Most claims people make of others and other communities are highly personal and likely not true unless for specific circumstances
Classic example are the few people who go around flaming inter-community drama in comments, then someone else replies showing that poster had recently been banned from that community and clearly deserved it. Modlog ftw.
It’s rare, and mostly the same people, but I see it about a dozen times a year.
Click on the menu, hit communities, and go subscribe to all the ones you’re interested in. Also https://lemmyverse.net/communities for finding communities on other instances you want to subscribe to.
If you’re interested in something, do you since up for more than one instance in that topic? For example, if I want to read about Apple related stuff, would I want to sign up for a few different Apple subreddits or just one?
subreddits
We ain’t in Kansas anymore! They’re officially called communities or comms for short over here.
It usually helps to subscribe to more than one, especially if it’s something simple like Apple comms, but you don’t need to sign up for a new account just to subscribe to communities on other instances. Also no point in subscribing to all the dead ones with no posts in months, but I’m subscribed to some technology comms on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and they both get posts. (There might even be some users who are only able to see one of those comms because their instance blocked another instance, so that’s a reason why one of those comms might not become the only one everyone is using.)
There are a few exceptions like /c/196 or politics subs where different ones have different-enough rules and moderation where it might actually matter which one you subscribe too, but for general interests, might as well just sub to them all because the worst case is they just don’t add any extra posts to your feed.
Sort by hot.
Make use of the block function. Lemmy makes it super easy to block assholes and it just makes life more pleasant. In ~2 years, I’ve amassed a block list of 39 users. It turns out that the vast majority of shittiness comes from a very small number of people.
Blocking a total of 6 people was enough to drastically change Lemmy for me
I’ve blocked a few users who’s spammed daily posts, but for me as someone who mainly browses /all blocking communities has been clutch.
Don’t hesitate to block communities and people if they become annoying to you. People on Lemmy can be very passionate, I would know as I was am sometimes still am included in that set. This combined with how vastly different the culture of each instance can be will lead to strong disagreements sometimes, if you choose to engage do so in good faith but don’t expect to convince anyone of anything lol.
Also you are gonna see some very radical politics if you are not used to that
You can also block entire instances.
I don’t want to turn off NSFW since there’s plenty non-porn NSFW but every time I go on all I block time of porn communities and if I see a bunch coming from the same instance I’ll block the whole thing. Makes it so I can actually find new communities on all.
Psst if you want newbie oriented advice ask on [email protected]
One piece of advice as a freebie: Don’t judge yourself too hard if an honest and genuine comment you make now-and-then gets downvoted. Often times the best thing to do is just to move on. You can try to reach a mutual understanding through conversation, but recognize the signs when a back-and-forth isn’t leading anywhere productive and simply back off.
That’s just healthy advice in general, I think. Thanks for thr reminder :)
Sometimes I get downvotes that make no sense, so I just chose to believe it was an accident.
I dont care for upvotes or downvotes. That feels… Anal…
Just for replies to comments.
There’s no algorithm here*, so use the different sorting options (for both posts and comments), as well as setting your favourite as default once you see what works for you.
* the different sort options are of course algorithms, but I mean there’s no automatic, manipulative system like YouTube’s “The Algorithm”, Facebook, TikTok, etc.
Voting doesn’t tune your algorithm, so I’d say only use downvoting for things that are low quality, trolling, in the wrong sub, duplicate posts, etc. Your votes aren’t private, by the way - although Lemmy itself doesn’t display voters’ names, that info is in every server’s database, and some other software in the Fediverse does show them.
There are quite a few apps available, I like Voyager on Android and I stick to the default website on my computer.
Out of curiosity, which sorting option do you prefer and why? I seem to use Hot a lot, but sometimes I switch to Active, honestly not sure what the difference is.
From the Lemmy docs:
- Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time
- Hot: Like active, but uses time when the post was published
My default is set to
- Scaled: Like hot, but gives a boost to less active communities
This is the newest sorting option, I think, and it helps me not miss posts from the smaller comms - particularly ones where people are asking a question and there’s been no engagement. Ideally I’d like to have Mastodon-style lists so I could have “quiet comms” or something and check them all every so often.
I will switch to new or top 6h/24h if I’ve been on recently and just want to see what’s fresh. Top all time or 1y if I’m looking at new-to-me comms so I can see what type of thing to expect from it.
Yeah, I like Scaled, I’ve switched to using that now. Thanks!
And yeah with Active I’ve noticed it seems to put the same posts at the top if I check it multiple times a day (I’ll often pop in for 20-30 minutes while waiting on something else or whatever), so hopefully Scaled does a better job about mixing that up.
As an aside: I am subbed to several political/news communities and I keep seeing the same post cross-posted to all 3 of them back to back, do you know of a way to avoid that? I want the other content from those subs but seeing the same ‘human fire hose of shit spews some more shit’ article 2-3 times in a row is annoying.
The duplicate content thing is kinda impossible to solve perfectly. Some people will tell you it’s a feature, and it can be interesting to see the different instances’ comment sections (especially after moderation), but yeah it can be annoying to have your feed dominated by a few stories.
The default web front-end will merge crossposts, but won’t if they’re multiple posts to the same URL. I think some of the apps do have that deduplication as a feature, but I couldn’t tell you which.
I remember the same problem from my Reddit days, but there wasn’t generally so many similar, overlapping communities.
You know, I just realized I don’t get it (or at least not as much) with Voyager on mobile, and I didn’t even think about it. I’m using the Alexandrite UI on desktop and it’s bad about it, I haven’t found any options for it in the settings or anything. I noticed it a few times on reddit, but I was subbed to so many communities and they were so much more active that it almost never happened. Oh well.
Read the rules for a community before posting or commenting. Take this community, for instance:
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Welcome! My little tips:
You can change your default sorting. I recommend setting it to hot instead of active.
You can filter things by word content in titles. Useful for filtering out some political content if you need a breather.
Have fun! 😁
I think scaled is better than hot otherwise you’ll never see anything from your small communities.
My default sort setting is Top 6 hour. Seems to have the best newest content. Hot doesn’t update enough for me.
Use https://lemmyverse.net/ to find communities (subreddits) to subscribe to.
Also these can be good sources:
Wow! Thanks. I actually found a bunch of communities I liked that i didn’t know existed.
Floss, drink water and live active!
Main one is applicable to any online space.
Hang back when you check out a new place. Get a feel for things before jumping in because, like reddit, not only does lemmy have a culture, each instance does, and each community on each instance does.
You go to a meme community in one place and crack a dark joke, everyone laughs. You do it on another, you get banned. Yet another and you’re in a flame war.
But it doesn’t just apply to things that controversial. It can be simple things like calling someone dude. Or talking about cars, or dogs, or weather. Sometimes, in some places, there’s a culture that isn’t obvious until you’ve scrolled through for a while. Again, this isn’t specific to lemmy, or even only online.
Always do a vibe check when you’re new somewhere, anywhere.
Pick an instance you like browsing locally, and use that, rather than trying to browse as much content as possible. Specialized and niche instances are often way more interesting.
You can not post videos on lemmy you can only link to them. I just learned about catbox.moe to upload videos
