(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.
As far as I know, yes. It’s like asking can I switch from Hotmail to Gmail? Make an account on Lemmy.world, and you should still be able to follow your favorite community hosted in lemmy.ca
Some Fediverse platforms (e.g. Mastodon) allow you to migrate your account from one server to another. By doing this, you keep your account details, post history, subscriptions, etc. and your followers get redirected to your new account. Lemmy does not currently support this, but it may someday.
Thanks for this post, @ruud@lemmy.world. I’ve setup my own instance and am enjoying the lemmy experience so far.
At least the latest RC cut the post and save time in half, for me. That’s a measurable improvement. It definitely must be due to server load, as posting and saving to !lemmyworld@lemmy.world from my instance seems pretty snappy.
Yes it halved it here too, but half of 20 is still 10 seconds which is just too long. But hey, 3.2k users and it’s still working so won’t complain too much…
3.2k users is impressive. But yes, 10 seconds is bad. 2.5 seconds is about the max I find acceptable. If you don’t mind me asking, what are you running on, in terms of hardware?
I’m tempted to fire up jmeter, or locust, or k6 and push some load against my instance to see how things look internally under load.
I don’t see too much on the OS level that could cause it. Probably more likely a bad DB query or locking. As I’m a DBA I could look into that, if only I had the time. Bit busy at the moment.
Great initiative!
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 :)
Sorry to bother you, but I wanted to test whether I could post a comment here.
And a reply?
What is the difference between Lemmy ML and WORLD?
Hi,
I noticed that thumbnails of links are not showing here https://lemmy.world/c/world, whereas same news link posted on https://lemmy.ml/c/worldnews is working fine, why is that?
Here is an example of the same news link on both communities:
https://lemmy.world/post/260407 (no thumbnail)
https://lemmy.ml/post/1317159 (with thumbnail)
Thanks
On Reddit subreddits are self moderated. Are communities on Lemmy self moderated or does all moderation happen at the instance level?
Is there a way to set a default language for posts and comments I’m making? Selecting “English” every time is pretty annoying. I’m not going to be changing up the language I’m typing in. I would assume most users are pretty consistent in terms of the language they post with.
Yes in Settings there’s a Languages selection box.
I played with that a few times before posting here. Maybe I don’t understand how the settings language selection box works.
My interface language is set to English.
In the Languages option I can select one or multiple languages, but I’m unclear what that does (and unclear what the X does on the right side of the box). The settings don’t say, it just has a warning not to deselect Undetermined. This makes me think it’s more about the languages for posts I can view rather than the default language for posts I’m trying to make.
After changing that the first time my Select Language drop-down on comments did drop from the full list down to just Undetermined and English, but there is no default, so it still requires I manually select it each time.
I’m not sure if a feature hasn’t been developed yet, I ran into a bug, or I’m just overlooking something.
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.
Is there some way to stop Lemmy from refreshing under my nose. I’m trying to click a link, or read one and it just scrolls away.
This is great, thank you! I plan to send it to a friend - it’s much better than any explanation that I could come up with.
Thanks! It’s not finished yet but keep checking back.
Are there any more guides for Moderators and about editing communities? e.g. can images and banners be edited after creation? Where exactly are the mod tools options to found as a moderator? I’m very new to this and there is very little that is obvious to me.
This basic guide is very helpful but where can I find more? thanks in advanceHelpfull!
What does “Subscribe Pending” mean?
I clicked the Subscribe button on !guildwars2@lemmy.ml but I get that yellow pending button instead of the green “joined”. Is it because of the heavy load?
Not a big problem, I can read and post there, but I was curious.
Can be heavy load, so just wait or re-try (cancel and then subscribe)
Ok, thanks!
Thank you for this guide! Helped me alot!
