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 !support@lemmy.world 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 Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de).

EDIT: Updated the apps list. Also some more interesting links in @otter@lemmy.ca’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 @Rootiest@lemmy.world laziness for that.

  • @wayl@lemmy.world
    13•2 years 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.

    • ██████████
      7•2 years ago

      bro my account got banned here. i figured it was my fault thwir server their rules, whatever. then like 3 days later i can log in again.

      growing pains i suppose

    • bery
      6•2 years ago

      Your account is automatically removed after a long time of inactivity

    • wayl
      8•2 years ago

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

        • wayl
          2•2 years 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.

  • XeroEnglish
    7•2 years ago

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

    • u/unhappy_grapefruit_2
      3•2 years 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

      • XeroEnglish
        2•2 years 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•2 years 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.

        • u/unhappy_grapefruit_2
          1•2 years ago

          I never had mods just out right insult me although after making a post on r/holup which got 700 upvotes before getting the post getting closed down by mods I did get an private message from a new user which was a bit iffy can’t remember the exact message this was 8 or 9 months ago or smth like that I think I must’ve pissed off an mod on r/holup to a certain extent for them to look for any slip ups which there were plenty off

          • @Clerkle@lemmy.world
            1•2 years ago

            . . . I did get an private message . . .

            Correction: . . . I did get a private message . . .

            I see this grammatical error frequently enough to realize this is likely being wrongfully taught as proper English on a large scale.

            Here’s the grammar rule with an:
            Use an to introduce words that identify a single thing that is pronounced to sound like it begins with a vowel. Otherwise, use a to introduce a single thing that is pronounced to sound like it begins with a consonant.

            Reference:
            https://www.grammar.com/a-vs-an-when-to-use/

            My guess is the incorrect grammar is probably being taught in the same ESL models teaching people to inject questions into noninquisitive statements (ie. “They don’t know what is proper English grammar” — which can be better phrased as “They don’t know what proper English grammar is” but more correctly as “They don’t know proper English grammar.”)

            Anyone who is educated in English enough to be able to standardize an ESL model is aware that those uses I exampled are grammatically incorrect, so it’s my guess there’s some deliberate oppression designed into those language learning models to distinguish foreign English learners as linguistically inferior instead of as potentially native.

    • @seaQueue@lemmy.world
      5•2 years ago

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

  • OtterEnglish
    80•2 years ago

    The list of apps is pretty out of date. For example, Boost already came out and !instance_assistant@lemmy.ca 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 !communitypromo@lemmy.ca, 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/

    • citrusfaceEnglish
      6•2 years ago

      Remember quality over quantity.

      But yes, I am glad mor people are joining as well.

  • @Gemini24601@lemmy.worldEnglish
    48•2 years ago

    I feel right at home in the fediverse, it gives me a much more secure feeling than Reddit. Thank you devs for your hard work at creating a suitable alternative.

    • @Limeey@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17•2 years ago

      So, on that topic of “security” - just remember that whenever you post, your post is essentially sent to every “instance” that is federated (and listening for the community you posted to). Each instance is it’s own server running it’s own version of an activitypub implementation (lemmy, mastadon, etc).

      So on lemmy.world that means your post is sent to literally thousands of servers that you cannot directly influence. If you delete a post, a request is made to those servers to also delete the post, but if that instance is modified or unavailable when the request is sent (it’ll re-try, but there’s a limit how many times), then it’s possible your post will not be deleted and you’ll never know.

      Keep in mind this also means that anyone, say a government or private company, can establish an instance, federate, and receive the posts of everyone. Their instance may be nearly completely invisible - so you won’t know they’re collecting that information.

      However, lemmy stores and sends almost no information about any user. A user profile does not contain IP address or country or anything. All of that stays in the server logs of the instance you originate from, and never enters the database. So your “true” personal information isn’t shared, but your account name, and a link to your account, and the post content (whatever text you add) is shared.

      Lastly, images tend to be shared. Lemmy uses “pict-rs” which is a FOSS image hosting server, and when an instance receives a federated post, if there is an image in the “URL” field, then it will ask pict-rs to download that image to its server for easier serving to its users.

      • @Gemini24601@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7•2 years ago

        Great point, however, I would rather have my posts be sent to like minded peers than to some walled-garden company like Reddit. Also, what data would any supposed malicious instance get that isn’t already available to the public? As for account names, text and images from posts, etc. aren’t these the very definition of social media? What kind of social media is not sharing text or images anyway?

        • @Limeey@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3•2 years ago

          Yep, I don’t disagree, just wanted to make it clear what is shared and what isn’t. I suppose if you don’t like people training AI on the text you write, then you may not like that they could gather it with literally no effort. Most other sites would require that they put some effort either into web scraping, using an api to request the post, or just buy the content in some text dump format.

          But ya, I mean, this is a minor difference between platforms, overall.

  • @Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19•2 years ago

    I’ve been here a few months, but still learned quite a bit from this post - thanks for putting this together!

    And welcome aboard to all the newest newbies! …did Reddit slap its users in the face again?