Hello World!

The last week or so we have seen quite a big ‘boost’ in the amount of new users signing up so we thought it would be a good time to highlight some things that are of interest to new users.

CODE OF CONDUCT

Lemmy World is not a free speech instance, there are a couple of ground rules that need to be followed. If you’re new, I would advise you to read our Code of Conduct.

NEW USER QUESTIONS

If you are new to the fediverse as a whole, it might all be a bit overwhelming. What is Lemmy? What is federation? What even is an instance? For those questions I would suggest you have a look at the getting starting guide. It should cover most of your questions.

STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?

You can head over to the [email protected] community. This community should be used for questions regarding Lemmy World and is not the support community for the Lemmy software this site uses.

Our Admin @quinten recently made a post covering the most recurring questions there too. Read about that here.

ALTERNATIVE USER INTERFACES

Lemmy World hosts a few custom User Interfaces which give you a completely different experience both on the desktop as on mobile.

THIRD PARTY APPS

There are a lot of Third Party apps available for Lemmy. From Paid to Open Source, you will find something that suits you easily.

For a complete list of apps have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ (Thanks [email protected]).

EDIT: Updated the apps list. Also some more interesting links in @[email protected]’s post here: https://lemmy.world/comment/3962001

EDIT 2: Instead of https://photon.lemmy.world you can now just go to https://p.lemmy.world. You can thank @[email protected] laziness for that.

      • citrusface@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        It’ll click for you soon. It’s essentially a bunch of individually owned boards like reddit that are all interconnected. You can see posts from all the instances, and if you don’t like the posts in one instance - you can block it or filter it out.

        • hermitary@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          I hope so. I’ve actually downloaded every single iOS Lemmy app I could find and I’m going to try them all out to see which is the best fit.

          I did the same thing when I joined Mastodon.

          Is Lemmy compatible with ActivityPub by chance?

          • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
            2·
            1 year ago

            For apps, I tend to fluctuate between Memmy and Voyager. I liked the “feel” of Memmy more, but development on it has been slower because the dev had some personal stuff going on in their life. So I’ve switched to Voyager in the meantime.

            Both are very close to Apollo though, if you used to use that.

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        What made it “click” for me was when someone explained it like email addresses. You can send emails between Gmail and Yahoo Mail just fine, and two email addresses with the same username are distinguished by their @ handles. So like “Example@gmail(dot)com” is a different address than “Example@yahoo(dot)com”. They’re entirely separate accounts that can send emails to each other.

        The fediverse is very similar. My account @lemmy.world is separate from the same username on another instance. And the same goes for communities. There may be communities on certain instances that naturally grow and absorb the smaller ones, but there’s nothing stopping you from making your own identical community on another instance, with its own rules, moderators, and content.

        Federation is simply the process of connecting two servers together. The same way gmail and yahoo can talk to each other via a standard protocol, federation allows the different servers to talk to each other. This occasionally causes weird things when one instance federates with another, and you suddenly get flooded by posts from that new server. But that’s just your Home feed catching up, since all of those posts are now considered unread.

        Federation isn’t an automatic process in the sense that new servers announce themselves and get connected automatically. Instead, federation happens when a user from one instance tries to interact with another instance. For example, maybe you have a community over in @examplecommunity(dot)com. The first time you (as a Lemmy(dot)world user) try to interact with that examplecommunity server, the two will federate and begin the process of sharing posts.

        • seaQueue@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          The fediverse is a bit like email and usenet had an awesome baby. You have an address somewhere on the network and you can see and participate in content from any instance that’s also connected.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    131·
    1 year ago

    The list of apps is pretty out of date. For example, Boost already came out and [email protected] is a pretty popular extension. I use it a lot to make posts, and just used it to open that post on my instance.

