We have gotten a lot of new signups over the past few days, and we’re all very excited to have you joining us! You’ll find that people are more than happy to help you get started and learn how to use the site.
If you feel up for it, you can introduce yourself or ask questions below!
We have put together some resources to help new users get started:
You can also read:
- A quick overview of Lemmy
- A detailed guide on how Lemmy works
- A quick overview of ‘the Fediverse’
- Learn about the non-profit that runs this site
These guides were published very recently, and we will be updating them over time. If you find that something is confusing or missing, please let us know and we can improve them further.
For an organized list of Canadian communities (provinces/territories, Cities / Local , Sports, Schools, BuyCanadian, CanadaPolitics etc.), see this post on [email protected]. You can also ask about communities in places like [email protected].
We also encourage you to check out [email protected], so that others can help you / learn from your questions.
Welcome to Lemmy :)
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Salut/Hi there!
Welcome! 😊
Bonjour, all! 🙂
Bonjour! 😊
Bonjour all.
Beinvenue!
Bonjour, et bienvenue 😊
Hi everyone!
Welcome 😊
Bonjour, fellow Canadian Lemmies! I’d deleted my Reddit, account in November, and was only lurking, so it’s nice to have a voice in the conversation once more.
Welcome 😊
Not a new user but I’m actually finally deleting my Reddit acct. Just updating all my comments and posts now using redact. The recent news about Elon getting them to massage their content was enough. Fuck them.
Well, now I must give it a try!
I deleted my reddit account a while ago. Sometimes I still lurk, but it hasn’t been the same lately. I was a redditor since 2010.
Welcome to lemmy! I hope you like it here!
What exactly is an ‘instance’?
Welcome!
I’d recommend looking through these two guides / infographics as they are a good introduction
How does Lemmy work, in detail
If you consider the network of email providers, then “gmail” could be considered one “instance” of the network. You can use it as a self-contained service, but the strength comes from being a part of the wider network.
So you can use lemmy.ca as if it was an isolated Canadian version of reddit, but the strength comes from being able to access communities from all over
So, Lemmy is software that lets you build an off-the-shelf content aggregation website, similar to how Wordpress lets you build an off-the-shelf blog. There are dozens of moderate to large websites running Lemmy, and hundreds of small or tiny ones running it.
Each one of these websites can, if the users and admins enable it, subscribe to communities hosted on other Lemmy-based websites, which lets them comment on posts in those communities, or even make their own posts to them.
Because this intercommunication allows users to treat remotely-hosted communities as if they are local to the user’s website, it’s common for people to think of the network of Lemmy-based websites as a signular entity. In this model, each of the independent websites running Lemmy gets called an “instance”.
The same terminology is used for Mastodon-based websites, and other websites that allow for similar auto-syndication of content that creates a simulacra of a centralized content environment. So, a “Lemmy instance” is a “website running Lemmy that is participating in active content syndication”, a “Mastodon instance” is “a website running Mastodon that is participating in active content syndication”, etc. You can replace “Mastodon” or “Lemmy” with “mbin”, “Friendica”, “PieFed”, “Misskey”, “Hubzilla”, “PeerTube”, “PixelFed”, “BookWyrm”, “FunkWhale”, “nodeBB”, or any number of other website engines that are participating in this type of ecosystem.
Just joined after being recommended on Reddit. The straw for me was a recent 7 day ban because I stated a historical fact on guerrilla war and America. Not sure when Americans got so delicate and all snowflake like but whatever. Glad to be here.
The techno-authoritarians are making their play for absolute power now. They’re going to suppress opposition in general. They spent years getting everyone to use their tools, and this is why.
I’m not new. This is my second post already.
Welcome nonetheless 😄
Elbows up, hosers!
Thank you. I’m in, I need something that doesn’t feed me an algorithm.
Welcome :)
If anyone is curious, the post sorting calculations are also public (the code is open source). As a summary:
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
- Active uses the post votes, and latest comment time (limited to two days).
- Hot uses the post votes, and the post published time.
- Scaled is similar to Hot, but gives a boost to smaller / less active communities.
