Mod: if you want to steal bits of this for an official sticky thread of your own or whatever feel free.
Newbies: Welcome to lemmy!
Where am I and what’s going on?
You’re on a platform called “Lemmy”, a collection of discussion groups (“communities”) around particular topics. You can think of it kind of like Reddit, or like a collection of old-school forums that all share a login.
Is Lemmy the Fediverse?
You might have heard the term “fediverse” thrown around, it’s the name for a collection of platforms like Lemmy that all talk to each other. So Lemmy is just one small part of the Fediverse, but there are lots of others for you to investigate one day too :)
What about the Threadiverse?
Another Fediverse platform that works a bit like Lemmy does is called Kbin. Since both of them use a forum thread type structure for discussion, they became collectively known as the Threadiverse.
People keep talking about “instances” and I’m confused
Lemmy as a whole consists of lots of different websites, all running the “Lemmy” software and talking to each other. For example this community is hosted on lemmy.ca, whereas my user account is on lemm.ee, but I can post here anyway. They’re two different websites (usually called “instances” or “servers”), but all part of the wider Lemmy platform.
You’ll learn more about what this means as you go, but for the most part it’s not super important to get started.
I clicked a link and it logged me out
Remember what we said about Lemmy actually being lots of websites? Chances are, you clicked a badly-formatted link that took you to a different one of those sites. You’re not logged out of your account, you’re just looking at another site.
If you’re on the web, you can follow instructions in the sidebar and search for the community address from your instance’s search page (magnifying glass icon at the top of the page). But if you’re on a mobile app they all work differently so I can’t sum that one up for you, sorry!
To create links that should work for everyone, you can use the ! syntax like so:
How do I find cool stuff?
Two main ways. First you can check out the All feed on your instance homepage. This shows all the content your instance knows about, from all the other Lemmy instances it talks to. Subscribe to any communities that catch your eye!
Alternatively you can use a search tool like https://lemmyverse.net/communities. Use the home icon in the top right to set your home instance, and search for stuff you want to talk about!
And if you’re a fibre crafter, well, check out my profile because I post in a lot of relevant communities 😉
It can be hard for someone who’s been here a while to explain things in a way that makes sense to absolute beginners. So if any of this was confusing, please just ask me in the comments and I’m happy to clarify.
Welcome, enjoy, and see you around!
I will add one that drives me nuts:
Why do some posts just look odd?
It’s because either you or the poster is using one of the many Lemmy apps. Most of the popular Lemmy apps don’t display things like subscript, superscript, or strike through correctly.
this should be subscript.
this should be superscript.
thisshould be strike-through.Interesting! I checked out your comment in Liftoff and sure enough only strikethrough is working. Never noticed that before, maybe my brain just parses markdown in realtime 🤔
It’s one of the reasons to use the browser and not an app.
But I am a grumpy old man who thinks that basically everything should be done in a browser and not an app.
Hah, I’m with you there. Somehow got about seven apps installed on my phone though for new Lemming tech support purposes. We do what we must 😄
What I recall from using Relay for Reddit -
An application can feel more comfortable, look neater and put things in a more reasonable order than the original system.
If the browser does that for you already, then you’re lucky!
Yup, just as you said, Mlem shows the subscript as strikethrough and the superscript with the carets on both sides. Strike through is, oddly enough, also struck through so it seems it Mlem parses both similarly.
Since you use the app, can you make a bug report about this? Something being displayed as struck-out that isn’t supposed to be really hurt communication.
Will do
I use kbin.social on PC Firefox.
I’ll add one thing that was really confusing to me when I first started that’s related to the “it logged me out” FAQ.
Your account works on any federated instance. But your login doesn’t. For example, I can’t use my lemmy.world credentials to log into in this instance (lemmy.ca) but I can comment here so long as I am on my “home” instance.
Thanks for the addition, yeah it’s a difficult part to explain in few words and people tend to nope out of a lengthy explanation even if the concept itself is simple enough. Will give rewording a go after work!
Hello, I have a question.
What is the preferred way to put a link to a Lemmy post (as opposed to a community), on Lemmy?
I can get the URL of a post, for example this one is https://lemm.ee/post/14775141 , but that goes via the instance URL and could (I’d imagine) cause problems for people coming from other instances.
Worse, when I get the URL for my own post, eg https://sh.itjust.works/post/9023136 , it goes via my own instance, despite being posted to a community on lemmy.world.
There is an instance-agnostic way to link to communities. Is there one for posts?
Good question, and sorry to disappoint but I believe the answer is still no. This has been talked about a lot ever since the initial exodus over from Reddit, so I can only assume there’s a complicated technical reason why it’s not a thing yet.
If you’re Lemmying from a browser there’s a tool called Lemmy Universal Link Switcher that I’ve heard good things about, although full disclosure I’ve not used it myself. It doesn’t solve the problem of generating instance-agnostic links but it does try to solve it from the reader’s side.
Thanks. The links work at least, so I’ll leave them as they are.
lemmyverse.net one of my favorites.
