts accumulating at the top like this: https://i.imgur.com/RvZ8C73.png
why did that top one appear??
That's a bug which will be fixed in the next version
This is great, thank you! I plan to send it to a friend - it's much better than any explanation that I could come up with.
Thanks! It's not finished yet but keep checking back.
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 still around? That was a cesspool of nazis lmao
Shut down awhile ago.
Thank you!
New users: this instance is too large, please join a smaller instance.
What is the difference between Lemmy ML and WORLD?
Hi,
I noticed that thumbnails of links are not showing here https://lemmy.world/c/world, whereas same news link posted on https://lemmy.ml/c/worldnews is working fine, why is that?
Here is an example of the same news link on both communities:
https://lemmy.world/post/260407 (no thumbnail)
https://lemmy.ml/post/1317159 (with thumbnail)
Thanks
Would it be an idea to add the alternative interfaces in this post?
What is the ideal resolution for a community banner so as not to unnecessarily 'weigh it down' with a super high-resolution image?
Is there a place to discuss moderating? I'm new to being a mod and I was wondering if mods should be able to edit post titles/body to follow community guidelines?
I created a community for that https://lemmy.world/c/moderators
goodbye reddit, hello lemmy!
This really helped me understand Lemmy and Mastodon so much better. I get it know. Now it just learning where to go to find things I did with Reddit.
Is there a way to slow down the firehose that is my feed? At times my feed will just start scrolling with new posts at the top without giving me a chance to click on anything. I've tried different filters, but nothing allows me to slow it down. Maybe I'm just missing something.
Fixed in lemmy 0.18 but lemmy.world hasn't updated yet. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1614
This is likely a stupid question, but why can I instantly subscribe to some sublemmys? (I have no idea what the equivalent of subreddits are called in Lemmy) but on others my sub request remains pending indefinitely? Thanks.
I'd also like to know the answer to this question.
On Reddit subreddits are self moderated. Are communities on Lemmy self moderated or does all moderation happen at the instance level?
On Reddit subreddits are self moderated
To some degree, yes, but reddit admins also moderates globally. I think in the past it has mostly been in the form of shutting down entire subreddits that they found inappropriate, but more recently they have also been replacing mods that they didn't like. There were even some allegations that reddit admins were editing posts critical of spez, but I didn't see that first hand.
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?
What does create remote post or comment mean? Does this mean we can post onreddit from here or something?
What does pending subscribe mean?
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?
Is Lemmy.world in the US?
according to https://sitereport.netcraft.com/?url=http://lemmy.world it is hosted in Finland (by its IPv4 address) or in Germany (by its IPv6 address).
Owner of this netblock of addresses is Hetzner Online GmbH, a German Hosting company
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...
Is there a way to hide posts / mark as read / remove from feed?
Biggest feature that I haven't been able to find yet.
if you go to settings i think there is a checkbox for whether or not you want Read posts to keep showing up
So can I not have my home page only be the communities I subscribe to by default?
You can change the default to 'Subscribed' in your Settings (click your name in the top right, then Settings
Don't forget to Save your changes.
Do you need to do anything else to go into effect? I set to All and sort type hot which is saved in settings but when going to home it reverts back to local and active
Has anybody an idea how to get the thumbnails to work properly?
I the post here it says once using the 'Upload Image' function, that the image will show in the post and as thumbnail. The latter doesn't seem to work for me on Jerboa.
The only way that worked for me so far was to link the uploaded image (via the button) by adding the url as
to the body of the post.So I’m a total newbie to this whole thing, and I’m sure I’m just being stupid, but I’m running into a weird problem. There’s a community on feddit.de that I’d like to participate in (!germany@feddit.de), and I found it successfully in the lemmy.world search, but when I go in via the search result, it doesn’t show any content. However going to the community directly on via the URL — https://feddit.de/c/germany — I see a post with a bunch of comments.
Is there something I’m missing here? I can subscribe and post via lemmy.world but it seems like I’m the only one in the community.
Thanks all! I’m really looking forward to getting a handle on this…
So if an instance 'defederates' another instance, it effectively means all content from them is blocked while using the instance which defederated them?
@RealFknNito @ruud No, just new content. And your posts won't show to them.
this is great, thanks for this - going to have a good read through over the blackout for the next few days
Frankly I’ve been looking for a while now and I can’t figure out how to subscribe to a community?
