(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.
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.
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.
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?
I just saw this posted in another post if you haven’t figured it out, scroll down to the bottom and click “next” then change the number in the url to “0”.
My url looks like: https://lemmy.world/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Hot/page/0
This keeps happening to me too, I came in here specifically looking for help with that.
I just saw this posted in another post if you haven’t figured it out, scroll down to the bottom and click “next” then change the number in the url to “0”.
My url looks like: https://lemmy.world/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Hot/page/0
Definitely the most frustrating part of trying to use this so far
I just saw this posted in another post if you haven’t figured it out, scroll down to the bottom and click “next” then change the number in the url to “0”.
My url looks like: https://lemmy.world/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Hot/page/0
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?
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.
Same. It show after a page refresh though!
Happened for me too, I remained persistent and kept clicking til it finally stuck…
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.
Excellent post! Hello to all the reddit refuges… including myself lol
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!
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.
This rundown is great @[email protected]
Does anyone know if it’s possible to use the show_read_posts filter of the API? I see that it’s implemented, but I can’t find the option anywhere in the web UI.
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
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?
If the server would be gone so would all the users and content here.
If lemmy.world would be gone, so would your account as well… This is the same for email providers, reddit and every other platform out there. If your email provider would be gone, so would your account. But since it is decentralized, it would not be a total blackout because many people use other email providers!
So, if lemmy.world would be gone, your account would be gone, but many others would not. Some communities would be gone, but many others would not!
I’m having trouble finding a Lemmy community from another instance. For example [email protected] 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 don’t think following is possible on Lemmy. It does work the other way around.
Relatedly, I had a user tell me that c/tennis is ‘the only community not showing up on search’ from a particular instance; any idea why that might be? I created the community on mobile, if that makes a difference. Thanks for putting this guide together!
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.