I’m finally making the switch from Reddit. The Voyager app seems like a pretty seamless transition, but I’d love to hear any tips about using this platform, or what quirks distinguish it from Reddit as a whole.
I think (absolutely IMHO) Reddit commenting is more confrontational. Sure, we have that here, but on Reddit I would get slapped down often, because I’m not that smart and I make mistakes. My clumsy way was chum in the water for the sharks.
Not here. I feel like people here, EVEN WHEN THEY GET MAD, can be spoken to, even apologized to, and together you can be okay. Not agree necessarily, but not ugly or unkind.
I’ve seen a few new people here try the “smack em for being stupid” technique, and mostly it gets them downvotes and criticism. I really love that about being here.
It feels much safer for the sensitive.
This is a great point.
There’s also very convenient block mechanisms for rude folks, and a “block and move on” culture for those who don’t keep their communication civil.
Yes, I do block the rude.
I think partly this is due to there being no karma on this platform. Garnering up votes or downvotes in a single thread is largely meaningless outside of it.
That’s refreshing to hear actually. Reddit can be a pretty unfriendly place depending on what corners you spend your time. I think in today’s tumultuous and divisive political/cultural landscape we need neighborliness more than ever.
Understand this is not reddit. There is no “reddit hivemind” on Lemmy because Lemmy is federated. You will find that this type of thing still exists within certain instances in various ways, but know that you are leaving a single large echo chamber and entering into a series of smaller, federated echo chambers. There is much more representation of human beings with differing morals, ideals, and beliefs here as compared to reddit.
Based on my own experience, you would do well by yourself to learn to not take what other people are thinking personally. You don’t have to believe in what anyone else thinks, but other people don’t have to believe in what you think either. Don’t make the mistake of believing you know what is best, or that you know everything.
I have seen this have a culture shock effect on newer users, because they often expect that everyone thinks, says, does, or feels all the same or similar things as them about anything and everything, and quickly find out that it is not necessarily the case here.
An example of this I have seen on multiple occasions is where new users are shocked when they make a post about wanting some kind of change to the entire platform “to attract users”, and are quickly informed that many user’s do not necessarily want, or care that the platform attracts users, because for many, that is not the point of the software Lemmy, rather that is the point for a business like reddit. If a user really wants some huge change, usually the response is for them to make an account on an existing instance like what they are looking for, or to host their own.
You will find much more actual individualism on Lemmy. It is important to be aware that not only is everyone not the same, but that they don’t have to be either.
People are also less likely to react positively to comments that are not offering actual thought. If you enter a thread to comment “this”, or just to make jokes without a point, you may find you receive a different reaction than what you would receive on reddit.
Do not read a title or a comment, hammer a reply into your keyboard, and then hit send so that you can move on to more content faster, like other social media has trained you to.
Read posts and comments and think about them. Weigh your replies. If you think you know the point you want to get across, consider what responses others may have, adjust what you are writing until you believe your reply thoroughly covers what you actually think about the subject matter as whole with consideration to what you think might be follow up questions and others thoughts, and then send it.
Of course if you have further thoughts later on, feel free to edit what you said to clarify or add to your thought (as I am doing this very moment, 40 minutes later).
Lemmy is an excellent opportunity to practice communication, because as it stands, you will find the degree of conversation is much more engaging than what reddit turned into over time. If you have a well thought out, beautiful, or powerful thing to say and go through the trouble of saying it well, you may find you are rewarded by someone else doing the same in return.
Just because the format is similar to that of reddit does not mean that Lemmy is the same platform.
In short I feel that Lemmy is not a platform that is there to work for you necessarily, instead it is a platform that enables you to work on yourself. But only if you will let it.
I feel called out with the “this” example, but I promise I was playing into the basic bitch redditor trope.
I appreciate the time you spent in crafting this thoughtful reply, and the insights you shared. It can be very easy to get trapped in a mindless content loop, so I think a reminder to slow down and be present is always timely.
I was (very) recently reminded of the love I once held for writing and it’s prompted me to begin forcing myself to be more mindful and patient with my own writing process, rather than hammer out only what’s necessary to convey a thought. So it’s an especially poignant reminder for me right now!
Thank you, and I am glad to hear that you were recently reminded of something you had love for. I had a similar experience when joining Lemmy about 2 years ago. It drove me to begin keeping a general book for journaling.
To that end, if you intend to take your rediscovery of your love of writing further, a recommendation of mine would be to find both a book and pen that you like. Something with a cover or paper which you enjoy, and something which makes it feel easy and smooth to write with. In doing this I have found that it has reminded me to write and allows me to enjoy doing so much more.
In my case I found a green, hard covered book, with a relief of a tree on the front. The cover has a soft wrap which makes it feel good to hold and warm to the touch. It has two tongues for keeping place.