Thank you very much for this post! It helped me a lot. I suggest caution with using browse.feddit.de though. They do not include all instances - like for example my home instance reddthat.com - you might miss a great community because of that.
EDIT: Now reddthat.com is back on the browser again - Instances could get dropped due to long response times or rate-limiting issues, so depending on the time you search you may get different results on the Community Browser.
Is there any phone app for Lemmy? Or would it be different websites for different Lemmy worlds?
Yes, it's called Jerboa. Using it now. Shockingly decent for being in alpha.
I just found this list of apps: https://join-lemmy.org/apps Also, why want an app? I never understood when the website is fine.
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.
Hi, thanks for making this instance and post! I think one of the main things that prevented me from grasping the fediverse when I tried mastodon out earlier was not knowing about the common Activitypub protocol. The e-mail analogy that was being used didn't quite click for me, so I'm happy to have a much better understanding for this go around! Here's to greener pastures!
I agree that e-mail analogy doesn't make a lot of sense. Honestly just using it was the best way to learn. I'm already finding communities on other instances and commenting and engaging with them.
I've seen repeated accusations that lemmy is tankie/red-fash, especially when it comes to those that control it - mods/admins/w/e. How true is this?
If you ask a liberal what "tankie" means you will get a response that sounds a lot like if you ask a conservative what "woke" means. The two main developers are communists, trying to collectivize social media. It is very shocking. 🙄 They develop the software transparently, out in the open, along with many other contributors. They also operate lemmy.ml, the very first Lemmy instance. Dessalines has a collection of essays he's written on Github. If you are concerned about his beliefs, I would go straight to the source rather then taking third hand rumors on face value. As for the rest of the network, each instance (such as lemmy.world) is operated independently. The whole point of federation is to decentralize control over the network.
If you ask a liberal what "tankie" means you will get a response that sounds a lot like if you ask a conservative what "woke" means. The two main developers are communists, trying to collectivize social media. It is very shocking. 🙄
Opening with challenging the definition of "tankie" without knowing or asking on what definition I operate on is quite the red flag. Also the condescension instantly put me in defensive mode.
Dessalines has a collection of essays he's written on Github.
Thank you for the links, now after seeing that individual's defense and apologia of the genocidal soviet empire I'm more than convinced that is not the place for me.
Just from a cursory glance alone his attitude is vehemently imperialistic, not too different from what I've experienced from many privileged westerners.
Whether his heart is or is not in the right place, that's another matter. But after a year and a half of excruciatingly depressing takes from western leftists of all kinds, I'm not going to surround myself with people that I disagree most, I value my mental health more than that.Thanks again!
Great initiative!
What does "Subscribe Pending" mean?
I clicked the Subscribe button on !guildwars2@lemmy.ml but I get that yellow pending button instead of the green "joined". Is it because of the heavy load?
Not a big problem, I can read and post there, but I was curious.
Can be heavy load, so just wait or re-try (cancel and then subscribe)
Ok, thanks!
Can one send a PRivate message to another user?
You can. If youre on lemmy through a browser go to a user's profile and there's a "Send message" button. Most likely a similar method in whatever app you use.
Hi, thanks for the post. I migrated here immediately after Boost started not working well any more.
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.
Are there any more guides for Moderators and about editing communities? e.g. can images and banners be edited after creation? Where exactly are the mod tools options to found as a moderator? I'm very new to this and there is very little that is obvious to me.
This basic guide is very helpful but where can I find more? thanks in advanceThank you for this guide! Helped me alot!
Helpfull!
I'm a dev interested in getting involved. I've followed on GitHub and I'm about to start diving into the various repos. Where is development being coordinated?
Github is the right place s most of the development is discussed in the issues and PRs there. There's also the Matrix space https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-space:matrix.org which has various chat rooms regarding Lemmy/Jerboa development.
Also you're... me? :D At least our taste in usernames is very similar.
So funny story. I just spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why I couldn't log in. I hadn't realized I typoed Colonel. I didn't do a pw request - just logged in with the email instead - but apologies if you got spammed with login attempts lol. Nice username! I'm not familiar with Matrix so I'll check it out and join.
I've been reading through the GitHub docs. Sounds like the Matrix space is probably what I'm looking for. PRs and issues are great for discussions specific to them but I feel awkward submitting feature requests as issues just to open discussion, ya know? Or like, discussing how to coordinate time so we don't have multiple people tackling the same thing - or could work together on them if so. So probably that. Thanks and I'll see ya there! I'll use a different username to avoid confusion lol
i don’t see it described here. i get the difference between “subscribed” and “all” but what the hell is ”local”?
