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 !Canada@lemmy.ca. You can also ask about communities in places like !CommunityPromo@lemmy.ca.
We also encourage you to check out !NewToLemmy@lemmy.ca, so that others can help you / learn from your questions.
Welcome to Lemmy :)
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: !technology@lemmy.world – into the search bar and then subscribe.
(9) Meow
(10) Try different sort options. New or Scales are my favourites.
(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.
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.
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.
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
Tip: sort by “Top 12 hours or 24hours”. This is equivalent to reddit’s “hot”
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! 😊
This one’s ours.
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.
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.
Well, well, ah fuck it, we’ll probably rejoin in a few years with fewer concessions and I’ll have to listen to even more nonsense.
@BeardedGingerWonder said it best, folks!! Join the community, stay for the sex!!
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!
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