No more hidden algorithms was a big one for me. I personally use ‘Scaled’, and sometimes flip to the other ones to take a peek
🫶 happy to be here
Here are some more tips, put together by @[email protected] in this post
Quick FAQ:
Q: I am not getting my registration email/can't log in after submitting application, what do I do?
A: Check your spam/junk box, gmail and outlook can be very finicky. Applications are vetted by each server’s admins, but the applications are only visible when the email is verified. If no success after 24 hours, try another instance.
Q: I signed up on one server (e.g. lemmy.ca), I can't login to another server to post/comment there (e.g. lemmy.world), what do I do?
A: You can actually post on that server without leaving the site you are logged in on. The URL syntax to visit a remote community is [your instance]/c/[community name]@[remote instance]. Example to visit https://lemmy.ca/c/canada with a lemmy.world account, go to https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]. Mentioning the community similar to this form: [email protected] in Lemmy will create a link that takes you directly there.
If you are visiting this post from another server, paste this link, https://lemmy.ca/post/39118714 into lemmyverse.link, set your home server, and it will automatically find the same post on your server so that you can comment. Some apps save you the trouble automatically. The rainbow pentagon is the permalink button to easily get the original link.
Q: There's a lot of noise, how do I curate my feed?
A: Two ways: 1. stay on All or Local and use blocks. Block users, communities and instances that post content you don’t want to see. 2. Find communities you are interested in, subscribe to those, and use the Subscribe feed to see posts exclusively from those communities.
Q: Lemmy's interface looks ugly, is there anything better? And can I use it on my phone?
A: Have a look at https://lemmyapps.com/, these include web interfaces, android, iOS and PC apps. On lemmy.ca you have a couple alternative web frontends, try https://old.lemmy.ca/ (for old.reddit.com users), https://alex.lemmy.ca/, https://photon.lemmy.ca/.
Q: Can I trust you, or the admins more than RedditInc, gallowboob, Shittymorph or Steve Huffman?
A: That’s for you to judge. Reddit is run as a for-profit publicly traded company, intent on scraping, hoarding and monetizing your data for itself, showing you ads, and getting every nickel they can siphon out of you. Lemmy is open source, and while the admins of lemmy.ca have control over its accounts in a similar way and have generously contributed significant resources, this server is run by Non-Profit Fédécan. Other servers will have their own admins, each with their own strengths and faults. The organization and the Lemmy developers will always appreciate your support, but isn’t interested in monetizing your data or ads. Friendly reminder when using public forums: what you post here will be open and publicly available for everyone, freely and equally.
A couple of notes and unsolicited advice as someone who is almost an old hand already…
(1) Your front-page will be more interesting as you subscribe to more things. You can subscribe to things from other Lemmy servers and they will be pulled into your feed here.
(2) Communities that are hosted on this server will show up under “Local”.
(3) “All” shows all of the local content from (2), but also any content that this server had to fetch from other servers for others. Basically, when you subscribe to stuff, it’ll end up in All for everyone else on this server as well. If no one on the server has subscribed to specific content from another server, it won’t show up in All. As a result, All is sort of a cross section of our users’ interests.
(4) If you were to sign up for another server – say lemm.ee – you would get a different Local and All. But you should be able to subscribe to the same things regardless of the server you chose.
(5) Some servers are not connected to others, for reasons. This is called defederation. It’s basically a means to block an entire server who has a community not behaving in a way that doesn’t jive well on your local server. Lemmygrad.ml is blocked from this server, for example. You probably won’t notice, but on rare occasions you can’t subscribe to a community on a blocked server.
(6) You can help the quieter communities grow by shitposting. Throw your backlog of old saved memes into them. There isn’t as much traffic here as reddit, and the niche communities often don’t exist (or are silent).
(7) Find a larger community to post to for engagement. For example, on Reddit I would subscribe to the WinnipegJets team sub, but on Lemmy it is too quiet. So instead I post my Jets content to the more general Hockey community so we can have some discussion. This will change over time.
