Quick post to answer some basic usage questions that can throw off new users.
Where should I register?
The age old question of fediverse. The answer is pick an instance that is not right-wing and you should be fine.
https://join-lemmy.org/instances makes this very easy. Once you find an instance, just go to its /signup endpoint. For the instance you’re reading right now, it would be: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/signup. Another great option is to use the lemmyverse which provides a lot more info about potential instances and communities, including a trust score.
Do I need to create a profile for each instance?
No! Each instance can access each other instance, unless it’s been defederated because its admins are toxic (this is why I told you not to join right-wing instances earlier).
I joined an instance, but the community I am interested in is in a different instance
No problem. Simply add the instance domain at the end of the url endpoint.
For example, say you’re in lemmy.ml and you realized that stable_diffusion is in lemmy.dbzer0.com. To access it, simply add @lemmy.dbzer0.com at the end of the url after the community name. So:
https://lemmy.ml/c/[email protected]
Or to put it differently, you can access any community, in any instance by adding /c/ (The requivalet of reddit /r/) and then community_name@instance.domain
If this doesn’t work, then it’s likely this instance is not yet federated with yours. To solve this, you need to search for it. See the next section.
But how do I even find the community I want to if it exists in any of hundreds of instances?
One option is to use the lemmyverse, as it’s very user friendly, if you specify which instance if your home, it will automatically convert all links to your own instance.
Alternatively use the use the built-in search.
Note that if you search for an community in an lemmy instance your own instance doesn’t yet know about, it won’t find it. You need to give it more precice instructions to find it, which require the whole “address”. To follow our example above, you would put !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com in your search field.
When searching for a community in a new instance, it might take a few minutes to take effect. The first search will not return anything, but if you search again after a couple of minutes, it should appear.
How do I find my community from reddit?
https://sub.rehab allows you to search for any subreddit and see if its official community exists in the threadiverse. You can then search for it specifically to subscribe. If you’ve already registered an account somewhere, make sure you visit the settings in sub.rehab and set your home instance there, so that all links go through it.
Community? Instance?
An instance is a lemmy server hosted by someone. it has its own set of users and communities. lemmy.dbzer0.com is an instance. You can access (almost) every instance from any other instance.
a community is like a subreddit in reddit, or a channel in discord. It’s a topic in inside an instance. stable_diffusion is a community inside the instance lemmy.dbzer0.com.
In more plain terms, consider a lemmy instance like a street, and a community like a number on that street. When you write !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com you are giving the exact address and number to search for.
I keep seeing the same posts
In you’re in a smaller instance and you’ve subscribed to communities in other places, you might have set up your default visibility to not show them.
Switch your view to Subscribed/Hot to get a similar view like the reddit frontpage.
Switch to All/Hot to get a similar view to reddit /r/all
You can store this setting permanently as default in your user settings
Tips and PSA
- Protip: Use instance or relative links
- Upload images on your text posts
- Use Firefox’ bookmark keywords to navigate quickly to a community
- Protip: Use the instance switcher script
One correction/clarification and some tips:
For now this seems only work if the community has already been federated. The first subscriber needs to use the search with either the [email protected] format or the community’s url. Make sure you have “all” selected so that it’s not just searching locally. Then the search results usually show “No results” even if it’s syncing in the background. After it’s been federated it’ll show up in searches, in the communities list, and will work with those /c/ style links. The UI for federating new communities definitely needs a bunch of work.
To find and subscribe to communities go to https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/communities, then selecting ‘All’ to look through any that are already federated. If you want to find more, https://browse.feddit.de/ has a mostly complete list of communities. Just watch out though, because it includes instances that are blocked from most sites for obvious reasons.
A few instances I’ve found centered around various topics:
https://slrpnk.net - Solarpunk
https://mander.xyz - Science
https://programming.dev - Programming
https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech - Pop Music
https://pathfinder.social - Pathfinder/Starfinder TTRPGs
https://sub.wetshaving.social - Wet Shaving
https://pawb.social - Furry
https://lemmy.studio - Music
There’s more for other topics, but a lot of them don’t have any moderation policies listed so I’m not going to recommend them yet. There’s also a bunch of general purpose instances, as well as location based ones.
One thing that a lot of people find confusing is how there can be multiple communities with the same name, just hosted on different sites. In those cases it’s not a single community viewed in two places. For example [email protected] and [email protected] are two separate communities that both exist, and you can subscribe to either or both. Each will have different rules, mods, posts and comments. The full name of a community includes the domain, sort of like an email address.
I’d also recommend people change their default settings to ‘Subscribed’ so it’s not just showing the posts hosted here. You might also want to set sorting to ‘Hot’, since ‘Active’ tends to show the same threads for days at a time as long as people keep posting in them.
Right now the federation with kbin.social seems to be broken since they added cloudflare protection. We probably need to wait for them to remove that before communities there can be federated.
Thanks. Adjusted my post a bit