(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.

  • Aeri@lemmy.world
    3·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • RarePepeCollector@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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
  • Andy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Ruud@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Jeef@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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

  • goldenarchmage@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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…

  • dirtySourdough@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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?

  • vipernixz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

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

  • major_third@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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?

  • twistypencil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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’

  • Sjotroll@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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?

  • Swarming@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

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