(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.
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 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 :)
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Yes in Settings there’s a Languages selection box.
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I’m having the same issue. Safari browser from a MacOS.
Same here (Firefox on Linux). From what I saw, if you select (with ctrl+click) multiple languages in the “Languages” option in the settings, every time you post you’ll have the option to select one of these languages in the “Language” drop-down menu of the post. But you have to choose one every time. It’d be nice if we could select one as default in the settings, so that we need to use that drop-down menu only when we’re posting in one of the other languages.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Can be heavy load, so just wait or re-try (cancel and then subscribe)
Ok, thanks!
What does create remote post or comment mean? Does this mean we can post onreddit from here or something?
Helpfull!
Thank you for this guide! Helped me alot!
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 advanceplease add turkish language
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?
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”
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.
Yes, I got that. But how do you connect to them?
If you open the community on our host (so it will read https://lemmy.world/c/communtityname@somewhereelse on the address bar for the communityname community owned by the somewhereelese instance) there should be a “Join” button on the sidebar.
