Ask Lemmy

People around here really love Linux.

Not saying it's a bad thing. Linux is great.

But people around here reeeealy love Linux.

Change post type to All and sort by Active. Start blocking communities that you don't want to see and subscribing to communities that interest you.

If you are like me and you want to see where everyone is talking, change your sort to New Comments instead of Active.

Block everyone! Block every instance! Block me! Block yourself!

Or maybe... just spend some time using the platform until you start to get a feel for the vibe. If you can bear to listen to opinions that don't already align with your own, you'll probably find that most people are pretty chill and discussions are mostly pretty civil. Disagreement is not the same thing as hostility or trolling. I've never blocked anything on this platform and I still find it to be miles better than reddit in terms of vibes. Rather than preemptively curating your feed based on whatever someone else's idea of bad content is, you can form your own opinions. Block if you want, but you can also just... not engage.

It's more leftist than Reddit, but just as insufferable.

There's a lot of leftist spaces around here. I don't mean liberal in the USA left, I mean actual socialist, communists, and anarchists. Most are fine with discussion but read the rules first. They're usually in the side bar.

If you aren't a bot change your tag or people are going to block you

Ignore karma and just have fun.

You're gonna need this.

... when the time comes, you'll know what to do.

We like beans and soapy tits.

Welcome. You are now a Lemming.

Don't worry to much about people telling you to hate this instance or this other, you'll find out on your own. Use heavily the blocking fonction and everything will be fine.

You don't find a niche community to post or comment in? Do the same on the less niche but related community.
Around here people hate AI, love beans, Start Trek and Linux. You can disagree and still enjoy the memes.

Lemmy is like many tiny Reddits called instances. You barely realise you switch from one to another while browsing happily expect for "instance nationalism". It is smaller but more humane. That's about all you need to start.

Don't hesitate to share you hobbies to get recommandation. Here is mine anyway : !superbowl@lemmy.world

Enjoy.

Honestly, it’s pretty left wing and there can be duplicates of communities. There’s far less content than on Reddit but I find that better because I lost weeks of my life doom scrolling on Reddit. I hit a point on here where I just have to wait for more stuff to appear. One good thing about that is you can comment on something and actually be heard. Not like on Reddit where all but the most niche communities have 200+ comments on each post.

Also, and this is a big one, you have to be running Linux.

Welcome.

You may find stronger opinions here, and you may find them more popular than you'd expect.

Be wary of tankies. What are tankies? It's a pejorative term for authoritarian communists who will claim Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin have done nothing wrong. They also support modern day Russia even though they're supposedly a liberal democracy because they're likely Russian psy ops guys.

We're still a pretty small community here and you'll see a lot of familiar usernames but you'll eventually fit right in to our tapestry of performative outrage and bickering. Depending on your home instance, you may not be able to see all the fediverse communities. I recommend hopping around until you find one that fits your style, like dbzer0.

The vegans, cyclists, and feminists are a bit feral; they tend to generate drama/ragebait threads at a higher rate than the norm. Good to read if you have popcorn handy.

Post what you got - folks here like content.

Got an ultra-niche interest? Create a community and share.

It's just like Reddit. Except non-fascist. And karma doesn't mean anything. In other words, it's much better!

Lemmy is politically extremely left leaning, so prepare to get downvoted for just having center opinions, let alone conservative ones. But unlike Reddit, downvotes (and upvotes for that matter) don't mean shit.

I think we're doing powdered milk this week.

So.... First thing is first. Lemmy works on what they're calling the "fediverse" (don't ask me, I didn't name it). Effectively, each Lemmy server, like Lemmy.ca or Lemmy.world (or whatever) is independent. But, through the power/magic of the fediverse, you can post on servers that are not your local server, and people from other servers can see/comment on your posts.

Because of this, things get a bit fractured. You can have communities (you might refer to them as "subreddits"), that are named the same on different servers. Eg, "/c/memes" on several servers, and they're entirely disconnected from eachother. They have different subscriber bases and different content.

So it's like Reddit, but now everything is broken down per server as well.

You, personally, can choose to block a single user on a single server (also called an instance), or block that entire server, so you can't see any of their content or posts by any users on those servers. Some Lemmy instances are more politically left/right/center/neutral, others seem to be found on almost entirely Marxist ideals. Some are simply geographically centered (like lemmy.ca is, where I am, in Canada). You are not required, as far as I know, to live in the geography where a geographic Lemmy instance is, but it can help.

Other than that, there's not a lot that's different day to day. You post, people up/down vote your posts, you live and move on. There's a lot less emphasis of how many updoots or downdoots you have overall. Most servers don't even really tell you those stats about anyone but yourself. At least, that was the case the last time I looked.

One last note about the fediverse: there are other apps that use the same fediverse login stuff, so you may get cross over from other platforms. I don't really dabble in all of that, I just stick to my local instance and use it like I would use Reddit.

Welcome fellow lemming.

There's a butt load of tankies here. They are incredibly hostile to anyone who doesn't agree with them. You'll just have to block them one by one.

They banned me for absolutely no reason.

A year ago whenever I saw someone say this my assumption was that "no reason" was like "I only posted a light-hearted joke about murdering queers", but Reddit has been such an absolute garbage fire recently that they genuinely do seem to be banning people for the most incredibly milquetoast shit.

Landlords, billionaires, AI, Reddit = Bad

Beans, Linux = good

Marxist-Leninists = it's complicated

My 2 cents: Don't be afraid to use the "block community" and curate your "home" from time to time, don't keep it static. There are a lot of awesome things here that can get buried easily.

1. You are now legally obligated to change that Reddit chibi to something mouse-related

2. Grab beans

3. Boot up Linux

4. Have fun!

But seriously, Lemmy is a diverse place. Take some time to explore what's in here, subscribe to what you like, block what you don't. Lemmy leaves it up to you to curate your experience. Also, welcome!

Beans and powdered milk are important.

There is no karma here. Don't worry too much about being downvoted every now and then.

Also, I like sorting by scaled. It's like sorting by hot, except it pushes smaller, niche communities up. Which is great if you don't want your feed to just be news articles.

Keep an open mind, don't be afraid of disagreement, and share your stuff! I find it so much easier to exist here as someone who's always been resistant to fitting into rigid categories.

I already have twice the amount of comments as I did when I left Reddit almost two years ago, and I was there for nearly a decade.

Copy pasting from another thread very similar to this one,

Welcome! I typically say that the Threadiverse (a decent all encompassing term to mean "reddit format" e.g. link aggregator type social media that includes Piefed, bin, Lemmy etc.) is about where reddit was 10-15 years ago.

I recommend lemmyverse.com for comm discovery, sometimes your might be looking for a comm that does exist, but for whatever reason your instance just hasn't picked up on it (typically someone from your instance has to manually go to a new comm and sub to it if your instance missed the automated bot federation from Lemmy-federate.com

We’re not without our cons though, biggest problem we have are probably the Tankies, but here they’re mostly on what's known as the Tankie Triad: lemmy.ml, lemmygrad and hexbear. For the most part, grad and hex are widely defederated from (Users and content of those instances won't be "synced" and you won't see them) and you only have to worry about .ml, but on Lemmy you can do a personal instance wide block if you’d rather just not deal with them. .ml tends to be more subtle opting for censorship of dissent before things get crazy on their threads and allowing certain propaganda to flourish (If you wish to see documentation of it, checkout !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works ) or the megathread here (is .ml centric specifically) Here on Lemmy all moderator actions are public and available for viewing on what's known as the "modlog".