We have gotten a lot of new signups over the past few days, and we’re all very excited to have you joining us! You’ll find that people are more than happy to help you get started and learn how to use the site.
If you feel up for it, you can introduce yourself or ask questions below!
We have put together some resources to help new users get started:
You can also read:
- A quick overview of Lemmy
- A detailed guide on how Lemmy works
- A quick overview of ‘the Fediverse’
- Learn about the non-profit that runs this site
These guides were published very recently, and we will be updating them over time. If you find that something is confusing or missing, please let us know and we can improve them further.
For an organized list of Canadian communities (provinces/territories, Cities / Local , Sports, Schools, BuyCanadian, CanadaPolitics etc.), see this post on [email protected]. You can also ask about communities in places like [email protected].
We also encourage you to check out [email protected], so that others can help you / learn from your questions.
Welcome to Lemmy :)
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Hello, this place is kinda old school interwebs, I like it
Welcome!
We also have a few custom front ends, one of which is https://old.lemmy.ca/
Since it’s developed by a third party, it’s likely not as stable as the main interface, but it’s fun to look at 😄
New user question; why is it that I cannot upvote? am I missing something? I tap the arrow and get ‘invalid_bot_action’ I can assure you I am a real human - I can pass most captchas 😆
You are currently labeled as a bot. You can change that in your account settings, there should be a checkbox “Bot account”, uncheck it :)
Dang that was quick! Thank you! I am definitely not a bot, I enjoy human things like walking bipedally on my 2 legs and breathing oxygen rich air with my very human lungs!
That’s what a bot would say. A human would complain about their microplastics-filled brain. 😂
That was very fast, thank you for responding so quickly 😄
Hi
Since Blaze’s answer is comprehensive, I’m linking it here as well for anyone that comes across this: https://lemmy.ca/post/40668574/15756000
What exactly is an ‘instance’?
So, Lemmy is software that lets you build an off-the-shelf content aggregation website, similar to how Wordpress lets you build an off-the-shelf blog. There are dozens of moderate to large websites running Lemmy, and hundreds of small or tiny ones running it.
Each one of these websites can, if the users and admins enable it, subscribe to communities hosted on other Lemmy-based websites, which lets them comment on posts in those communities, or even make their own posts to them.
Because this intercommunication allows users to treat remotely-hosted communities as if they are local to the user’s website, it’s common for people to think of the network of Lemmy-based websites as a signular entity. In this model, each of the independent websites running Lemmy gets called an “instance”.
The same terminology is used for Mastodon-based websites, and other websites that allow for similar auto-syndication of content that creates a simulacrum of a centralized content environment. So, a “Lemmy instance” is a “website running Lemmy that is participating in active content syndication”, a “Mastodon instance” is “a website running Mastodon that is participating in active content syndication”, etc. You can replace “Mastodon” or “Lemmy” with “mbin”, “Friendica”, “PieFed”, “Misskey”, “Hubzilla”, “PeerTube”, “PixelFed”, “BookWyrm”, “FunkWhale”, “nodeBB”, or any number of other website engines that are participating in this type of ecosystem.
So, it sounds (actually, ‘reads)’ like a treatise written by someone indoctrinated into the ‘Linux - C++’ ideology (theocracy? The Religion of IT? Way back in the ‘olden days’, we referred to ‘getting a job at IBM’ as ‘entering the Priesthood’ ). The term ‘instance’ comes directly out of the obscure-to-the-masses lexicon of C++, Please, translate your indoctrinated terminology into something more identifiable and familiar to the masses in order for us plebians to follow it.
Or at least provide a ‘definition of terms’ translation service, written without any reference to exclusively in-house terminology in the description.
Also, it would be really, really useful to modify the ‘messages’ coding such that, when clicking to link to the post in ‘messages’ to see the original post, the reader went directly to their post in the thread, instead of starting at the top and having to scroll through page after page of other irrelevant posts in order to see just the activity on their original post.
That message behavior is more or less what happens in Boost for Lemmy. Whichever app/website you’re using can implement that differently.
Salut/Hi there!
Bonjour, all! 🙂
Bonjour! 😊
Bonjour, fellow Canadian Lemmies! I’d deleted my Reddit account in November, and was only lurking, so it’s nice to have a voice in the conversation once more.
A couple of notes and unsolicited advice as someone who is almost an old hand already…
(1) Your front-page will be more interesting as you subscribe to more things. You can subscribe to things from other Lemmy servers and they will be pulled into your feed here.
(2) Communities that are hosted on this server will show up under “Local”.
(3) “All” shows all of the local content from (2), but also any content that this server had to fetch from other servers for others. Basically, when you subscribe to stuff, it’ll end up in All for everyone else on this server as well. If no one on the server has subscribed to specific content from another server, it won’t show up in All. As a result, All is sort of a cross section of our users’ interests.
(4) If you were to sign up for another server – say lemm.ee – you would get a different Local and All. But you should be able to subscribe to the same things regardless of the server you chose.
(5) Some servers are not connected to others, for reasons. This is called defederation. It’s basically a means to block an entire server who has a community not behaving in a way that doesn’t jive well on your local server. Lemmygrad.ml is blocked from this server, for example. You probably won’t notice, but on rare occasions you can’t subscribe to a community on a blocked server.
(6) You can help the quieter communities grow by shitposting. Throw your backlog of old saved memes into them. There isn’t as much traffic here as reddit, and the niche communities often don’t exist (or are silent).
(7) Find a larger community to post to for engagement. For example, on Reddit I would subscribe to the WinnipegJets team sub, but on Lemmy it is too quiet. So instead I post my Jets content to the more general Hockey community so we can have some discussion. This will change over time.
(8) A good place to find communities to subscribe to is: https://lemmyverse.net/communities – copy and paste the community name – eg: [email protected] – into the search bar and then subscribe.
(9) Meow
(10) Try different sort options. New or Scales are my favourites.
I’ve been here for awhile and have a pretty good understanding of how federation works. Number (3) was a very concise way to explain how the All feed works. I sort of knew but that really helped me understand.
Number (7), I will suggest the use of the cross-posting feature. Post to the larger community for engagement but also cross-post to the smaller communities to help them grow. Quiet communities are a cat-and-mouse game where people don’t post or comment because no one else is. The more people start to engage, the more others will start to engage.
(11) Also don’t be afraid to curate the feed the block button is your friend, don’t like certain users, communities or instances baaam block, there’s your peace of mind.
