Hello World!

The last week or so we have seen quite a big ‘boost’ in the amount of new users signing up so we thought it would be a good time to highlight some things that are of interest to new users.

CODE OF CONDUCT

Lemmy World is not a free speech instance, there are a couple of ground rules that need to be followed. If you’re new, I would advise you to read our Code of Conduct.

NEW USER QUESTIONS

If you are new to the fediverse as a whole, it might all be a bit overwhelming. What is Lemmy? What is federation? What even is an instance? For those questions I would suggest you have a look at the getting starting guide. It should cover most of your questions.

STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?

You can head over to the !support@lemmy.world community. This community should be used for questions regarding Lemmy World and is not the support community for the Lemmy software this site uses.

Our Admin @quinten recently made a post covering the most recurring questions there too. Read about that here.

ALTERNATIVE USER INTERFACES

Lemmy World hosts a few custom User Interfaces which give you a completely different experience both on the desktop as on mobile.

THIRD PARTY APPS

There are a lot of Third Party apps available for Lemmy. From Paid to Open Source, you will find something that suits you easily.

For a complete list of apps have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ (Thanks Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de).

EDIT: Updated the apps list. Also some more interesting links in @otter@lemmy.ca’s post here: https://lemmy.world/comment/3962001

EDIT 2: Instead of https://photon.lemmy.world you can now just go to https://p.lemmy.world. You can thank @Rootiest@lemmy.world laziness for that.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    672·
    1 year ago

    The list of apps is pretty out of date. For example, Boost already came out and !instance_assistant@lemmy.ca is a pretty popular extension. I use it a lot to make posts, and just used it to open that post on my instance.

    Also related is how to find communities

    I help with !communitypromo@lemmy.ca, and the idea is that you can subscribe to keep seeing more recommendations. We also have a guide for finding new communities here: https://lemmy.ca/post/5581032, which I’ve copied below:

    A great way to find lesser known communities is to look at the /communities page on an instance. For example: https://lemmy.ca/communities

    For a list of instances to look through:

    • pangora.social (NEW): Great way to find instances related to a particular topic. This is also great for picking an instance when first making an account/moving accounts.
    • awesome-lemmy-instances: not that organized, but it

    🔎 Search pages

    🔥 Apps and Browser Extensions

    🙌 Communities for discovering new communities:

    Here are some other communities, some of which are less active:

    Remember, you can also post questions about finding new communities right here!

    👽 Coming from Reddit?

    https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/

  • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
    601·
    1 year ago

    Honestly tho, if people aren’t being absolute dicks, its pretty frickin’ free in the speech department. I have to be conscious of it cuz I’m on several different boards with way higher standards and I don’t want to be booted from them. It never hurts to be kind and fun and even a little intense sometimes.

    Just afix your heart to the right place and everything’s gonna be just fine. Stay excellent u lemmings!

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
      221·
      1 year ago

      Like seriously, I’ve already said countless things that would give you the boot on reddit, and I’ve been allowed to just say it without even getting downvoted.

      So we’re back to the “Old Internet” rules of “Just don’t be a dick”

        • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
          210·
          1 year ago

          I think you’d have to be blatantly, openly, unquestionably, intentionally, and insultingly racist to get kicked off of here.

          Definitely not like Reddit where “Oh didn’t you hear Piano was made a slur yesterday, oh you didn’t? NO EXCUSES! You’re permabanned for being a Nazi!” is the law of the land.

          Edit: Why am I being downvoted

    • cricket97@lemmy.world
      22·
      1 year ago

      can attest to this. used to being banned on reddit for some very mainstream (yet controversial in terminally online spheres) opinions. i hope lemmy moderators never become what reddit moderators have become

  • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    58·
    1 year ago

    I> Remember to criticise ideas, and not people.

    That’s a nice guideline. I kept trying to explain that to my recent ex… the vast difference between saying “this behavior is unproductive” vs. “you are unproductive”.

