Quick post to answer some basic usage questions that can throw off new users.
Where should I register?
The age old question of fediverse. The answer is pick an instance that is not right-wing and you should be fine.
https://join-lemmy.org/instances makes this very easy. Once you find an instance, just go to its /signup endpoint. For the instance you're reading right now, it would be: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/signup. Another great option is to use the lemmyverse which provides a lot more info about potential instances and communities, including a trust score.
Do I need to create a profile for each instance?
No! Each instance can access each other instance, unless it's been defederated because its admins are toxic (this is why I told you not to join right-wing instances earlier).
I joined an instance, but the community I am interested in is in a different instance
No problem. Simply add the instance domain at the end of the url endpoint.
For example, say you're in lemmy.ml and you realized that stable_diffusion is in lemmy.dbzer0.com. To access it, simply add @lemmy.dbzer0.com at the end of the url after the community name. So:
Or to put it differently, you can access any community, in any instance by adding /c/ (The requivalet of reddit /r/) and then community_name@instance.domain
If this doesn't work, then it's likely this instance is not yet federated with yours. To solve this, you need to search for it. See the next section.
But how do I even find the community I want to if it exists in any of hundreds of instances?
One option is to use the lemmyverse, as it's very user friendly, if you specify which instance if your home, it will automatically convert all links to your own instance.
Note that if you search for an community in an lemmy instance your own instance doesn't yet know about, it won't find it. You need to give it more precice instructions to find it, which require the whole "address". To follow our example above, you would put !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com in your search field.
When searching for a community in a new instance, it might take a few minutes to take effect. The first search will not return anything, but if you search again after a couple of minutes, it should appear.
How do I find my community from reddit?
https://sub.rehab allows you to search for any subreddit and see if its official community exists in the threadiverse. You can then search for it specifically to subscribe. If you've already registered an account somewhere, make sure you visit the settings in sub.rehab and set your home instance there, so that all links go through it.
Community? Instance?
An instance is a lemmy server hosted by someone. it has its own set of users and communities. lemmy.dbzer0.com is an instance. You can access (almost) every instance from any other instance.
a community is like a subreddit in reddit, or a channel in discord. It's a topic in inside an instance. stable_diffusion is a community inside the instance lemmy.dbzer0.com.
In more plain terms, consider a lemmy instance like a street, and a community like a number on that street. When you write !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com you are giving the exact address and number to search for.
I keep seeing the same posts
In you're in a smaller instance and you've subscribed to communities in other places, you might have set up your default visibility to not show them.
Switch your view to Subscribed/Hot to get a similar view like the reddit frontpage.
Switch to All/Hot to get a similar view to reddit /r/all
You can store this setting permanently as default in your user settings
I made a userscript (Lemmy post) which rewrites all links everywhere (not only on Lemmy) to always point to your home instance. It helps a lot with subscribing to communities and in general makes browsing the web and finding Lemmy links nicer.
Also, this userscript also works on Firefox on Android with the Tampermonkey extension, which wouldn't be possible with a regular extension since those have to be separately approved.
So I made a lemmy acccount in this instance lemmy.dbzer0.com. From my very limited research, apparently I can just login to other "federated" instances, but I can't login (infinite time "loading circle" in login page) with the same username and password in both https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/login and https://lemmy.ml/login. Why is that? Any help would be appreciated, sorry if it's obvious because it's not to me
Don't try to log in with your lemmy.dbzer0.com account in lemmy.fmhy.ml. It won't work and the login error report is broken (which is why you get the infinite spinny).
If you want to subscribe to a fmhy community, simply search for its url in the lemmy.dbzer0.com search and then click the link in that. This will take you to that community vialemmy.dbzer0.com, which will allow you to subscribe to it.
