A (hopefully not as complicated as the others) introduction to Lemmy
Short link for easy sharing: w.on-t.work/lemmy101
Notice: Spam campaigns targeting Lemmy providers are already happening, so quite a few of them are moving to requiring manual approval. Cut the admins some slack, please. They need sleep too.
- Go to https://lemmyverse.net/ and filter by Open Only
- You may need to switch to Instances from the top bar just in case that's not the default.
- Pick one with larger than 20 but smaller than 3-5k users (bottom-left-most
number) and with more than about 90% uptime
(bottom-right-most number)
- But there is so much choice! How do I narrow it down?
- Read the description just to make sure it's generic enough
- Click the name and read their sidebar just to make sure they have some rules in place
- And then pick the one with the coolest domain name. Seriously. It doesn't
matter.
- That domain name will be attached to your username, just like email. So make sure you like it.
- Do NOT join lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, or beehaw.org.
They are alright places but at this moment they are overloaded to hell and
back and will frequently slow down or otherwise cause issues. This also
applies to other large providers, which is why I recommend not joining
providers larger than 3-4k users.
- You will still be able to talk to people from those large providers.
- Overall, picking the largest provider and going with them is not a good idea and will cause issues. Just go with a smaller one and take the convenience hit of occasionally needing to search for stuff. You will still be able to talk with people from large providers!
- Click the name, and press Sign Up at the top-right-most corner.
- If needed, verify your email.
- Done!
You have just signed up to Lemmy. Congratulations, welcome to the club. At this point, you should click the name of the provider you're on (at the top-left-most part of the registration page) and bookmark it to your browser. This is where you will be browsing Lemmy from now on.
Beyond a few basic quirks, you don't need to care about it yet. That's for Lemmy 102, if I bother with such a thing.
- Your account is bound to the provider you signed up to. You will only be able to log into it from that place, and that place alone. This is why I recommend bookmarking it.
- Your provider is not omnipotent, and occasionally needs to be taught about communities and content, especially if it is a new or small one. Read on below on how to do that.
- You are not limited to content hosted on your own provider. This is the hardest part to grasp so just roll with it even if you don't know what I mean by that yet.
- Go to https://lemmyverse.net/communities
- Click the home icon at the top-right-most part of the website, and enter in
the provider you signed up with.
- It should auto-complete and light up green.
- Browse the list and click on the names of the ones you find interesting
- Click the Subscribe button on the sidebar to add them to your homepage.
For 90% of cases, it really is this easy. It's the last 10% that's gonna bring your trouble.
Lemmy just had a big bang of activity and every single admin and developer is running around with their hair on fire, so there will be quirks you will encounter in day to day usage.
For example:
Click it again. If it says Subscription Pending it means you're subscribed.
This should slowly become less of an issue as more and more providers update to newer versions of Lemmy.
This means your provider just learned about the existence of that community. If you subscribe to it, it will fetch future posts and make it not a ghost town to the people after you. It will not fetch past posts because technical reasons.
Oh boy, here we go. This is the most complicated thing you will need to do.
This means your provider does not know about the existence of that community. If you want to subscribe there, you'll have to first teach your provider about it.
- On the Lemmyverse website, each community has an additional part under their
name that starts with an exclamation mark and
!looks@like.this. Click it to copy it. - Go to your provider's home page.
- Click the little magnifying glass at the top-right-most corner.
- On the search bar, paste this identifier you just copied.
- Search for it.
- Ignore it when it says there are no results found. That's a lie.
- If it doesn't show up within 10-20 seconds. Search for it again.
- It should show up by now.
Going through this is tiring, yes. But after doing it once, your provider will, in most cases, remember it for anybody else in the future.
- Remain calm.
- Copy the URL of the page you are in right now.
- If you're on the home page of a community, that exclamation mark identifier will be at the sidebar just below it's name. You can take that and use the instructions in the previous section.
- Go to your provider's home page.
- Click the little magnifying glass at the top-right-most corner.
- On the search bar, paste the URL you just copied.
- That post/comment/community should pop up in the search results.
- Yeah, this is getting pretty absurd I know. Growing pains and all
- On the comment, there will be this rainbow colored star badge somewhere next to the author's name. Right click it and select Copy Link
- Proceed with the above instructions using that link.
I clicked a link and everything is different and I can't find any of these buttons you are talking about
Scroll to the very top of the page. Is the strip at the top of the page a dark blue/purple-y color or white/black
If it's purple-y, you stumbled your way onto kbin instead of Lemmy. That's a different thing.
If it isn't... I got no clue, sorry.
All of them are under-baked and have missing features at the present. But if you really want to, you can try Jerboa for Android, and Mlem for iOS.
Alternatively, Liftoff seems to be a promising cross-platform app.
You will need to adapt parts of this guide to how the apps work (in particular, where the search box is).
The app Sync for Reddit will be continuing as Sync for Lemmy, however, no releases have been made so far.
- In your settings there is a box for preferred languages. DON'T TOUCH IT
- I am serious. You will lose access to half the content in the entire network in one fell swoop. Nobody tags languages correctly.
- Occasionally submit buttons will start loading infinitely. This may or may not mean whatever you were trying to submit may or may not have happened. Nobody knows. If it keeps spinning for more than 10-20 seconds, just go back to where you tried to post/comment and pray it worked.
- Some providers disable downvotes, some do not.
- Some providers disable community creation, some do not.
- Expect providers to go down and up and slow down and speed up and run out of money and start begging for donations as more and more people join in and start posting.
- Expect inter-provider drama,
which may result in providers cutting each other off.
- This is also known as "defederating". Which is both a blessing and a curse.
- There is no way to transfer your account between providers.
- You should not need to create accounts on more than one provider unless there is a specific reason to do so (e.g. if your account is on a provider that's defederated from a large one)
- This entire document is a massive oversimplification
All of this apply as of June 24, 2023. Hopefully the future is brighter.