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Lemmy is a selfhosted, federated social link aggregation and discussion forum. It consists of many different communities which are focused on different topics. Users can post text, links or images and discuss it with others. Voting helps to bring the most interesting items to the top. There are strong moderation tools to keep out spam and trolls. All this is completely free and open, not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms.

Federation is a form of decentralization. Instead of a single central service that everyone uses, there are multiple services that any number of people can use.

A Lemmy website can operate alone. Just like a traditional website, people sign up on it, post messages, upload pictures and talk to each other. Unlike a traditional website, Lemmy instances can interoperate, letting their users communicate with each other; just like you can send an email from your Gmail account to someone from Outlook, Fastmail, Proton Mail, or any other email provider, as long as you know their email address, you can mention or message anyone on any website using their address.

Lemmy uses a standardized, open protocol to implement federation which is called ActivityPub. Any software that likewise implements federation via ActivityPub can seamlessly communicate with Lemmy, just like Lemmy instances communicate with one another.

The fediverse ("federated universe") is the name for all instances that can communicate with each other over ActivityPub and the World Wide Web. That includes all Lemmy servers, but also other implementations:

Mastodon (microblogging)
PeerTube (videos)
Friendica (multi-purpose)
and many more!

In practical terms: Imagine if you could follow a Facebook group from your Reddit account and comment on its posts without leaving your account. If Facebook and Reddit were federated services that used the same protocol, that would be possible. With a Lemmy account, you can communicate with any other compatible instance, even if it is not running on Lemmy. All that is necessary is that the software support the same subset of the ActivityPub protocol.

Unlike proprietary services, anyone has the complete freedom to run, examine, inspect, copy, modify, distribute, and reuse the Lemmy source code. Just like how users of Lemmy can choose their service provider, you as an individual are free to contribute features to Lemmy or publish a modified version of Lemmy that includes different features. These modified versions, also known as software forks, are required to also uphold the same freedoms as the original Lemmy project. Because Lemmy is libre software that respects your freedom, personalizations are not only allowed but encouraged.

Choosing an instance

If you are used to sites like Reddit, then Lemmy works in a fundamentally different way. Instead of a single website like reddit.com, there are many different websites (called instances). These are operated by different people, have different topics and rules. Nevertheless, posts created in one instance can directly be seen by users who are registered on another. Its basically like email, but for social media.

This means before using Lemmy and registering an account, you need to pick an instance. For this you can browse the instance list and look for one that matches your topics of interest. You can also see if the rules match your expectations, and how many users there are. It is better to avoid very big or very small instances. But don't worry too much about this choice, you can always create another account on a different instance later.

[instance list screenshot] Registration

Once you choose an instance, it's time to create your account. To do this, click sign up in the top right of the page, or click the top right button on mobile to open a menu with sign up link.

[registration page screenshot]

On the signup page you need to enter a few things:

Username: How do you want to be called? This name can not be changed and is unique within an instance. Later you can also set a displayname which can be freely changed. If your desired username is taken, consider choosing a different instance where it is still available.
Email: Your email address. This is used for password resets and notifications (if enabled). Providing an email address is usually optional, but admins may choose to make it mandatory. In this case you will have to wait for a confirmation mail and click the link after completing this form.
Password: The password for logging in to your account. Make sure to choose a long and unique password which isn't used on any other website.
Verify password: Repeat the same password from above to ensure that it was entered correctly.

There are also a few optional fields, which you may need to fill in depending on the instance configuration:

Question/Answer: Instance admins can set an arbitrary question which needs to be answered in order to create an account. This is often used to prevent spam bots from signing up. After submitting the form, you will need to wait for some time until the answer is approved manually before you can login.
Code: A captcha which is easy to solve for humans but hard for bots. Enter the letters and numbers that you see in the text box, ignoring uppercase or lowercase. Click the refresh button if you are unable to read a character. The play button plays an audio version of the captcha.
Show NSFW content: Here you can choose if content that is "not safe for work" (or adult-only) should be shown.

When you are done, press the sign up button.

It depends on the instance configuration when you can login and start using the account. In case the email is mandatory, you need to wait for the confirmation email and click the link first. In case "Question/Answer" is present, you need to wait for an admin to manually review and approve your registration. If you have problems with the registration, try to get in contact with the admin for support. You can also choose a different instance to sign up if your primary choice does not work. Following communities

After logging in to your new account, its time to follow communities that you are interested in. For this you can click on the communities link at the top of the page (on mobile, you need to click the menu icon on the top right first). You will see a list of communities which can be filtered by subscribed, local or all. Local communities are those which are hosted on the same site where you are signed in, while all also contains federated communities from other instances. In any case you can directly subscribe to communities with the right-hand subscribe link. Or click on the community name to browse the community first, see what its posted and what the rules are before subscribing.

Another way to find communities to subscribe to is by going to the front page and browsing the posts. If there is something that interests you, click on the post title to see more details and comments. Here you can subscribe to the community in the right-hand sidebar, or by clicking the "sidebar" button on mobile.

These previous ways will only show communities that are already known to the instance. Especially if you joined a small or inactive Lemmy instance, there will be few communities to discover. You can find more communities by browsing different Lemmy instances, or using the Lemmy Community Browser. When you found a community that you want to follow, enter its URL (e.g. https://feddit.de/c/main) or the identifier (e.g. !main@feddit.de) into the search field of your own Lemmy instance. Lemmy will then fetch the community from its original instance, and allow you to interact with it. The same method also works to fetch users, posts or comments from other instances. Setting up your profile

Before you start posting, its a good idea to provide some details about yourself. Open the top-right menu and go to "settings". Here the following settings are available for your public profile:

Displayname: An alternative username which can be changed at any time
Bio: Long description of yourself, can be formatted with Markdown
Matrix User: Your username on the decentralized Matrix chat
Avatar: Profile picture that is shown next to all your posts
Banner: A header image for your profile page

On this page you can also change the email and password. Additionally there are many other settings available, which allow customizing of your browsing experience:

Blocks (tab at top of the page): Here you can block users and communities, so that their posts will be hidden.
Interface language: Which language the user interface should use.
Languages: Select the languages that you speak to see only content in these languages. This is a new feature and many posts don't specify a language yet, so be sure to select "Undetermined" to see them.
Theme: You can choose between different color themes for the user interface. Instance admins can add more themes.
Type: Which timeline you want to see by default on the frontpage; only posts from communities that you subscribe to, posts in local communities, or all posts including federated.
Sort type: How posts and comments should be sorted by default. See Votes and Ranking for details.
Show NSFW content: Whether or not you want to see content that is "not safe for work" (or adult-only).
Show Scores: Whether the number of upvotes and downvotes should be visible.
Show Avatars: Whether profile pictures of other users should be shown.
Bot Account: Enable this if you are using a script or program to create posts automatically
Show Bot Accounts: Disable this to hide posts that were created by bot accounts.
Show Read Posts: If this is disabled, posts that you already viewed are not shown in listings anymore. Useful if you want to find

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