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 :)
You must log in or register to comment.
Reddit has become just an absolute dumpster fire lately. Anything even remotely negative and bam you’re banned. Even the gifs i could post got so limited. I’m done with it, and am joining the exodus.
Welcome! 😊
If you have any questions while getting settled, feel free to post in !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
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?
@otter@lemmy.ca, do you know what the catalyst was for the recent influx? It’s great news!
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
Here are some more tips, put together by @Rentlar@lemmy.ca in this post
Quick FAQ:
Q: I am not getting my registration email/can't log in after submitting application, what do I do?
A: Check your spam/junk box, gmail and outlook can be very finicky. Applications are vetted by each server’s admins, but the applications are only visible when the email is verified. If no success after 24 hours, try another instance.
Q: I signed up on one server (e.g. lemmy.ca), I can't login to another server to post/comment there (e.g. lemmy.world), what do I do?
A: You can actually post on that server without leaving the site you are logged in on. The URL syntax to visit a remote community is [your instance]/c/[community name]@[remote instance]. Example to visit https://lemmy.ca/c/canada with a lemmy.world account, go to https://lemmy.world/c/canada@lemmy.ca. Mentioning the community similar to this form: !canada@lemmy.ca in Lemmy will create a link that takes you directly there.
If you are visiting this post from another server, paste this link, https://lemmy.ca/post/39118714 into lemmyverse.link, set your home server, and it will automatically find the same post on your server so that you can comment. Some apps save you the trouble automatically. The rainbow pentagon is the permalink button to easily get the original link.
Q: There's a lot of noise, how do I curate my feed?
A: Two ways: 1. stay on All or Local and use blocks. Block users, communities and instances that post content you don’t want to see. 2. Find communities you are interested in, subscribe to those, and use the Subscribe feed to see posts exclusively from those communities.
Q: Lemmy's interface looks ugly, is there anything better? And can I use it on my phone?
A: Have a look at https://lemmyapps.com/, these include web interfaces, android, iOS and PC apps. On lemmy.ca you have a couple alternative web frontends, try https://old.lemmy.ca/ (for old.reddit.com users), https://alex.lemmy.ca/, https://photon.lemmy.ca/.
Q: Can I trust you, or the admins more than RedditInc, gallowboob, Shittymorph or Steve Huffman?
A: That’s for you to judge. Reddit is run as a for-profit publicly traded company, intent on scraping, hoarding and monetizing your data for itself, showing you ads, and getting every nickel they can siphon out of you. Lemmy is open source, and while the admins of lemmy.ca have control over its accounts in a similar way and have generously contributed significant resources, this server is run by Non-Profit Fédécan. Other servers will have their own admins, each with their own strengths and faults. The organization and the Lemmy developers will always appreciate your support, but isn’t interested in monetizing your data or ads. Friendly reminder when using public forums: what you post here will be open and publicly available for everyone, freely and equally.
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.
🫶 happy to be here