    • LiquidPhD@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      1 year ago

      I think for some people, there is zero difference between the two. These kind of people are “you are what you do” kind of people. Lazy people have lazy behavior, unproductive people have productive behavior, etc.

      It could also be that they take “you are unproductive” to be a sort of shorthand for "Right now, you are being unproductive. How people perceive themselves and others in time can be strange. That can also cause problems with communication.

      Anyway, have a great week!

      • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        1 year ago

        Avoiding that is something I learned to do intentionally, I suppose. Labeling the person and not a behavior is more confrontational and psychologically suggests to people that they can’t change. It’s also a lot broader, more sweeping type of statement that suggests all of their behavior is that way.

        Thanks, I hope your week is lovely as well.

      • seaQueue@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        I think for some people, there is zero difference between the two. These kind of people are “you are what you do” kind of people. Lazy people have lazy behavior, unproductive people have productive behavior, etc.

        Some people are intellectually lazy and just don’t care to differentiate. I try not to spend much time talking to them, they tend to be dicks.

  • Pheonixdeath@lemmy.world
    52·
    1 year ago

    Thank you. Gave up Reddit when Reddit Is Fun (RIF) died. Found Lemmings. Wait a few weeks and now here I am. I have to admit the different instances and this federation thingy, a lot to learn though it feels.more background stuff that Reddit may have had but we just didnt notice. Appreciate the post and happy to be here. Cheers!

    • knotthatone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      I hope there’s a “Lemmy Is Fun” app eventually, but I haven’t heard whether the original developer is interested. He’s apparently working on something with Tildes.

        • Obi@sopuli.xyz
          3·
          1 year ago

          Yeah I’ve settled in well in liftoff (also ex-RiF), I try other apps here and there but this one seems to work fine for me.

          • zecg@lemmy.world
            4·
            1 year ago

            I also like Jerboa, but Liftoff can be logged in on several instances at once, which is nice.

      • seaQueue@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        Check out Boost, IIRC you can get it to behave mostly like RIF with some settings tweaking. I haven’t used RIF since like 2016, I found Boost around then and switched full time - Boost’s compact mode was the closest thing to old.reddit.com I could find in a 3rd party client.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      I gave up reddit when I got banned by an automod because I commented on a subreddit they didn’t approve of. No attempt to put my comment in context (I was questioning the “offensive” subreddit). No appeal, no one to talk to. Pretty ironic that a site that claims to be for “open conversations” is run like an authoritarian gov. Really scummy site.

      • LackingC10H12N2O@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        Lol I got permanently banned from reddit for “Report Abuse”… apparently the hive mind thought I abused the report button for… checks notes… reporting a post that was LITERALLY a pro-n@z¡ group denying the holocaust happened.

        • seaQueue@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          There’s your problem, you reported political content that Reddit’s admins agreed with. Reddit has a pretty long history of company leadership skewing to the right, we joke that the dude running the show fantasizes about being a feudal lord in a post collapse world. Read about his weird prepper behavior, he’s a bit off in cuckoo land.

  • LackingC10H12N2O@lemmy.world
    481·
    1 year ago

    Oh man… my first post here on Lemmy, hailing from Boost for Lemmy!

    My Boost for Reddit is still working but I got permanently banned for an absolutely ridiculous reason…

    Here’s to hoping that B4L can be everything that Reddit threw out the window, and more!

  • Gemini24601@lemmy.worldEnglish
    46·
    1 year ago

    I feel right at home in the fediverse, it gives me a much more secure feeling than Reddit. Thank you devs for your hard work at creating a suitable alternative.

    • Limeey@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      So, on that topic of “security” - just remember that whenever you post, your post is essentially sent to every “instance” that is federated (and listening for the community you posted to). Each instance is it’s own server running it’s own version of an activitypub implementation (lemmy, mastadon, etc).

