(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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RIF transplant. Happy to be here. Thank you for the tutorial looking forward to start playing catchup
Thanks this helps a lot. Coming over since they massacred by boy rif
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).How can i help donate and support lemmy.wold and the greater Lemmy ecosystem?
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.
Could you sticky a donation link on the top of this community? Or put it in the community-info section?
OK
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.
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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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?
Yes
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.
Great answer, thank you!
No worries, hope you’re settling in ok!
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 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.
ty for this
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 :)
May I suggest to add a link to donate in order to contribute to the financial efforts behind Lemmy.world? @ruud@lemmy.world
It’s on the frontpage.
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Yes in Settings there’s a Languages selection box.
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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’m having the same issue. Safari browser from a MacOS.
