Lemmy.world starting guide

Ruud@lemmy.worldmod to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 373 points –

(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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As someone who used voat for awhiel here are my tips:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

What is the philosophy behind downvotes? Downvote non-productive/bad faith comments or downvote things you do not like?

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

How does lemmy mark a post as read? I want to scroll past posts and have them automatically marked read, and then not show them to me again. Every time i open lemmy I'm seeing the same posts I've seen many times. Yes, even when I am not sorting on 'active'

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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).

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 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.

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.

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?

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!

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!

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.

I'm trying to use the app to browse when I'm not at a computer. I've seen mentions of "Jerboa" but it won't accept my login credentials. I've tried all three instances, no dice. Any suggestions? I use Android phone the most, but open to apps for iOS.

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

Thanks so much for this guide! i was not aware on how the accounts worked and I created the same account on multiple servers, is that a problem now?

If I understand how lemmy works, then when you make an account named “bob” on lemmy.world, then your full username is something like “bob@lemmy.world”.

So if you made another “bob” on somewhere.else, then that account’s full username would be something like “bob@somewhere.else”.

If I’ve got the right idea, then no it’s not a problem. Although you might want to consider deleting extra accounts, b/c these servers are still pretty small and 1 more account on one means 1 more to support

Thanks for the advice, will take me a while to get used to this, haha.

Is there a beginners guide I can read so I could learn how to set up scheduled posts?

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.

What is the difference between Lemmy ML and WORLD?

Different owners, different rules. Different communities but they can be followed from all servers so that doesn't matter.

Do I need a different sign in for ML and World?

Yes but actually you just need an account on 1, you can read and post on both with it

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.

Is the registration closed on lemmy.world? It does not seem to go through when signing up. I know you can choose another instance but I just thought it could be confusing when sign-up still looks open and is encouraged in this guide.

Edit: Resolved. Apparently there was some delay in the server. Got the verification email now. While I was retrying without the email, on the sign-up and login pages, the loading wheel just kept spinning. But all is fine now. Thanks!

No. If it doesn't work probably the username was already taken or too long or the password was too long. It doesn't say when it is..

Check your mail (both normal inbox and spam). You might’ve gotten a verification ail.

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In my haste to sign up I jumped into Lemmy.ca, as I followed a favorite subreddit there. Now I'm feeling like I would prefer a more general instance. Can I switch from lemmy.ca to Lemmy.world? Outside of the local view does it even matter?

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.

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?

Is there a file size limit for banners?

Good question. I think there's a 40MB upload limit.. but not sure. Need to check.

I tried uploading one around 15MB, didn’t seem to work. I’m using safari on iPad, so not sure if that would be an issue.

Would be good if we could see a res and size limit on the settings page?

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.

Thanks for all the info i feel like i finally understand. Hopefully people figure out how to migrate because a federated network of sites is much better and its about time everyone moved on from reddit!

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

Sorry but I really don't understand. Didn't you say that to find a community through lemmy.world search one user from this instance had to have interacted with it? If so, how do I first find and interact with a community noone interacted with before, if the lemmy.world search shows no results?

Hey, I know this comment is a few days old but I also saw nobody really answered and you've not been posting much so might still be confused. Ignore me if you figured it out already :)

The search page lets you search by keyword, which will turn up communities lemmy.world already knows about. The good news for you is since this is currently the biggest instance, we already did most of the work and it knows about most communities.

But it also lets you search for communities it doesn't yet know about with the syntax !community@instance (note the ! at the beginning there). Doing this means future users from lemmy.world will be able to find that community in regular keyword search.

If you're on the website this is a lot easier because remote communities have the search syntax instructions in the sidebar like so

And note usually during this process it'll show "no results" for a few seconds before pulling in the new community and updating the search results.

So your question now might be "how do I find unsynced communities in the first place to find their address and sync it on my home instance?" and the answer to that part is lemmyverse.net/communities.

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.

I'd really like to have the ability to disable embedded images in comments. I want to see only text, not 50 memes, RES had this as a feature.

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.

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.

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.

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...

