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:

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 :)

  • Soulforged@lemmy.caEnglish
    15·
    4 days ago

    Hello! Coming over from Reddit and I’m new to Lemmy. So happy to easily find a Canadian Community!

  • remotelove@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    Accounts and anonymity?

    For social media, I don’t mind using my real name and email to register as long as only my username shows on posts or image uploads.

    When I upload an image, what can other users see?

  • GrizzlyBur@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    4 days ago

    I had no idea that communities had taken off on Lemmy since 2 years ago! I didn’t even realize I still had an account on here.

    Really excited to see where this goes, and to support a Canadian server. Fingers crossed that this gains more traction in Canada and can act as strong shield against misinformation and bad faith actors.

    I’ll be certain to spread the word about this community more to fellow Canadians. I think with current events this could be the lightning in the bottle to see more usage here.

    Any communities worth looking at?

  • Dappie@lemmy.caEnglish
    13·
    5 days ago

    Hi, I’m new to Lemmy Greetings from the Netherlands 🇳🇱🇨🇦🇪🇺

  • wreckus@lemmy.caEnglish
    12·
    5 days ago

    Learned about Lemmy recently and I immediately wanted to join so I can get out of Reddit

    Good to be here.

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      13·
      5 days ago

      I’m not sure if there was a particularly viral post (aside from a few mentions of r/BuyCanadian), but I know we’ve also been mentioned in comment sections all over. Copying from another comment:

      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

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    29·
    7 days ago

    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.

  • Yerbouti@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    31·
    7 days ago

    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.

  • WorkshopBubby@lemmy.caEnglish
    212·
    7 days ago

    Hey so as a Canadian, we are about to get attacked by our long time ally and the worlds military superpower. We are probably going to be steamrolled, and then become second class citizens in the Trump dictatorship cult. Am I allowed to say violent things about how that makes me feel? Or will I get banned, like on reddit?

    • GrizzlyBur@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Purchase a long rifle and shoot it often. I say this as a staunch pacifist. Having a weapon and using it are two different things. For a thousand reasons, if a genuine war broke out it would likely destroy America. Unfortunately, likely taking Canada with it.

      Regardless, be armed and be prepared. It is not as bleak as you may think, even in the worst case scenario. Best case scenario nothing happens and you take up hunting or target shooting as a hobby!

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      16·
      5 days ago

      We’re pretty reasonable with moderation here. The way Lemmy works, mod actions are recorded publicly for transparency. You can access those records here, but as a warning before you open the page, “Some deleted posts may contain disturbing or adult material”: https://lemmy.ca/modlog

      So far we’ve only banned users site wide when it was a consistent problem (ex. spam bot, harassing other users). However, we do need to remove comments that are clearly against the law in Canada, else we couldn’t keep operating.

      It really comes down to what the comment is. If you look through the threads on here, a lot of people are already expressing how they feel, or what Canada’s/Canadians’ response should be. Where it might be a problem is if someone says they’re going to do something violent/illegal, or call for someone else to do it

      Hopefully that makes sense?

      • wise_pancake@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        6 days ago

        “don’t get the admins subpoenaed” is probably a good rule of thumb.

        (You folks do a great job, I appreciate the community you’ve fostered and tended to here)

    • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      You will be less likely to be banned. Still, be reasonable, tactful and don’t be a dick about it, even if I get that you came here to express your genuine feelings.

      “Kill [person of interest]” is off limits here and on many other servers, but there are ways you can describe how your frustration in ways that aren’t illegal or personally charged. “Fuck [person of interest]” is nearly universally allowed here. Even if not banned, the outcome of whether you are upvoted to heaven or downvoted to hell will depend on the person and the context.

  • Snowstorm@lemmy.caEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    I challenge every newbies to create 1-3 posts over the first 72 h here : what do you enjoy in social media usually? It doesn’t have to be perfectly new if it’s new on Lemmy: your favourite Reddit group isn’t represented here or silent for a while : show us a glimpse of what you like and see how much engagement you receive.

  • solarvalleys@lemmy.caEnglish
    17·
    7 days ago

    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).

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      13·
      7 days ago

      Totally!

      We were planning to do another census this winter, but we got busy with the new servers and spinning up new platforms.

      You might have seen other comments asking about Pixelfed and Friendica. Pixelfed is to instagram in the way that Lemmy is to Reddit, and we’re in the process of setting up a Canadian instance of Pixelfed right now. If all goes well, we may get more new people joining through there