Upvotes don’t mean anything here

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!

One thing a lot of people don’t realize at first: You likely have the option to disable visibility of downvotes and/or upvotes in the settings

Landlords, billionaires, AI, Reddit = Bad

Beans, Linux = good

Marxist-Leninists = it’s complicated

first know that there are tankie triads: hexbear, ml and lemmygrad avoid these instances you can block it. blahaj zone, startrekwebsite.com is another ones to avoid, as they ban very easily for very vague reasons.

Nothing happened in Tienanmen Square.

You should know that you are awesome

Something I haven’t seen people talk about is the nature of the fediverse in terms of the philosophy of separate instances.

There are a lot of “general” instances that are kind of like mini-reddits. Lots of users sign up from all over, communities for a wide variety of interests. But there are also instances with a specific focus.

For example, I’m a member of midwest.social so when I look at the “local” feed, I only get communities relating to the US midwest. But of course, I can still subscribe and interact with other communities on federated insances.

Think of it like email. You can sign up for the big general purpose emails (google, outlook, icloud, etc). But you might want something different, perhaps privacy focused like Proton or Tuta. Or you can have an “instance” for your work where everyone gets an @company.com email. Or maybe you just want to spin up your own email with a vanity domain.

No matter which email server you use, you can still communicate with people on separate servers.

You don’t have to stick with the first account you create. In fact, I’d recommend that you try a few instances before you settle on one.

Beyond separate instances, there are also alternatives to Lemmy that are very similar but do some things differently. Mbin, Kbin, and Piefed are examples. And again, thanks to federation standards and everything being built to be compatible, you can subscribe to a Lemmy community from Mbin and vice versa.

You’re gonna need this.

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

There’s about 20 monumental assholes here that are responsible for almost all of the squabbling and drama.

Use the BLOCK function liberally, every time you find someone who’s just a complete asshat, block them.

Eventually you’ll catch the big fish and life will get easier around here and you won’t have these morons to deal with.

“Post before you leave” is the rule of one of the most active communities on here, but it is a good rule in general

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.

I recommend looking at everything in ‘settings’. There are some cool things you can do, such as limiting your home page solely to communities you’re subscribed to.

Also, blocking works differently here. People you block will still see your posts, you just won’t see their replies. (Which I find to be kinda fun, personally.)

1. Think about things you like.
2. Look for community about said thing
3. If it exists, GREAT! contribute content And have fun!

3-A. If it DOESN’T exist, make it. THEN contribute & have fun!

4. Become a linux user.

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.