My pen is a very cheap but nicely made Muji brand aluminum fountain pen with which I use Waterman black ink. It writes smoothly and the pages soak the ink in well. It is also not so expensive that I would be worried if I lost it. It has a knurling which makes it easy to hold, and the cap posts in the back in an unconventional manner.
I have found writing for myself has helped me when writing for others, the only difficult part was remembering to begin.
I have no fucking clue what federated is and no one seems to ever explain it lol. What does it mean?
Every instance is like a different forum, and they can choose to “federate” with others to provide a somewhat seamless experience. You only have an account at one instance but others recognize that and vice versa. Each instance can have communities, similar to subreddits, focusing on different content. You can follow, comment, and post in communities hosted on other instances that federate with your instance. Each instance has its own rules and culture.
How is that different than subreddits? Not tryna be argumentative about it it just sounds like Reddit and subreddits. I got banned on reddit but have grown to hate it and other than the constant US hate subs which I’ve slowly but surely come to block I like it here much more. Just wish there were more communities that weren’t political
To try to clarify for you:
Imagine you could have your own entire reddit that you can install on a server and let other people join and use. On your reddit, they can create subreddits, make comments, make posts, and everything else you would expect.
Now imagine other people do the same thing. Many other people. They make their own reddits on their own servers which have their own subreddits, users, posts, comments, etc. Imagine I am one of these other people, and I have my own version of reddit on my own server.
Federation is where between you and I and everyone else, between all these peoples own personal reddits, posts and communities will show up from all of the reddits on everyones front page, and everyone can interact with them regardless of whose reddit they are actually on.
You might make a post on your own reddit, in a subreddit there called “mySubreddit”. Even though I am on my own server, I see this post you have made on the front page of my server, and I can comment on it, make posts on “mySubreddit”, upvote and downvote, everything you would expect.
This works both ways. I can make posts on the version of reddit running on your server, see its communities etc, and you can do the same on mine.
Now replace the word “subreddit” with “community”, the word “server” with “instance”, and the word “reddit” with “lemmy”, and this is how the platform works.
This means you can have a large group of people like reddit does, interacting with one another, but without any one person or a business having to buy and manage entire server farms, moderate an enormous platform, or any of the other major logistical stuff.
It means that no company owns it as well. Lemmy also can’t “go down” like reddit, because reddit is not federated. If reddits server has an issue, no one can access reddit. If lemmy.ml goes down, you can still see lemm.ee, lemmy.world, lemmy.one, or any of the other lemmy instances, because they are different entire servers owned by entirely different people that are managed and configured separately from one another.
Your account is on lemm.ee, which is an instance of lemmy on someones server. My account is on lemmy.ml, which is a different instance - someone elses server. And yet, we can hold this conversation because of federation. The community (subreddit) this conversation is taking place in is lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy, which is a community on my home server where my account is stored. Your account does not exist here, but you didnt have to create a lemmy.ml account to see this community, or the post, or my comments, or to reply to me, because federation allows your account to work on lemmy instances that are federated to your lemm.ee home server.
This also keeps you from getting banned from the entire platform over ridiculous things. At most, you can be banned from an entire Lemmy instance. This is good because if an instance has a change of ownership, and the new owner is an asshole, you can’t be locked out of the entire platform, you can always just create another account on a different lemmy instance without fear of being banned again (so long as you follow the respective rules on whatever instances you are communicating in). Furthermore, the mod logs are public data, and can be viewed from the sidebar of communities, so it is easy to see if a mod or admin is an asshole.
I’m glad to take any follow up questions or provide further clarifications.
Okay that helps a lot I was always wondering what the instances were. How do you go about browsing different ones? Finding one that suits you? Is that possible?
If you want to browse a different instance directly, you just type in that instances URL into your browsers search bar, though this is not how most people look at other instances.
In the upper right, you will likely see a magnifying glass icon for search. When you click on it, you will see a page like this:
The first box in the upper left that reads “All” (The one to the left of “Subscribed”) let’s you choose the type of result you want from your search. Using this box you can search for all, comments, posts, communities, users, or URL.
The selector to the right with the choices Subscribed, Local, All, Moderator View (if you moderate communities) allows you to scope the source of your search results. Subscribed will only show results from communities you subscribe to, local will only show results from your home server (lemm.ee in your case), All will show you results from everything lemm.ee federates to (such as lemmy.ml, lemmy.one, and many more), and moderator view will show results from communities you moderate.
If you set that first box to “Communities”, set the selector to “all” and then search “asklemmy”, it means you want to see communities from all federated instances that match your search. The result will also show how many users are subscribed to each.