      So on lemmy.world that means your post is sent to literally thousands of servers that you cannot directly influence. If you delete a post, a request is made to those servers to also delete the post, but if that instance is modified or unavailable when the request is sent (it’ll re-try, but there’s a limit how many times), then it’s possible your post will not be deleted and you’ll never know.

      Keep in mind this also means that anyone, say a government or private company, can establish an instance, federate, and receive the posts of everyone. Their instance may be nearly completely invisible - so you won’t know they’re collecting that information.

      However, lemmy stores and sends almost no information about any user. A user profile does not contain IP address or country or anything. All of that stays in the server logs of the instance you originate from, and never enters the database. So your “true” personal information isn’t shared, but your account name, and a link to your account, and the post content (whatever text you add) is shared.

      Lastly, images tend to be shared. Lemmy uses “pict-rs” which is a FOSS image hosting server, and when an instance receives a federated post, if there is an image in the “URL” field, then it will ask pict-rs to download that image to its server for easier serving to its users.

      • Gemini24601@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        Great point, however, I would rather have my posts be sent to like minded peers than to some walled-garden company like Reddit. Also, what data would any supposed malicious instance get that isn’t already available to the public? As for account names, text and images from posts, etc. aren’t these the very definition of social media? What kind of social media is not sharing text or images anyway?

        • Limeey@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yep, I don’t disagree, just wanted to make it clear what is shared and what isn’t. I suppose if you don’t like people training AI on the text you write, then you may not like that they could gather it with literally no effort. Most other sites would require that they put some effort either into web scraping, using an api to request the post, or just buy the content in some text dump format.

          But ya, I mean, this is a minor difference between platforms, overall.

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been here a few months, but still learned quite a bit from this post - thanks for putting this together!

    And welcome aboard to all the newest newbies! …did Reddit slap its users in the face again?

      • citrusface@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        It’ll click for you soon. It’s essentially a bunch of individually owned boards like reddit that are all interconnected. You can see posts from all the instances, and if you don’t like the posts in one instance - you can block it or filter it out.

        • hermitary@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          I hope so. I’ve actually downloaded every single iOS Lemmy app I could find and I’m going to try them all out to see which is the best fit.

          I did the same thing when I joined Mastodon.

          Is Lemmy compatible with ActivityPub by chance?

          • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
            1·
            1 year ago

            For apps, I tend to fluctuate between Memmy and Voyager. I liked the “feel” of Memmy more, but development on it has been slower because the dev had some personal stuff going on in their life. So I’ve switched to Voyager in the meantime.

            Both are very close to Apollo though, if you used to use that.

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        What made it “click” for me was when someone explained it like email addresses. You can send emails between Gmail and Yahoo Mail just fine, and two email addresses with the same username are distinguished by their @ handles. So like “Example@gmail(dot)com” is a different address than “Example@yahoo(dot)com”. They’re entirely separate accounts that can send emails to each other.

        The fediverse is very similar. My account @lemmy.world is separate from the same username on another instance. And the same goes for communities. There may be communities on certain instances that naturally grow and absorb the smaller ones, but there’s nothing stopping you from making your own identical community on another instance, with its own rules, moderators, and content.

        Federation is simply the process of connecting two servers together. The same way gmail and yahoo can talk to each other via a standard protocol, federation allows the different servers to talk to each other. This occasionally causes weird things when one instance federates with another, and you suddenly get flooded by posts from that new server. But that’s just your Home feed catching up, since all of those posts are now considered unread.

        Federation isn’t an automatic process in the sense that new servers announce themselves and get connected automatically. Instead, federation happens when a user from one instance tries to interact with another instance. For example, maybe you have a community over in @examplecommunity(dot)com. The first time you (as a Lemmy(dot)world user) try to interact with that examplecommunity server, the two will federate and begin the process of sharing posts.

        • seaQueue@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          The fediverse is a bit like email and usenet had an awesome baby. You have an address somewhere on the network and you can see and participate in content from any instance that’s also connected.