    Also related is how to find communities

    I help with [email protected], and the idea is that you can subscribe to keep seeing more recommendations. We also have a guide for finding new communities here: https://lemmy.ca/post/5581032, which I’ve copied below:

    A great way to find lesser known communities is to look at the /communities page on an instance. For example: https://lemmy.ca/communities

    For a list of instances to look through:

    • pangora.social (NEW): Great way to find instances related to a particular topic. This is also great for picking an instance when first making an account/moving accounts.
    • awesome-lemmy-instances: not that organized, but it

    🔎 Search pages

    🔥 Apps and Browser Extensions

    🙌 Communities for discovering new communities:

    Here are some other communities, some of which are less active:

    Remember, you can also post questions about finding new communities right here!

    👽 Coming from Reddit?

    https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/

  • wayl@lemmy.world
    122·
    1 year ago

    It reminds me when the Mastodon replaced Twitter. I did my account there, then I had trouble logging in because instances don’t share the logging process. Eventually my posts were lost, now I just checked and my account disappeared.

    • wayl@lemmings.world
      81·
      1 year ago

      The federated paradigm and its fragmented nature has differences we need to get used to.

        • wayl@lemmings.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          Account deleted. IIRC the instance disappeared for a while (mastodon.social in this case) then I couldn’t login anymore. Other instances (e.g., mastodon.uno) of course don’t keep my whole message history. At first I understood that communities are shared, you can post in the same community from many account (often the example of “email is federated” is used). But I’m not sure anymore. Seems the case for c/announcements, but not for many others, so you have communities which are are already little further fragmented.

    • bery@lemmy.world
      71·
      1 year ago

      Your account is automatically removed after a long time of inactivity

  • Xero@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    big “boost” in the amount of users? What kind of dumbass stunt did spez pull again this time?

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      Nothing new from Fuhrer Spez - the Boost for Lemmy client had its first release and brought in a new wave of reddit refugees.

    • u/unhappy_grapefruit_2@lemmy.world
      31·
      1 year ago

      The reason why I’m here is I was permanently banned from reddit that’s Possibly why alot of people decided to just hop onto lemmy and give it ago I noticed myself it’s alot easier to get banned on reddit nowadays then a few months back before all this started

      • Xero@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I changed email to an alias called fuckspez@ and even changed the username to the same name ever since spez blackmailed 3rd party apps but I haven’t been banned yet.

      • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        The amount of posts on the front page of Reddit that were no longer available because user was banned or broke the rules or mods just didn’t like the post, is just way too much. My friend would share reddit posts with me only for me to see that they weren’t available anymore. It really gets in the way of the experience. Also I had so many posts removed without explanation, or in some cases, with the mods insulting me.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
    41·
    1 year ago

    I’m curious: How does this work if you’re posting in this instance from another instance? Can I be banned? Would I be informed of a ban? Can you delete or edit my posts? I see more instsnce banned users from Lemmy.World than any other instance, and the rules don’t seem to be much different than another other social site, which is concerning as looking through those banned users, I quite often can not find anything that would have broken the rules, whether it was deleted or not. Which really makes it seem like some admin or admins over here are banning people who disagree with them.

    Edit: So I was just checking the modlog over at Foodporn (of which I am a mod) and noticed that most of the actions taken were an admin from Lemmy.World deleting and banning a single user who argued against eating meat. The only thing the offending user did was argue with the admin. They didn’t break our rules or site rules, they just happened to engage in an argument against this admin. Definitely not a good look.

      • Erdgeist@lemmings.world
        31·
        1 year ago

        Please don’t ban me, I don’t understand anything what you are saying. The first page literally says: You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server/instance.

        That means it doesn’t matter which instance you are using.

        • freamon@endlesstalk.orgEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Don’t worry. I’m not in a position to ban anyone from anything. Sorry if it seemed otherwise - I was just warning a fellow user not to be too casual about lemmy.world’s rules. As the community I linked to demonstrated, we can be on other instances, posting to communities on other instances, but if we’re banned by LW, no-one on what’s easily the biggest instance will see what we’re saying.

          As for the ‘access all content’ line, it should probably be ‘you can access all content [that your admins allow you access]’.