This is what I see when I do this. As you might notice, there is more than one ask lemmy community, because each instance can have their own! If the result is not on my home server, you can see that it adds the name of the instance it is on (for example the first result is the asklemmy on my homeserver, but then the second result is the asklemmy on lemmy.world, so it shows this.
If you leave these settings the same, and enter in two spaces as your search term, it will return everything, and you can paginate through every federated community that you can go visit, subscribe to, and communicate through. Alternatively, you can click “Communities” at the top of the screen on your main page and change the selector there to see this.
As to your question about finding an instance that suits you, there are a few pages like https://join-lemmy.org/instances which will let you browse instances. Each instance typically has a description explaining what the purpose of the instance is. Some are geared towards hobbies, others are for general use, some are for specific locations, some are for ideological beliefs, etc. On your main page on lemm.ee, at the top, you will see that same selector for “Subscribed, Local, All, Moderator View”. When you browse “Local”, you will only see posts from other users on your own instance and it’s communities. This is really great because you can actually come to get to know other people pretty well on your home instance. It’s the same as being able to see what is going on in your own town, and have a smaller community of people interested in the same general theme, but then also being able to interact with every town in the world by browsing “All” instead.
Instance owners have the power to do a few things which are important to know. They can turn off new user account creation for their servers (because if they are paying for server space, it is a problem if suddenly you have 10,000 users on your instance creating content) so you can’t necessarily create an account on any instance. If you hit join on one of them on that page though, it should let you know if they are open for new accounts when you go through the sign up process.
Instance owners can also defederate other instances. This is a feature for cases where, let’s say you have someone create a lemmy instance which is there just to make a group of mean people, who go to other instances to be mean. If every other lemmy instance were to defederate them, they become like a single standalone website without federation. Their comments and posts, votes, etc do not show up for anyone except them, and their content can no longer be searched for or seen by those who don’t federate with them.
Wow! Thanks! I’ll definitely be saving this comment for reference for a while. I appreciate you!
Reddit is like one big instance, subreddits are our communuties. However, federated instances can visit the subreddits (communities) of other instances. This leads to decentralization of power, and cool niche instances that don’t all need to have everything.
As for politics, most people here are going to be more political than Reddit, as coming here instead of staying on Reddit is an ideological choice, often times.
It’s like posting on digg via Reddit except both are self hosted instead of corporate. Instances will also defederate if they decide they are incompatible.
Communities are the subreddits here. Instances are just what server you’re using/viewing. Some Instances block others, some Instances have special rules (viewed in the sidebar).
subreddits are all part of reddit, there’s a top part that can decide over all subreddits and make rules and ban people etc. Lemmy does not have a central point of authority. lemmy.world can only make rules and control lemmy.world, lemm.ee can only decide over lemm.ee. If you want your own rules, you can make your own instance and be as valid and part of lemmy as any other instance. The main point is: there is no level above this that controls all instances. Each instance is the top level of authority for that instance, and anyone can create an instance if they have the knowledge and resources.
Another aspect is that technically you could also interact with mastodon, peertube, etc, but that isn’t seamless and there’s no consensus if it’s even a good idea to pursue that, but it’s technically possible.Oh that’s actually really cool
take all of the things you hate about Reddit comment culture and do your best to perpetuate them here
This
Beans
ECCE HOMO QVI EST FABA
Karma does not persist and there is no minimum karma or account ages to comment anywhere.
Not entirely true, Solarpunk’s Pleasant Politics comm has an automod that bans and unbans based on recent karma ratios. The bot going back and forth on banning and unbanning me is the bulk of my modlog, lmao
[…] Solarpunk’s Pleasant Politics comm has an automod that bans and unbans based on recent karma ratios. […]
Do they have any documentation for that behavior? If so, could you link it?
https://slrpnk.net/post/11069853
That’s where they discuss it. You can check my modlog to see it in action, lol
Karma does not persist […]
I’m not sure what you mean; if I look at your account, for example, I can see all of your past vote scores [1].
References
- Type: User Account. Publisher: [“geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml”. “sh.itjust.works”. “Lemmy”.]. Accessed: 2025-03-28T02:12Z. URI: https://sh.itjust.works/u/geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml.
- Outlined in red are the vote scores for some of the user’s most recent comments and posts.
it’s different than karma. points from every post have to be added to get the “karma”, which may can be done unofficially by using some scripts, but officially lemmy doesn’t do that,
- Type: User Account. Publisher: [“geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml”. “sh.itjust.works”. “Lemmy”.]. Accessed: 2025-03-28T02:12Z. URI: https://sh.itjust.works/u/geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml.
No awards, so you have escaped the cringe “thank you, kind stranger!” comments.
In all seriousness, I would curate a bunch of pages that interest you so you have a home page relevant to your interests. There’s a lot of competing communities but I just add all the big ones that are relevant.
