If you are reading this, let me be the first to welcome you to the exciting world of Lemmy! Lemmy has quite a few differences from Reddit (or most other traditional websites), and it might be a bit confusing when you’re first getting started. If you’re feeling lost, read on!

What is Lemmy?

Essentially, Lemmy is free and open source software that you can install on a server to create a “Lemmy instance”. This post lives on lemmy.sascamooch.com, for example. Instances can have their own users, posts, and communities (aka subreddits).

Here’s the neat part: users on one instance can interact with users and content from another. For example, users on lemmy.sascamooch.com can post memes on lemmy.ml, create communities on beehaw.org, have discussions with users on lemmy.world, and so on.

Getting Started

Join an Instance

To get started, make an account on a Lemmy instance. The most popular instances right now are lemmy.ml and beehaw.org. However, due to ongoing Reddit drama, these instances are experiencing a huge wave of new users. Joining a less crowded instance is recommended (remember, you can still interact with users and communities on these other instances).

To find an instance, please refer to https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Note: lemmy.sascamooch.com is currently invite-only. This might change in the future, but we are still getting our sea legs. Please bear with us.

Subscribing to Communities

Subscribing to communities that live on the same instance as you is pretty easy: it’s not much different than subscribing to a subreddit. Subscribing to communities on other instances, however, is a little bit trickier. This is, admittedly, something Lemmy could improve upon in the future, but for now, here are some tips.

  • Go to https://browse.feddit.de/ and search for communities you might be interested in.
    • This site might not have less popular communities from less popular instances, but this should help get you started.
  • When you find a community you want to subscribe to, click on the link (e.g. https://beehaw.org/c/programming)
  • on lemmy.sascamooch.com (or whatever instance you’re using), go into the search bar. In the search bar, type in the community in the form of [email protected].
  • Click the search button. If your instance has seen that community before, it will pop up in the results. If not, you might be see “No Results”. In that case, click on “Communities” at the top, click “All”, and then see if your community is listed.
  • Subscribe to the community.

Again, I’m aware this is a bit convoluted, but things should hopefully get streamlined in the future. Lemmy is still relatively new and experiencing unprecedented growth due to the Reddit API drama, so be patient.

Getting Help

If you need help with Lemmy (Sascamooch’s instance or otherwise), feel free to post here. We’ll try our best to help you out.