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:

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 :)

  • YerboutiEnglish
    26•2 months ago

    I find it way more easy to have civil interactions with people here. On reddit, I would either get ignored or discussions would turn to shit. Lemmy is actually way more fun to use, it just need a bit more of content.

  • IninewCrowEnglish
    31•2 months ago

    I’m happy to see new users joining Lemmy and every instance out there big and small.

    One thing everyone should consider and think of is … funding and supporting the Fediverse.

    Every new user should consider and think about supporting the fediverse through a donation as they use this new community in order for it to remain free to use, open and freely available for everyone. We all like to believe that these things can be just free to use without any of us having to pay for any of it. We also like to think that people just magically and without reward or compensation just work in the background for free to keep all this software, hardware, equipment and organization running.

    We don’t have to spend a fortune to keep funding these projects, but we should contribute something to it even if it is a small amount. If thousands of users spend a dollar, then it would add up to thousands of dollars to keep this whole system well funded. I know I’ve chatted with a few of the instance owners and have read what developers have written in the past … many of them have well paying jobs and have commercial work themselves that they do and they enjoy doing the work on Lemmy as either a hobby or passion project. However, I also know that as the popularity of these platforms grow, expenses add up for more hardware requirements, new hardware requirements, software management, security management and even having people monitoring everything online around the clock. Eventually, no matter how you cut it … work, time, effort, equipment all ends up costing money to someone at some point. And those costs only increase as popularity grows. And those payments have to come from somewhere.

    Donating a little bit and funding even just a little from everyone should be a new norm we should all accept. Otherwise, any new social media we create, no matter how open source we want it to be will slowly just be affected by corporate rot and get taken over again by those who would like to lock everything behind a wall and make the most money from it.

    Donating to Lemmy.ca (run by the non-profit Fedecan)
    https://fedecan.ca/en/donate

    Donating to the Lemmy Software developers
    https://join-lemmy.org/donate

    Donating to The Fediverse Foundation
    https://fediverse.foundation/en/spenden/

    But also … Donate to the instance you are on and support the people who maintain your instance.

  • TroyEnglish
    62•2 months ago

    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.

    • Sunshine (she/her)English
      37•2 months ago

      (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.

      • TroyEnglish
        22•2 months ago

        Yes! I have so much anime softcore blocked in my feed haha.

        (12) A great way to find new communities: when you see a user who posted something interesting, click on them and see which communities they’re in. Then subscribe to those :)

      • @[email protected]English
        4•1 month ago

        The block button is key to curating your general daily experience on Lemmy. Obviously block anything you don’t like, but also use it if you’re not interested in a specific scene or topic. You can always remove the block later if you want. I think of the block button more like the “Not Interested” button on Youtube.

    • UndeariusEnglish
      14•2 months ago

      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.

      • OtterOPMEnglish
        18•2 months ago

        What I like doing is posting to the small community first, and then cross posting from there

        That way people in the larger community can follow the link back and learn about the community if they’re interested. It also helps to mention the community at the start of the cross post since Lemmy doesn’t do that automatically

  • Avid AmoebaEnglish
    30•2 months ago

    Welcome!

    A social network is created by our collective social interaction. We’re still small, so your posts, comments and upvotes matter. Don’t just lurk, if you can. Every upvote counts! 😊

  • rinzeEnglish
    23•2 months ago

    First of all, thanks for all the work you do. I lived almost 10 years in Canada and having an account here makes me feel warm inside (not on the outside :-) ).

    Any idea why the recent influx of new users? May it have anything to do with Reddit planning to put some subreddits behind a paywal?

    Thanks again!

    • OtterOPMEnglish
      37•2 months ago

      Welcome! :)

      Going off of what people have mentioned in the registration applications, it is a combination of

      • wanting to support Canadian, and avoiding American tech companies (due to tariffs and other concerns)
      • concerns with how big tech has changed for the worse these past few months
      • Reddit’s recent actions, such as banning (and then reversing) a bunch of communities and the recent paywall announcement
      • learning about it for the first time and being excited about the concept

      The first point is why lemmy.ca has seen more relative growth this week than the others, but a lot of fediverse instances have seen growth recently

  • @[email protected]English
    16•2 months ago

    Glad to be here! As Reddit keeps enshittifying, and the boycott USAmerica movement gains momentum, hoping more folks migrate over.

  • @[email protected]English
    14•2 months ago

    Thank you for hosting and for all your work! I am excited to see this community grow. I have already seen a couple of posts on Canadian reddit communities where people name dropped lemmy.ca. It’d be interesting to maybe do a census once the signups stabilize to see how much the demographic changed. (I saw that there was one made in 2023).

    • OtterOPMEnglish
      9•2 months ago

      Totally!