(8) A good place to find communities to subscribe to is: https://lemmyverse.net/communities – copy and paste the community name – eg: [email protected] – into the search bar and then subscribe.
(9) Meow
(10) Try different sort options. New or Scales are my favourites.
(11) Also don’t be afraid to curate the feed the block button is your friend, don’t like certain users, communities or instances baaam block, there’s your peace of mind.
Yes! I have so much anime softcore blocked in my feed haha.
(12) A great way to find new communities: when you see a user who posted something interesting, click on them and see which communities they’re in. Then subscribe to those :)
The block button is key to curating your general daily experience on Lemmy. Obviously block anything you don’t like, but also use it if you’re not interested in a specific scene or topic. You can always remove the block later if you want. I think of the block button more like the “Not Interested” button on Youtube.
Tip: sort by “Top 12 hours or 24hours”. This is equivalent to reddit’s “hot”
Ah ha! Perfect. This is what I was missing. Thank you.
I’ve been here for awhile and have a pretty good understanding of how federation works. Number (3) was a very concise way to explain how the All feed works. I sort of knew but that really helped me understand.
Number (7), I will suggest the use of the cross-posting feature. Post to the larger community for engagement but also cross-post to the smaller communities to help them grow. Quiet communities are a cat-and-mouse game where people don’t post or comment because no one else is. The more people start to engage, the more others will start to engage.
What I like doing is posting to the small community first, and then cross posting from there
That way people in the larger community can follow the link back and learn about the community if they’re interested. It also helps to mention the community at the start of the cross post since Lemmy doesn’t do that automatically
You guys are awesome.
Any updates on when Pixelfed and Friendica will be ready? I’m waiting for the fedecan instance before I sign up for those :)
We’re in the process of getting pixelfed together :)see Shadow’s commentI love it.
Pixelfed soon. We have a domain registered and I’ve started provisioning the infra.
Friendica isn’t on our todo list yet, not sure if it will be or not since none of us are regular Facebook users.
fwiw I would join a friendica instance in a heartbeat and lobby for people I know on fb to sign up.
Thank you!
I want to join Pixelfed, I joined a server but it isn’t even updated to work with the app yet.
So I’ve been eagerly anticipating the fedecan one because I’m sure you guys will do a great job.
I couldn’t see converting a lot of friends over to lemmy, but Pixelfed and loops is something I can see my friends being interested in.
Actually I am ashamed to tell that I am on Facebook, but more out of necessity and to keep in touch with relatives 😬
I deleted FB from my life a few years back, but I’m like >< this close to trying to set up a domain and my own friendica just for family. Back in the days of chronological order, FB was really nice for sharing photos and life event stuff. Now, saying that out loud (so to speak), maybe Pixelfed would satisfy that too - no idea because I never used it’s corpo cousin!
I posted about Fedecan and the fediverse on Facebook a few weeks ago. Might just be my friend group, but a lot of people seemed interested in ditching Facebook in the wake of all the Trump stuff.
I know it takes time and resources, but I would love to see you hosting an instance for each alternative to the major platforms.
Anyway, great work! I appreciate you. Keep it up! :)
A Friendica server would be amazing!
I feel like the similarity to Facebook is way overstated. I wonder how much that association hurts Friendica since even people who use FB a lot think it’s super lame. It’s the most similar to FB compared to others but it’s really the Swiss Army knife of the Fediverse – and the most powerful tool for accessing it. Coming from Mastodon, and even the Misskey forks, it’s crazy what you can do with Friendica.
A Canadian server would be incredible but it’d also be such a benefit to Friendica to have more servers run by people who know what they’re doing.
I promise to take a look a Friendica after we get Pixelfed up =)
If you have time, could you share more about what speciically makes Frendica so powerful.
Im only just dipping my toes into fediverse and I’m super curious.
Rather than list features, I think the best place to start is this incredible article by Elena Rossini. She’s just such a great communicator and approaches it as a new user, covering many of the biggest features. There are other great resources linked in the article too.
I’d be happy to help with any other Qs you might have too if I can.
Yeah can’t argue with that. That’s pretty compelling. Thanks for sharing!
That’s exciting news!