It's not that dissimilar from what happens already on Reddit with lots of subs with similar names and topics.

Eventually, the best ones will prevail.

Yeah this is exactly how Reddit was back in 2010. It was the Wild West back then and similar subs fought to survive. Eventually the one with the best content will win out!

This is not a problem, it's a feature. It is comparable to reddit having some subs about the same topic, only with different names. Just give it time and it will sort itself out. The best community(ies) will prevail. Subscribe and post and create content for now. Let's kill 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.

Hi, thanks for the post. I migrated here immediately after Boost started not working well any more.

Is there any phone app for Lemmy? Or would it be different websites for different Lemmy worlds?

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.

Are you familiar with what's going on over at Reddit right now?

Yes, but in that case the mobile website is not fine; it is awful. I just used the desktop site on mobile, though, so I'm not actually familiar with what people want to get out of an app.

Yes, it's called Jerboa. Using it now. Shockingly decent for being in alpha.

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??

Would it be an idea to add the alternative interfaces in this post?

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

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.

What does create remote post or comment mean? Does this mean we can post onreddit from here or something?

New users: this instance is too large, please join a smaller instance.

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 ![](IMAGE_URL) to the body of the post.

Can I change my @handle (not display name)? I messed up.

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.

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 we are back on the browser again

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.

Hope that someone creates a Lemmy view much like old.reddit - way too spread out for me right now. Please, someone build this. :)

Firefox on android doesn't let me login to lemmy. I have AdGuard installed and the add-on switched on. What could be the solution?

Edit: I haven't solved the problem, but after some time trying some things here and there, I think I know what's the issue. I have both Chrome and Firefox installed. I was using Lemmy on Chrome, so I tried to login in Firefox, and the issue started. I logged out on Chrome, and tried here on Firefox, it worked. TLDR: you can't have the same account logged in on both Chrome and Firefox.

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!

just to be clear, we're talking about the people that created Lemmy and gave it to the world for free and do not attempt to control your personal opinion on political matters nor are telling you that you can't use the system they developed if you disagree with them politically. additionally, you're not even in their instance/server. so if anyone here is being judgemental and self-righteous with the Lemmy system, it's not them. if you want to leave and hold yourself to the same standard that you do for leaving, then make sure to investigate the authors of every single system you use and then decide to stay or leave based on your congruence with their political opinions to ensure you maintain consistency. i believe you'll find it nearly impossible to find a place, though you might find some companies what will inauthentically pay lip-service to attract the most users for monetary gain or influence.

for my next point, i want to be definitely clear that don't like marxist-leninist theory. i find it too controlling and authoritarian. the Soviet Union definitely did some atrocious stuff, especially under Stalin. but if you want to criticize states and their respective economical systems based on the human toll, you might want to consider all of lives lost to manifest destiny, slavery, and then followed by CIA meddling in Latin America. if you're from any country in Western Europe that was a colonial power, then I don't even have say anything. if you're from elsewhere without Western European ancestry, then I applaud your inherited innocence and I wish you good luck.

Also the condescension instantly put me in defensive mode.

if you want to take it as condescending, then that's your right. no one can tell you how to feel about something. however, you can't tell someone else what their intent was if it wasn't openly state or clearly evident.

Have fun putting words in people's mouths and spreading rumors on Reddit.

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.

You can search for communities, and in the list you will get communities on other instances.

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.

The forum-like structure is also helping a ton, I think I'm just not a fan of the micro-blogging format lol.

I think you're right. Imagining the instances as a bunch of a little reddits with their own subreddits that I can subscribe to and interact with is easier for me to wrap my head around.

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

this is great, thanks for this - going to have a good read through over the blackout for the next few days

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.

@ruud Can a Mastodon user vote on a Lemmy post?

Good question. You could try by starring a post from Mastodon, see if the upvote goes up?

@ruud that worked! though it looks like Lemmy apps require a lemmy account, so I might need to have two of them.

Good to know. Haven't tried checking out Lemmy communities from my Mastodon main, or Mastodon toots from my Lemmy main yet. So far for me, Lemmy is Lemmy, and Mastodon is Mastodon, and never the twain shall meet. In theory, the Federated aspects should offer some interesting and useful features.

