Hello World!
The last week or so we have seen quite a big 'boost' in the amount of new users signing up so we thought it would be a good time to highlight some things that are of interest to new users.
CODE OF CONDUCT
Lemmy World is not a free speech instance, there are a couple of ground rules that need to be followed. If you're new, I would advise you to read our Code of Conduct.
NEW USER QUESTIONS
If you are new to the fediverse as a whole, it might all be a bit overwhelming. What is Lemmy? What is federation? What even is an instance? For those questions I would suggest you have a look at the getting starting guide. It should cover most of your questions.
STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?
You can head over to the !support@lemmy.world community. This community should be used for questions regarding Lemmy World and is not the support community for the Lemmy software this site uses.
Our Admin @quinten recently made a post covering the most recurring questions there too. Read about that here.
ALTERNATIVE USER INTERFACES
Lemmy World hosts a few custom User Interfaces which give you a completely different experience both on the desktop as on mobile.
- https://a.lemmy.world - Alexandrite is a beautiful and convenient desktop-first alternate web UI for Lemmy. Official site https://alexandrite.app
- https://p.lemmy.world - Photon A sleek client for Lemmy with powerful mod and admin tools. The only alternative client with feature parity to the official client. Official site https://phtn.app
- https://m.lemmy.world - Voyager was one of the first alternative UI's that became available. Optimized for Mobile. Official site https://vger.app
- https://old.lemmy.world - a familiar desktop experience for lemmy. Official site https://mlmym.org
THIRD PARTY APPS
There are a lot of Third Party apps available for Lemmy. From Paid to Open Source, you will find something that suits you easily.
For a complete list of apps have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ (Thanks Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de).
EDIT: Updated the apps list. Also some more interesting links in @otter@lemmy.ca's post here: https://lemmy.world/comment/3962001
EDIT 2: Instead of https://photon.lemmy.world you can now just go to https://p.lemmy.world. You can thank @Rootiest@lemmy.world laziness for that.
What made it “click” for me was when someone explained it like email addresses. You can send emails between Gmail and Yahoo Mail just fine, and two email addresses with the same username are distinguished by their @ handles. So like “Example@gmail(dot)com” is a different address than “Example@yahoo(dot)com”. They’re entirely separate accounts that can send emails to each other.
The fediverse is very similar. My account @lemmy.world is separate from the same username on another instance. And the same goes for communities. There may be communities on certain instances that naturally grow and absorb the smaller ones, but there’s nothing stopping you from making your own identical community on another instance, with its own rules, moderators, and content.
Federation is simply the process of connecting two servers together. The same way gmail and yahoo can talk to each other via a standard protocol, federation allows the different servers to talk to each other. This occasionally causes weird things when one instance federates with another, and you suddenly get flooded by posts from that new server. But that’s just your Home feed catching up, since all of those posts are now considered unread.
Federation isn’t an automatic process in the sense that new servers announce themselves and get connected automatically. Instead, federation happens when a user from one instance tries to interact with another instance. For example, maybe you have a community over in @examplecommunity(dot)com. The first time you (as a Lemmy(dot)world user) try to interact with that examplecommunity server, the two will federate and begin the process of sharing posts.
The fediverse is a bit like email and usenet had an awesome baby. You have an address somewhere on the network and you can see and participate in content from any instance that's also connected.