Lemmy.ca's Main Community

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Glad to be here. I wanted to get off Reddit for obvious reasons.

🫶 happy to be here

Thank you for hosting and for all your work! I am excited to see this community grow. I have already seen a couple of posts on Canadian reddit communities where people name dropped lemmy.ca. It'd be interesting to maybe do a census once the signups stabilize to see how much the demographic changed. (I saw that there was one made in 2023).

First off, this is great... thanks to everyone who's helped put all this together! It's a relief to finally have a Canadian alternative! And then can someone please explain to me (like I'm 5) what an "instance" is exactly?

Glad to be here! As Reddit keeps enshittifying, and the boycott USAmerica movement gains momentum, hoping more folks migrate over.

You guys are awesome.

Any updates on when Pixelfed and Friendica will be ready? I’m waiting for the fedecan instance before I sign up for those :)

Woo! I'm from .world but wanted to make an account here too :D

Make yourselves at home!

Please check out !taneggs@lemmy.ca and !modelparliament@lemmy.ca

Is there any interest in taking donations on Librapay or Open collective again?

Welcome new users! You've made an excellent choice.

Here are some more tips, put together by @Rentlar@lemmy.ca in this post

Quick FAQ:

Thank you for Lemmy.ca :) Go #TeamCanada

Another question: My email notifications take me to lemm.ca... is there any way to be directed to https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca? Something in my settings maybe?