For some reason nobody gave any suggestions for a client to use. If you are familiar with Apollo for Reddit, there is a spiritual successor here on Lemmy called Voyager: https://vger.app/
Here is a great 30 min explainer presentation on the activitypub network in general: https://conf.tube/w/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01f38f966
It covers a lot of the philosophical and design differences that a lot of us are very passionate about. Welcome.
Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
Another tip I haven’t seen yet:
-
It varies by client, but Markdown generally works, here.
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Spoiler tags seem to still be a separate extension from regular Markdown.
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Many of us try to be more careful to include ALT Text with images, as it supports both blind users, and anyone whose server is just being slow to load images:
Example of Image with Alt text in Markdown:
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Here’s one I haven’t seen mentioned yet: many of us explicitly state our intended tone after our comments, to avoid miscommunication. Particularly in busy threads.
We have some great accessibility outreach communicators here, some of whom have shared how much it helps them or people they know.
Some examples:
- (Sarcasm)
- (Genuine)
- (Joke)
Sometimes these are abbreviated, but we often even avoid abbreviation - for general clarity, but probably mainly because we’re always gaining new users who might not recognize the abbreviation.
Might wanna block universal monk. It makes the experience smoother.
Is this where I submit my application to be blocked as well?
Yeah actually, thanks
Edit: You’re just a big goof. I looked at your post history. I’d miss your shit posting.
If you see a bunch of posts that says death to America, you’re probably on a .ml server
Most content is driven by the Picard maneuver and this jellyfish guy.
There I think you’re oriented.
As a more serious aside to the above, it is generally worth paying a bit of attention to which instance other users you interact with. There’s obviously no blanket statement you can make about the users of particular instances, but there are definitely certain instances that are more appealing to… certain groups of users.
lemmy.ml in particular has a bit of a reputation for having tankies on it, but there’s lots of very interesting and reasonable people there (or here, I suppose, given this is an ml community), also.
Watch out for posters trying to bum rush you, trying to get you to react, and then mass reporting you to have your post removed.
They are just trolling.
If you ever say the word trans expect someone from a certain 196 community to ban you.
Don’t ever assume things like tiananmen square or the fall of the soviet union are settled matters
Edit: oh and there are better instances than ml and world isn’t one of them.
Trans
Don’t ever assume things like tiananmen square or the fall of the soviet union are settled matters
Those people can stay on Reddit.
Like the mass migrating here now.
If they haven’t been banned looong ago when you can’t even have the mildest criticism of genocide or other things there, I have questions.What are the best instances, in your opinion?
Also, what is 196?
IMO divided by zero or shit just works seem pretty appealing and thought about moving to one of those. Really, though, it comes down to personal preference.
There are no recommendation algorithms for content, you are one! Search for communities based on your interests and subscribe to them. The Communities view of your home instance and Lemmy Explorer are good for that. Because Lemmy is decentralized, all discussion isn’t centered around one site like on Reddit, which may at first give an impression of emptiness.
I also wrote an extensive guide about Lemmy few weeks ago.
Welcome!
Yeah it felt a little empty here at first, but then I realized I get way more replies on most of my comments here than I did on reddit where most people just scrolled right past it.
Right? I think Lemmy is way more conducive to conversations than Reddit.
I find myself commenting far more often than I did on Reddit. I remember once that I lamented that Lemmy doesn’t have a “super upvote” in the way that Reddit gold used to be (which is a silly thought, given that I have never, and would never pay money to gild a comment). However, I realised that on this more discussion based platform, a short but meaningful comment can readily function as a super upvote. I think the lack of karma accrual for comments/posts also promotes this.
Same, I’m engaging more often here than I did on Reddit because it feels less like shouting into the void. I just wish there were more active communities for philosophical/political/religious debate on lemmy.
Also I didn’t even realize there wasn’t a karma system here, but that seems like a good call. I never paid attention to it on Reddit either (I couldn’t even tell you off the top of my head how much I have.)
You make a great point.
I fire off comments without thinking much at about the same rate as I did on the other website but get replies on about ~50-60% here vs. ~20% on centralized media.
It’s really nice honestly. /gen
(And people are much nicer about tone tags here!)
Indeed, I quite like it, cause I’m here for discussion not just shouting into the void.
That guide is helpful. Thanks!
Very nice, thanks!
I’m going to be honest, I would prefer having some sort of algorithm. Not only it would the things I’m uninsterested away, but it would occasionally show something new to me. I’ve seen people with “cjrated feeds” saying something about it being boring. The problem is not algorithms, it’s how they are constructed.
That’s a good point. That said, I do have options for finding unusual stuff when I want something fresh, so I’ve never felt uninterested. (It also helps that I’m tired of dopamine holes trying to create a never ending novelty coaster like regular social media)
