That depends. What operating system do you use?

Varies wildly from instance to instance. At this point, most instances have their own “culture” and ideological leanings, if you go against your instance’s grain then you will run into more friction. I can help if you give a broad overview of your political leanings and interests, or you can browse the major instances and see which most appeals to you.

Lemmy is, in general, very welcoming of newcomers. We are always happy to see one more person escape the hell hole that is reddit. We all hope you have an amazing time here! Though a lot of it depends on what home instance you are on, but feel free to hop around from instance to instance to find one that suits you, or maybe you already feel nice and cozy just where you are.

Completely random, unorganized and improvised tips and tricks and other miscellaneous information

Reminder to use the subscribe button to curate a nice Subscribed feed!

Subreddits here are called “communities”.

Use ! to link to a community. Like so [email protected].

Need help? Ask something on the adequate support communities, like [email protected].

The All feed only shows posts from communities that at least one person from your own instance is subscribed to, so might make sense to look on other instances Local community lists to find a community you might not find on Lemmy’s horrible search function.

You might know on Lemmy, multiple instances share content. This content sharing happens through a proccess called “federation”. When two instances are sharing content, we say they are federated, when they stop sharing content, we say they are defederated (like lemmy.world and lemmygrad.ml).

You might be confused with all the @ everywhere in community names and user names. Let me explain:

Username are structured like so: Username @ instance link.

username@host.instance

And communities much the same way:

communityname@host.instance

If you do not see a @ in a community or username, it means they are on the same instance you are on right now!

There might be duplicate communities of the same topic on different instances, so if you like one, you might want to subscribe to all of them. (There are like… 3 meme communities for example: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] )

Before posting in a community, make sure to read the rules of both the community and the instance it is hosted in.

It is worth noting, though, that due to recent political… events… politically related skirmishes have gotten somewhat more common. Also, as more people join Lemmy, some of them are bound to be morons so… reminder the block button exists if you are not interested in that. Most of the skirmishes are between liberals and Marxist-Leninist.

I hope my unorganized guide might of of some use to you! ( ^ ω ^ )

Most of Lemmy was extremely hostile during the US elections but that has mostly passed.

On average, yeah.

But you gotta remember, there’s a fresh wave of r/efugees coming in, and there was one not that long ago.

Lemmy is mostly people that left Reddit, rather than having been a separate culture of its own. So there’s plenty of the same things that make reddit a difficult place to be.

Lemmy tends to be more forgiving overall, outside of the politically focused instances, and some of the more… assertive belief systems that have communities and instances.

As others have already said, lemmy.ml is a dedicated leftist space, and it’s hard left, even outright tankie at times (far left and authoritative). So you don’t want to go there about politics, you won’t have a good time.

Lemmy.world catches a lot of hell because some of the mods and admins are a tad whack, but the users are typically not going to fuck with you.

Sh.itjust.works is probably the closest in vibe to reddit, good and bad.

Those are still, iirc, the three biggest instances. So you’ll have more users, which means the percentage of assholes in the human race equals those instances having higher numbers of assholes, but that really is the issue.

My advice to anyone new on lemmy is the same as it was for new reddit users. Hang back a while. Stay chill. Observe the culture of lemmy as a whole, and any community you want to participate in.

It is the internet though. People will say shit they’d never dare to in person. But I’d say there’s less of it here than most forums. And, I also tend to see more compassion too

I’ve found lemmy to be kind most of the time but my original experience coming here was 2 years ago

I say somewhat - it really depends on which server you’re on, because that defines the initial community that will be immediately available to you. There’s also plenty of mods and admins that have very pronounced political views and will exercise their power according to them.

I’ve found that the discussion is better here, although slower, and there are far fewer bots and trolls (although Fediverse trolls tend to be heartier and more persistent than their Reddit cousins).

I think we’re pretty nice. Though I can get a little hot sometimes I think we all try to keep in mind we are talking to real humans (most of the time lol).

Yes.

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