(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 @[email protected] : 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 @[email protected] , 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. [email protected]. 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.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•2 years 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?

    • @[email protected]English
      1•2 years ago

      all your requests go to your home server. When you search for a community on another server, your home server (in this case lemmy.world) will do the magick behind the scenes: find the right lemmy server, find the right community, grab the core data and show it to you. It will also remember that you are interested in that foreign server/community and will index it locally. Your requests will still go to the local server and it will do its best to pre-cache as much as possible from remote server for you.

      • @[email protected]English
        0•2 years ago

        Sorry but I really don’t understand. Didn’t you say that to find a community through lemmy.world search one user from this instance had to have interacted with it? If so, how do I first find and interact with a community noone interacted with before, if the lemmy.world search shows no results?

        • @[email protected]English
          2•2 years ago

          Hey, I know this comment is a few days old but I also saw nobody really answered and you’ve not been posting much so might still be confused. Ignore me if you figured it out already :)

          The search page lets you search by keyword, which will turn up communities lemmy.world already knows about. The good news for you is since this is currently the biggest instance, we already did most of the work and it knows about most communities.

          But it also lets you search for communities it doesn’t yet know about with the syntax !community@instance (note the ! at the beginning there). Doing this means future users from lemmy.world will be able to find that community in regular keyword search.

          If you’re on the website this is a lot easier because remote communities have the search syntax instructions in the sidebar like so

          And note usually during this process it’ll show “no results” for a few seconds before pulling in the new community and updating the search results.

          So your question now might be “how do I find unsynced communities in the first place to find their address and sync it on my home instance?” and the answer to that part is lemmyverse.net/communities.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•2 years ago

    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 advance

  • Convict45English
    0•2 years ago

    If it’s federated, how does or can it integrate with Mastodon? Did I make a mistake by creating a separate login?

    • RuudOPMEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      You should be able to reply to posts via Mastodon. You should be able to see your Lemmy posts in Mastodon. (Although I think that doesn’t work yet from lemmy.world, need to troubleshoot). It’s good to have a Lemmy and a Mastodon account.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•2 years ago

    The part that was confusing to me is even if I choose “All” when searching for communities, it doesn’t find communities I know exist on other instances. This post helped clear it up for me (I have to search for it by link to add it), so thanks! I am worried this is going to trip up a lot of people though.

  • @[email protected]English
    6•2 years 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’

  • @[email protected]English
    0•2 years ago

    Goodbye reddit and hello Lemmy.world Just gonna wait for an app for both iOS and Android.

  • Dick JusticeEnglish
    1•2 years ago

    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.

    • RuudOPMEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      Thanks! It’s not finished yet but keep checking back.