      We were planning to do another census this winter, but we got busy with the new servers and spinning up new platforms.

      You might have seen other comments asking about Pixelfed and Friendica. Pixelfed is to instagram in the way that Lemmy is to Reddit, and we’re in the process of setting up a Canadian instance of Pixelfed right now. If all goes well, we may get more new people joining through there

    • ShadowMEnglish
      6•2 months ago

      Oooh, that’s a good feature request but not something we could easily do.

        • OtterOPMEnglish
          3•2 months ago

          If you’re on desktop, it might be possible to set up a JavaScript bookmarklet for that. I can take a look tonight.

          You would still open the lemmy.ca link first, but you wouldn’t need to modify the URL manually. You would click on the bookmarklet

          • @[email protected]English
            4•2 months ago

            Thanks, but I don’t want to put you through all that trouble. I’m guessing you’re busy enough already. I’m also getting used to lemmy.ca… starting to feel more at home :)

            • OtterOPMEnglish
              3•2 months ago

              That’s very considerate, thank you :)

              I’ve played with bookmarklets before, so it wasn’t too much trouble. I don’t normally use Alexandrite, but from my quick exploration it seems that Alexandrite URLs are very similar to the default ones, where it just appends alex.lemmy.ca/ to the start. If that is the case, the following steps should work. The steps are for Firefox, but it should be similar on other browsers:

              1. Right-click on the bookmark bar and click Add Bookmark
              2. Put anything you want in the name
              3. In the URL field, paste in this block of code:
              javascript:(function(){
    let currentURL = window.location.href;
    if (currentURL.startsWith('https://lemmy.ca/')) {
        window.location.href = currentURL.replace('https://lemmy.ca/', 'https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca/');
    }
})();

              When you are on any lemmy.ca page, clicking on the bookmark should take you to the corresponding alex.lemmy.ca page. You can also make one to go in the opposite direction, with this block of code:

              javascript:(function(){
    let currentURL = window.location.href;
    if (currentURL.startsWith('https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca/')) {
        window.location.href = currentURL.replace('https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca/', 'https://lemmy.ca/');
    } else if (currentURL === 'https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca') {
        window.location.href = 'https://lemmy.ca/';
    }
})();

              Hopefully that works!

  • OtterOPMEnglish
    7•2 months ago

    Here are some more tips, put together by @[email protected] in this post

    Quick FAQ:

    Q: I am not getting my registration email/can't log in after submitting application, what do I do?

    A: Check your spam/junk box, gmail and outlook can be very finicky. Applications are vetted by each server’s admins, but the applications are only visible when the email is verified. If no success after 24 hours, try another instance.

    Q: I signed up on one server (e.g. lemmy.ca), I can't login to another server to post/comment there (e.g. lemmy.world), what do I do?

    A: You can actually post on that server without leaving the site you are logged in on. The URL syntax to visit a remote community is [your instance]/c/[community name]@[remote instance]. Example to visit https://lemmy.ca/c/canada with a lemmy.world account, go to https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]. Mentioning the community similar to this form: [email protected] in Lemmy will create a link that takes you directly there.

    If you are visiting this post from another server, paste this link, https://lemmy.ca/post/39118714 into lemmyverse.link, set your home server, and it will automatically find the same post on your server so that you can comment. Some apps save you the trouble automatically. The rainbow pentagon is the permalink button to easily get the original link.

    Q: There's a lot of noise, how do I curate my feed?

    A: Two ways: 1. stay on All or Local and use blocks. Block users, communities and instances that post content you don’t want to see. 2. Find communities you are interested in, subscribe to those, and use the Subscribe feed to see posts exclusively from those communities.

    Q: Lemmy's interface looks ugly, is there anything better? And can I use it on my phone?

    A: Have a look at https://lemmyapps.com/, these include web interfaces, android, iOS and PC apps. On lemmy.ca you have a couple alternative web frontends, try https://old.lemmy.ca/ (for old.reddit.com users), https://alex.lemmy.ca/, https://photon.lemmy.ca/.

    Q: Can I trust you, or the admins more than RedditInc, gallowboob, Shittymorph or Steve Huffman?

    A: That’s for you to judge. Reddit is run as a for-profit publicly traded company, intent on scraping, hoarding and monetizing your data for itself, showing you ads, and getting every nickel they can siphon out of you. Lemmy is open source, and while the admins of lemmy.ca have control over its accounts in a similar way and have generously contributed significant resources, this server is run by Non-Profit Fédécan. Other servers will have their own admins, each with their own strengths and faults. The organization and the Lemmy developers will always appreciate your support, but isn’t interested in monetizing your data or ads. Friendly reminder when using public forums: what you post here will be open and publicly available for everyone, freely and equally.

    • OtterOPMEnglish
      4•5 days ago

      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 😄