If I understand correctly, 'Local' is a feed with only posts that were made on the local server. So here on lemmy.world, that would contain only posts to communities hosted on lemmy.world. Whereas the 'All' feed brings in posts from other servers that lemmy.world knows about. So posts from lemmy.ml or beehaw.org will be included. It does seem to take a bit longer to populate the All feed though, and you'll notice posts 'pop' in as you scroll.
Is this server going to keep its federation blocklist empty? I am likely going to move here from another instance because they have defederated a few servers now
I hope that too, I understand some people have issues, but blocking communities, in my opinion, should be left to individuals, each one of us have different opinions after all and there's no way to make everyone "happy".
Unless there's something illegal but that IMO should be blocked at community level, not the entire server.
/u/Ruud official response?
What servers do you want defederating from?
My SO is having a login issue, that I'm not experiencing myself. Everytime she closes Jerboa, it logs her out. She will end up as "anonymous" so you have to go into Settings and under Accounts, her account is not visible. She's gotta Add New Account everytime to input the account she already created and added. Hmm
Anyone else experiencing this? I am not and I'm wondering if it's user error on my part. I been using lemmy since last night and love it, I'm just trying to get her settled over here. Thanks!
Jerboa's been working for me. I wonder if it's a background battery / processing permission issue.
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
Anyone else having issues trying to create a community? I input everything and get the loading symbol but it never goes past that, no matter how long I leave it.
See here https://lemmy.world/post/15786
Is Lemmy.world based on the US?
Server is in Finland, I am in The Netherlands. rest of admins and the moderators from all over the place (lots of US people in the team)
Thank you all for the work on the update.
Is there any concern about posts going viral and spiking bandwidth cost? Kind of a 'victim of my own success' kinda thing. Also, I could imagine a bad actor DDoS-ing an instance just to drive up network costs.
I would like to implement a CDN like Fastly or Bunny or whichever to help avoid that. If the site gets really popular, I'm sure we'll get more donations, covering the costs. I've seen that on mastodon.world.
Goodbye reddit and hello Lemmy.world Just gonna wait for an app for both iOS and Android.
Could someone help me add my lemmy community to kbin? I've been trying to add !webtoons@lemmy.world to kbin.social but putting it into the search finds nothing. Going to kbin.social/m/webtoons@lemmy.world just gets 404 not found error.
I believe a user account from kbin needs to interact with the lemmy.world community before it gets indexed by kbin.
@caoimhinr @N00dle agreed
Muito bom pra eu aprender..
Gracias
Is there a way to collapse this post or hide it now that I’ve read it? It seems to be the first post in my feed, always.
That's because it's pinned, it's like sticky posts on reddit.
Better to stay it this way, it would be lost in the flood otherwise and new people wouldn't find it.
Thanks for this post, @ruud@lemmy.world. I’ve setup my own instance and am enjoying the lemmy experience so far.
At least the latest RC cut the post and save time in half, for me. That’s a measurable improvement. It definitely must be due to server load, as posting and saving to !lemmyworld@lemmy.world from my instance seems pretty snappy.
Yes it halved it here too, but half of 20 is still 10 seconds which is just too long. But hey, 3.2k users and it's still working so won't complain too much...
3.2k users is impressive. But yes, 10 seconds is bad. 2.5 seconds is about the max I find acceptable. If you don’t mind me asking, what are you running on, in terms of hardware?
I’m tempted to fire up jmeter, or locust, or k6 and push some load against my instance to see how things look internally under load.
Just made a community, how do I make it searchable for people in other instances aside from lemmy.world?
What's the name of your community?
So as I understand it, communities are the equivalent of subreddits, is it possible to create a private community? One accessible only by members? Most of the people I interact with on a daily basis are part of a private sub.
One work around I thought of would be to have someone that will be in the community create an instance, then block all other instances. That would prevent anyone from accessing your instance, and that right there would be your private community. However, that might mean that you will need another separate account on another instance to access the rest of the Fediverse.
If it’s federated, how does or can it integrate with Mastodon? Did I make a mistake by creating a separate login?
You should be able to reply to posts via Mastodon. You should be able to see your Lemmy posts in Mastodon. (Although I think that doesn't work yet from lemmy.world, need to troubleshoot). It's good to have a Lemmy and a Mastodon account.