Frankly I’ve been looking for a while now and I can’t figure out how to subscribe to a community?

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…

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 advance

Is there a way to pause the feed when browsing all/new?

It's adding new posts faster than I can even scroll, I see something I want to look at and POOF, it's gone to who knows where.

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.

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.

What is the ideal resolution for a community banner so as not to unnecessarily 'weigh it down' with a super high-resolution image?

Thanks so much for this guide.ive used mastodon in the past, but it's been a while. I'm not really a fan of the short-blurb content and prefer a forum-format, so here I am!

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.

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.

Can I hide this post somehow?

I will un-pin this when the major inflow of users is over, it's already getting less.

Are the algorithms that determine how our "front pages" are populated set at each Lemmy instance or by the protocol as a whole? Aside from blocked instances.

Can any posts be hidden? I haven't found that feature yet. I've looked on both the web version and jerboa.

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

When I browse communities and switch to allI am able to find some off server communities that I would like to join, but when I go to the link, I am unable to subscribe. The subscribe button doesn't seem to work. Is this because the server doesn't federate with the other one? I am trying to add some nature/science related communities from the https://mander.xyz server.

That should all work, but maybe there's some slowness on 1 of the servers. Please refresh to see if it has worked, if not, try again.

Thanks! It worked later on when I tried again.

i don’t see it described here. i get the difference between “subscribed” and “all” but what the hell is ”local”?

That's what Ferawyn (I have no idea how to tag them) said:

"All" shows all posts from any community from any non blocked instance/server by your instance/server.

"Subscribed" shows only the communities you are subscribed to, no matter the instance/server it is as long as it is a non blocked one.

"Local" shows all the communities belonging to the instance/server in which you are located.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't see too much on the OS level that could cause it. Probably more likely a bad DB query or locking. As I'm a DBA I could look into that, if only I had the time. Bit busy at the moment.

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

https://browse.feddit.de

How often is this updated? I've joined a few in the past 24 hours that aren't listed on this aggregator.

Is it possible to stop the new posts auto-scrolling the screen up? I can't read a headline without 20 new posts teleporting it away!

That's a bug in the websockets implementation. We're waiting for 0.18 which removes websockets entirely

This auto-updating of the timeline is a platform killer for me. Yes, I understand it's a bug and it will be fixed with a future update. However, if this bug was widely advertised as a bug and people knew it was a bug, then most people would stick around Lemmy and wait patiently. I was one click away from abandoning Lemmy before reading your post. Just saying.

Hi, is having a community flagged NSFW sufficient, or will every individual post also need to be marked as NSFW at time or posting?

Every post needs to be flagged I think. Maybe you could try with a test post.

Yeah cool, I tested and it doesn’t auto NSFW every new post. I’ll just ask people to flag NSFW for every post that’s required and delete if they don’t. Thanks!

I am unable to create a community. The thing just keeps spinning and doesn't do anything. Trying to get things sorted out here to get my users to transfer from reddit ultimately.

Probably it already exists, or has existed and was deleted. Which name do you try to create?

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.

Is there a way to hide posts / mark as read / remove from feed?

if you go to settings i think there is a checkbox for whether or not you want Read posts to keep showing up

Just made a community, how do I make it searchable for people in other instances aside from lemmy.world?

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.

Actually the upvotes should work the first time but for some reason it’s bugging and not displaying correctly for a bit.

The next release of Lemmy is supposed to improve this, removing websocket.

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)

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.

Does anyone know where I can find the main differences between Lemmy.world and kbin.social? That’s probably a stupid question….just trying to understand

Both look similar because they do the same thing and can interact with each other because they use ActivityPub protocol, but the under-the-hood is different. kbin is written in php and lemmy is written in rust. That only matters to the developers and website hosts.

Cool, thanks! Do you have a preference yet?

Not really to be honest, I have been using 3 or 4 instances and they all have pieces of the whole "fediverse" I can see how it might not be user friendly but idc, works for me.