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2y ago

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.

667 comments

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 :)
https://imgur.com/a/uyoYySY

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!

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.

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.
  
  How can I get all mander.xyz posts to show up on my lemmy.world all feed?
- 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?
- 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).
- https://lemmy.ml/post/1160417

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.

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 😂

On Reddit subreddits are self moderated. Are communities on Lemmy self moderated or does all moderation happen at the instance level?

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

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

Really appreciating that a lot of help and guides are provided for newer users. That whole fediverse thing can be a bit overwhelming if you are starting to tinker around with it.

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.
- Hosted at a Hetzner datacenter in Germany. I am in the Netherlands
  
  On what kind of server are you hosting it? I guess it can get pretty expensive with the increasing traffic.
  Also what happens to my account when you decide to pull the plug? Are all accounts created on this instance deleted?
  
  Thank you!

The more people that Upvote and Downvote my comments here on Lemmy, I'm now curious to know if Upvoting and Downvoting on Lemmy hurts your overall experience much like how it does on Reddit?
For context: On Reddit, over the years I found myself deleting my posts and comments that got downvoted by any amount, but more so if it got double-triple number downvotes, not because I'm so incapable of having discussions and understanding and respecting people's opinions and points of view, but because other people could more or less control my Reddit experience, and that's just not fair or balanced. If you have low enough Karma you actually can be denied entry into subreddits. If you have low enough Karma you become limited on what you can even do on Reddit as a whole. Having low enough Karma can legitimately have negative effects on your general Reddit experience, and all it takes is for a handful of people who don't agree with what you're saying, who then choose to downvote your posts and comments.
- There's no notion of karma on Lemmy, so I don't think that matters.

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.

Thanks for the explanation. So far I have only explored a a few communities. I still have to get used to this platform. Is it possible to see which posts I have upvoted?

Goodbye Reddit and welcome Lemmy

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...

On jerboa I found out that you can reply to stuff in your inbox without revisiting that thread. You have to click it so isn't collapsed, then click and hold where the up votes are and it will expand further to show all the options like upvote, comment, etc. Hope that helps someone, anyone.

Thank you for having us here!
Already feels like home...
And man... It feels good to be here.
Getting great vibes from .world and all of Lemmy so far.

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.

What’s the difference between this and calckey
- This is comparable to Reddit. Calckey is comparable with Twitter/Facebook

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?

Thanks this helps a lot. Coming over since they massacred by boy rif

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

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!

Great post, but how do i hide this after reading through it? It really sucks that this keeps popping up at the top of my all feed and i have to scroll past it before anything else shows.

Hello ! For those like me that do not understand the sentences « Lemmy is a federated platform for news aggregation » nor « it means Lemmy is using a protocol which makes it possible for al Lemmy servers to interact », there is a good explanation here: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances (Link from https://join-lemmy.org/instances)
Like emails companies (gmail, outlook,…) you have multiple Lemmy server (Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml,…) than can communicate ( you can send an email from Gmail to Outlook).
So by register on one Lemmy server, you can interact on all Lemmy servers ( depending on server configuration, still) and then have access to multiple communities (aka subreddit)

RIF transplant. Happy to be here. Thank you for the tutorial looking forward to start playing catchup

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.

It needs to be emphasized that content needs to be discovered by the other instance and only new content will be synced since the discovery. I only found that out today and it's pretty confusing.

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?

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!
- No I don't think so.
  
  Ah okay, thanks for letting me know

This rundown is great @ruud@lemmy.world

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.

Saved this for later. I feel like this will be really useful to sober me

Do you have a Patreon setup for deferring some of the costs? I think there's a tidal wave of users in your future.

Could you sticky a donation link on the top of this community? Or put it in the community-info section?

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
- There's a Matrix channel you could join https://matrix.to/#/!OwmdVYiZSXrXbtCNLw:matrix.org?via=matrix.org&via=tchncs.de&via=mozilla.org

Why did 3 people downvote this?!
I know this behavior is inevitable and I shouldn’t focus on that minority, but this is objectively a good post for the community.

Should add a section about client apps. I’m using the web for now, but I can’t imagine Lemmy getting incorporated into my daily routine like Reddit is without a native app.

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.
  
  In an extreme scenario, what happens if there are 50,000 users? Is the capacity something we should be worried about?
- If you don't mind me asking, do you see private instances as being sustainable for an individual, in the long run? I went that route with Mastodon and realized that with the nature of how it all works there would be a lot of overhead, for some time to come, with having to perform pre-fetch tricks to see follow-ups and stuff like that.
  My initial impression is that Lemmy might be easier to contend with because each instance has it's own channels (pardon if that's the wrong term; I've been here all of 5 seconds) so the whole conversation is instantly available anytime you select a post. Just weighing whether going the private route is a good choice before I really start branching out and establishing my "identity".
  
  Hi there! Please keep in mind I've only been a fedditor for a few days now, and have been running an instance for one day, and that day was mostly banging my head against the wall troubleshooting and figuring out setup issues (again thanks to the folks over at !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml). My instance also isn't private, and I have no problem if folks sign up on it and use it.
  do you see private instances as being sustainable for an individual, in the long run?
  I think that depends on the individual running the instance. I enjoy it, and the cost of the instance I setup is roughly $15 (USD) a month, plus I use it for other projects as well so it's not just for hosting lemmy. Regarding pitfalls of running an instance and overhead, well, I just don't know enough about it yet to comment on it.

Fuck reddit, long live Lemmy!

Does lemmy.world have any guidelines on what communities can and cannot be created? Is NSFW allowed? Are there any rules for what communities should NOT be created here?
- Well I need to add a rule for that, for now it's just the mastodon.world rules. NSFW is allowed as long as it's marked NSFW, and again nothing against the rules (see https://mastodon.world/about)
  
  just to clarify, straight up porn subreddits are allowed as long as its legal in germany, correct?
  
  You should put a space before your last closing parentheses. Clicking the link as is includes it and leads to "unknown page".

Hi all. I hope this is the right place for getting help. I have a question, how do I subscribe to communities not on Lemmy.world? For example, a community on lemmy.ml
I created my account here because Lemmy.ml is suggesting to use alternate instances but I want to subscribe to some communities there but I get the error "not logged in" because I don't have an account there.
Thanks!

Just joined. I am trying to find my way around here and trying to figure out how things work. Last time I felt like this was my first day in the army. Lol.

667 comments