(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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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 :)
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!
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
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.
Some of them are, mine is more general and has communities on basically anything while yours seems to be some kind of primarily media-based thing (just from a quick scan of your local community list).
But again that only affects your local feed. You can sub and comment in communities from my instance and I can do the same on yours.
How can I get all mander.xyz posts to show up on my lemmy.world all feed?
You need to subscribe to the communities individually unfortunately (as far as I know).
I know all it takes for them to show up in our search is for someone here to have searched for them before, they don’t need to have also subbed.
But I’m not sure what makes it actually show up in the all feed, whether a search is enough or if someone from lemmy.world would need to have subscribed.
I am already subbed to some of their communities but definitely not all, so some of them should be showing up for you already.
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 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?
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?
On community level
Is there instance level moderation too? Do posts from the same community name on two different instances get federated or are they considered two separate communities?
Moderation also takes place on the instance level. Instance admins can ban people from the instance, remove posts / communities / etc. If instance A bans a user from instance B. That user is no longer visible to anybody on instance A, but it doesn’t impact their status on instance B. Instance admins can also opt-in or opt-out of federating with any individual instance. If instance A thinks instance B is full of jerks, it can block everything originating from that instance.
Communities, like users, exist on a specific instance. Instance A and instance B can both have a community name “cats.” These are separate communities. You can view/subscribe/post/comment/vote either of the “cats” communities from either instance. The admins of the instance are ultimately in control. They could add and remove mods and do whatever mods can do. A good admin would delegate and allow communities a reasonable degree of autonomy, but if a community violates the rules of the instance, it isn’t unreasonable that corrective actions might be taken.
A “multi-reddit” for Lemmy would be great due to many instances having the same named communities. Perhaps in the future.
Yes there is instance moderation.
No the communities are different even if the names are the same.
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
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?
I will watch the costs, and actively ask for donations when needed. But we have some reserve from the mastodon.world donations and also I’ve already seen Lemmy users donate.
When this server is deleted, the accounts on it go as well. But as with the mastodon server (which has 164000 accounts now) I’m looking to adding levels of admins, of which at least 1 will get ‘the keys’ (registrar/dns/hosting/OS) for continuity. I have already promised on Mastodon I won’t shutdown. If I ever get tired of it I’ll transfer to another admin.
That sounds like a good idea! Do you have a link where people donate?
Yes it’s in the sidebar on the frontpage
This is what worries me - an instance creator terminates the instance for whatever reason, then all the accounts and posts are gone. Or the creator could hold the instance hostage - “Hey guys, costs are building up and I’m going to have to shut it down unless people donate”
Afaik there has been talk of making a “server migration” procedure for an account. So if an instance is getting the axe in a month, everyone has time to migrate their stuff to another instance. Though this is not the case as of now.
I appreciate this question. Day 2 on Lemmy and am glad to realize this so quickly.
Thank you!
