New Here

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/24569

I know people are confused about how fediverse works and how to use it. This is an attempt to compile a list of beginner's guides made by some amazing people on this topic.

• Unsunny's Guide - An easy to read guide aimed at redditors migrating to Lemmy or Kbin
• Lemmy.world Starting Guide - A beginner's guide to Lemmy by the admin of lemmy.world instance.
• db0's New User Guide - A guide for new users on Lemmy made by head mod of r/piracy.
• Michael Altfield's Guide - A guide on finding Lemmy Communities (Lemmy version of Subreddits)
• r/KbinMigration's Guide - Redditor's guide to how Kbin works

I will update this list if any new guide is made so you can save this post for later. Also, if anyone has any good guide to add post it in the comments and I'll add it here.

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to discuss.online! discuss.online is an instance of the Lemmy fediverse. The goal of discuss.online is to be a single location for general topics. I’ve created this post to help new people find their way to understanding the fediverse of Lemmy.

What is Lemmy?

A great introduction is to read their documentation found here.

A quick summary to quote is: Lemmy is a self-hosted, federated social link aggregation and discussion forum. It consists of many different communities which are focused on various topics. Users can post text, links or images and discuss it with others. Voting helps to bring the most interesting items to the top. There are strong moderation tools to keep out spam and trolls. All this is completely free and open, not controlled by any company. This means that there are no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms.

Lemmy is a network of individual servers that communicate with each other. This is similar to how email works. An email server is where you host your messages. You can send messages to members of the same server or send them out to other servers. Lemmy does this same thing with a discussion forum. As a user, you sign up for your favorite of these servers. Next, you join, create, and talk with the members of that community. If you see posts or communities hosted on other servers, you search for that community on your server to invite it over. You must have the community on your user server to interact with it. You must search for it on your server to invite it to import and sync. I plan to expand more on this later to help clarify.

How to find communities?

Communities are located locally or through federated instances. You can only interact with communities on your host instance. You can use the search bar on this site to search locally or externally ("All").

When you find a community, you can join regardless if it's local or federated. The community will sync into this instance and act as if it is local. Sometimes the sync can take a few minutes to finish. Only the last 20 post sync by default. Searching for specific posts from other instances also pulls them locally. If you can search for it here, it's being pulled here for you to interact with.

Browse the Discover new communities community to discover what others enjoy.

If you wish to have a more simple tool to find communities, there is a tool for that external to this site called The Lemmy Community Browser

Why is it so buggy?

Lemmy is new and young. It was created for free by some developers in their spare time. Due to mass drama on Reddit, people fled to find new communities. Lemmy had a massive burst of interest. Similar to how Mastodon took in refugees from Twitter.

The application needs time to catch up because of the new and growing community and sudden interest. More people will contribute to the free service, and the issues will be resolved.

Remember that Lemmy is free, and no ad revenue is generated. Most servers are at the cost of the admin or accept donations. The same is true for development.

Where are the mobile apps?

Mobile apps are in development. Particularly the one for iOS. It takes beta testers but is also slowly in development for free by a developer. You can see more about mobile apps here.

The mobile app for iOS, Mlem, will soon release a major update. You must be part of their beta to get access: https://testflight.apple.com/join/xQfmkJhc

I have more questions!

Please create an account and post in our new_here community for help. You can also contact me directly at hello@discuss.online.

Links

You may want to also checkout the following websites for more information about Lemmy

• Beginner’s Guide to Lemmy’ Collection
• Awesome Lemmy Instances
• Official Lemmy Documentation
• Intro to Lemmy Guide - How to create a lemmy account, find, and subscribe-to popular communities
• Lemmy Community Browser - List of all communities across all lemmy instances, sorted by popularity
• Lemmy Map - Data visualization of lemmy instances
• The Federation Info - Another table comparing lemmy instances (with pretty charts)
• Federation Observer - Yet another table comparing lemmy instances
• FediDB - Yet another site comparing lemmy instances (with pretty charts)
• Lemmy Sourcecode
• Jerboa (Official Android Client)
• Mlem (iOS Client)

Note: This guide will grow and is open to feedback.