          It all works by every instance copying in communities that their users are interested in, and then every instance merging the results. I commented here, but I never left my server on endlesstalk.org - I commented on endlesstalk.org/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world. Similarly, you commented on lemmings.world/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world and now we’re both seeing the merged result.
          This means that, when an instance is copying something, it’s free to leave out anything it doesn’t like (e.g. stuff from a banned user).
          You’ll need to copy/paste this URL to see the difference: https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] is what LW users see of that community - there’s a lot less there than what everyone else sees at [email protected] (which, for you, is lemmings.world/c/sciencefiction@lemmy.ml of course)

  • LackingC10H12N2O@lemmy.world
    32·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure where to post my question, it’s more of a general question rather than something specific that belongs in [email protected] so I’ll just ask here.

    I have read the guide for new users and similar posts but couldn’t find anything that addresses it.

    I somewhat understand the distributed nature of the fediverse, but my question is: how does it differ from reddit in terms of eventually a small handful of people will create all the most popular subreddits (or communities here), consolidate power, and turn it into a dictatorship like reddit.

    That was one of the main problems on reddit, where like 25 power mods ran every single popular sub.

    Apologies if this has been asked before or if it’s the wrong place, I did look around and try to find an answer…

    Thanks.

    • Black Xanthus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      However, unlike Reddit, there’s alternatives. You might not like the community on @lemmy.world, but you might like the community on @anotherlemmythatmight.exist.

      Because of the federated nature, communities will naturally fracture and focus. Here, a bad faith mod will just kill a community on instance a, and people will move to instance b.

      We’ve already seen things happen like this under the banner of ‘free speech’, where people believe that free speech means free from consequences. If you think that, there are plenty of instances out there. Lemmy.world isn’t one of them.

      This means that you can find your favourite community in places with different server rules. Which means it will be the community - the people, the mods, the knowledge, that grows one, not just the fact the names taken.

      • LackingC10H12N2O@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        Hmm, interesting, thanks for that!

        I only joined lemmy.world because it was the first one on the list in the tutorial I read when setting this up. I’m still brand new here and trying to figure out how this all works.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      I somewhat understand the distributed nature of the fediverse, but my question is: how does it differ from reddit in terms of eventually a small handful of people will create all the most popular subreddits (or communities here), consolidate power, and turn it into a dictatorship like reddit.

      That’s something any community needs to be on the lookout for, I wouldn’t assume the worst just yet. Lemmy is entirely community driven, if governance is a concern then get involved in governance and see what you can help with.

  • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I> Remember to criticise ideas, and not people.

    That’s a nice guideline. I kept trying to explain that to my recent ex… the vast difference between saying “this behavior is unproductive” vs. “you are unproductive”.

    • LiquidPhD@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think for some people, there is zero difference between the two. These kind of people are “you are what you do” kind of people. Lazy people have lazy behavior, unproductive people have productive behavior, etc.

      It could also be that they take “you are unproductive” to be a sort of shorthand for "Right now, you are being unproductive. How people perceive themselves and others in time can be strange. That can also cause problems with communication.

      Anyway, have a great week!

  • LongPigFlavor@lemmy.world
    1616·
    1 year ago

    I’m going to be honest, I’m probably not going stay on lemmy for much longer. It’s just the few toxic members ruining for the majority couple with the extreme political polarization. Some people turn benign discourse into heated arguments and argue in bad faith and some leave mean spirited or nasty comments without provocation. Those are the things that I do not miss from Reddit. I’ve already blocked a few people, but that’s not something that Iike to do, but such is life.

    If I were to describe it in a simple way I’d say it feels very anti-normie.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
      161·
      1 year ago

      I just tag people who argue in bad faith with a note and avoid engaging with them in the future. Don’t let a few assholes ruin an entire community for you.

      • seaQueue@lemmy.world
        11·
        1 year ago

        The nice thing about lemmy is that if you don’t agree with how a particular instance is run you can always find another that’s more your speed. That isn’t really an option on any other social media network.

        I’ve definitely run into some assholes on the platform who can’t separate the user from the idea but by and large it’s a step up from Reddit.

      • LongPigFlavor@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        I do hope to stay, but if I were to leave, I’d just stop using social media as a whole or use it very seldomly.