We have gotten a lot of new signups over the past few days, and we’re all very excited to have you joining us! You’ll find that people are more than happy to help you get started and learn how to use the site.
If you feel up for it, you can introduce yourself or ask questions below!
We have put together some resources to help new users get started:
You can also read:
- A quick overview of Lemmy
- A detailed guide on how Lemmy works
- A quick overview of ‘the Fediverse’
- Learn about the non-profit that runs this site
These guides were published very recently, and we will be updating them over time. If you find that something is confusing or missing, please let us know and we can improve them further.
For an organized list of Canadian communities (provinces/territories, Cities / Local , Sports, Schools, BuyCanadian, CanadaPolitics etc.), see this post on !Canada@lemmy.ca. You can also ask about communities in places like !CommunityPromo@lemmy.ca.
We also encourage you to check out !NewToLemmy@lemmy.ca, so that others can help you / learn from your questions.
Welcome to Lemmy :)
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Just joined after being recommended on Reddit. The straw for me was a recent 7 day ban because I stated a historical fact on guerrilla war and America. Not sure when Americans got so delicate and all snowflake like but whatever. Glad to be here.
I’m not new. This is my second post already.
Welcome nonetheless 😄
Elbows up, hosers!
Elbows up!!!
Hello everyone, nice to e-meet you :D
Welcome :)
Hello. Nice to see a Canadian alternative to reddit.
Welcome :) Let us know if you need help with anything!
Hello! Still mostly hanging out at Reddit but I see the writing on the wall and am trying to at the very least diversify, and hopefully make a full switch soon. Very grateful that this is here - both Lemmy and this particular resource.
Welcome!
Still mostly hanging out at Reddit but I see the writing on the wall and am trying to at the very least diversify, and hopefully make a full switch soon
This is true for a lot of the new users, despite what the memes may suggest 😄
Is there a particular community on reddit that you’d like to see more of on here?
Established users, too. I’m still active on Reddit, just much less so than I used to be. And a lot of the biggest promoters of the Fediverse are still active there, doing what they can to promote Lemmy- and Mastodon-based sites.
New here, looking to move from redd it also. Got recommended lemmy by my brother this morning and I like what I see so far. Keep up the good work.
Welcome!
It’s nice to see the word of mouth working, I’ve seen a lot of mentions recently of people being recommended here by friends and family members
absolutely new to here (and to Lemmy, just learn that this exist today from… well … reddit) Glad to be here and glad to move on from there. Thanks to all the folks who host this, setting this up, and making this happen!
Welcome 😊
Definitely check out the guides above, and drop by in !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca if you have any issues!
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.
(11) Also don’t be afraid to curate the feed the block button is your friend, don’t like certain users, communities or instances baaam block, there’s your peace of mind.
Yes! I have so much anime softcore blocked in my feed haha.
(12) A great way to find new communities: when you see a user who posted something interesting, click on them and see which communities they’re in. Then subscribe to those :)
The block button is key to curating your general daily experience on Lemmy. Obviously block anything you don’t like, but also use it if you’re not interested in a specific scene or topic. You can always remove the block later if you want. I think of the block button more like the “Not Interested” button on Youtube.
I’ve been here for awhile and have a pretty good understanding of how federation works. Number (3) was a very concise way to explain how the All feed works. I sort of knew but that really helped me understand.
Number (7), I will suggest the use of the cross-posting feature. Post to the larger community for engagement but also cross-post to the smaller communities to help them grow. Quiet communities are a cat-and-mouse game where people don’t post or comment because no one else is. The more people start to engage, the more others will start to engage.
What I like doing is posting to the small community first, and then cross posting from there
That way people in the larger community can follow the link back and learn about the community if they’re interested. It also helps to mention the community at the start of the cross post since Lemmy doesn’t do that automatically
Tip: sort by “Top 12 hours or 24hours”. This is equivalent to reddit’s “hot”
Ah ha! Perfect. This is what I was missing. Thank you.
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.
Lurking has been my primary activity on Reddit. I shall try to contribute more.
Shucks
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.
Yeah, well, fuck you
Oh yeah?!? Well, brexit!
Well, well, ah fuck it, we’ll probably rejoin in a few years with fewer concessions and I’ll have to listen to even more nonsense.
You should ditch the freedom units for KM/h too… If not, pretty soon it’ll be color, neighbor, trunk, etc.
Lost redditor?
No, just a joke.
It is clearly a joke.
From what I see, you get at least 50% of the jokes you read.
🤔
@BeardedGingerWonder said it best, folks!! Join the community, stay for the sex!!
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/donateDonating to the Lemmy Software developers
https://join-lemmy.org/donateDonating 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.
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!
Welcome! :)
Going off of what people have mentioned in the registration applications, it is a combination of
- wanting to support Canadian, and avoiding American tech companies (due to tariffs and other concerns)
- concerns with how big tech has changed for the worse these past few months
- Reddit’s recent actions, such as banning (and then reversing) a bunch of communities and the recent paywall announcement
- learning about it for the first time and being excited about the concept
The first point is why lemmy.ca has seen more relative growth this week than the others, but a lot of fediverse instances have seen growth recently
All of the above for me!
Glad to be here. I wanted to get off Reddit for obvious reasons.