For example, say you’re in lemmy.ml and you realized that stable_diffusion is in lemmy.dbzer0.com. To access it, simply add lemmy.dbzer0.com at the end of the url. So
For now this seems only work if the community has already been federated. The first subscriber needs to use the search with either the !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com format or the community's url. Make sure you have "all" selected so that it's not just searching locally. Then the search results usually show "No results" even if it's syncing in the background. After it's been federated it'll show up in searches, in the communities list, and will work with those /c/ style links. The UI for federating new communities definitely needs a bunch of work.
To find and subscribe to communities go to https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/communities, then selecting 'All' to look through any that are already federated. If you want to find more, https://browse.feddit.de/ has a mostly complete list of communities. Just watch out though, because it includes instances that are blocked from most sites for obvious reasons.
A few instances I've found centered around various topics:
There's more for other topics, but a lot of them don't have any moderation policies listed so I'm not going to recommend them yet. There's also a bunch of general purpose instances, as well as location based ones.
One thing that a lot of people find confusing is how there can be multiple communities with the same name, just hosted on different sites. In those cases it's not a single community viewed in two places. For example !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@beehaw.org are two separate communities that both exist, and you can subscribe to either or both. Each will have different rules, mods, posts and comments. The full name of a community includes the domain, sort of like an email address.
I'd also recommend people change their default settings to 'Subscribed' so it's not just showing the posts hosted here. You might also want to set sorting to 'Hot', since 'Active' tends to show the same threads for days at a time as long as people keep posting in them.
Right now the federation with kbin.social seems to be broken since they added cloudflare protection. We probably need to wait for them to remove that before communities there can be federated.
Many many thanks for this. Got up and running in no time. Loving the communities and the lack of toxicity in the posts and comments. What a breath of fresh air!
Just needs traction and more users. Doing my bit posting and getting involved in the discussions. Really scratches that Reddit itch without the dirty feeling that I am supporting some wanker CEO.
This whole fediverse thing is bizarre to me, and learning how to navigate it and understanding what the hell is going on is weird. Ive signed up like 4 different instances without realising they interconnect and now i feel like i gotta choose one.
hello! hey db0, im here because of you... literally. I was starting in the r/piracy and spez happened... then, a few days later, i saw ur post about moving to this platform (which i honestly had never heard about, but that doenst matter)... and since i was really upset with the way that motherfucker dealt with was, to me, a sacred thing in reddit: the decade-long golden relationship between company and users (so much so that Reddit itself could capitalize on ads using sheer amounts of "good will" bcs of how the community and therefore the world saw the company)... and throw it in a river of radioactive poo aka his mom, so i decided to join here and try to help in anyway i can!
problem is... im kinda noob to the whole piracy, datamining, AI and whatever other tendencies nowadays, so im not sure how much (nor where) i can help... and thats why im writing this: do you mind if we chat a bit in private so u can explain the whole situation, its ramifications and propose ways that i could do my part? it would be great.
Hey mate, I'd love to chat, unfortunately I'm up to my nose in work. I suggest you post in /c/piracy with your questions, or with a general post with a similar vibe as this comment. I'm sure others will join in to chat. Or you can post in /c/div0 instead.
Ill do that, thanks. But i still would like to chat w u about all the stuff thats happening, in order to get a wider POV, then try to deduce whats going to be their next steps and its overall impact to, finally, try help by making suggestions, debating, brainstorming etc. Talking to you specifically is a key point bcs i cant think of another person thats more "in the eye of the storm" than u (maybe other former top mods from different subs, but i dont know them), so u can be REALLY enlightening. If ure wonder what i have to gain with this, its simple: knowledge. as i said, im a noob in this area but my interest on it is huge, so the mere act of chatting with u and other veteran guys will be insanely helpful for me (and ultimately for everyone here, as more knowledge = more ways to help). its a win-win.
i understand u have ur pants full of work (dunno if its IRL or online, but nvm its work anyway), so i will wait until u can talk. seems good? in the meantime, i will do what u suggested and try to check out this platform.
do u have an idea of when things will slow down for u? approximately or not, whatever. if no, then ill just msg u from time to time, ok? i hope i don't bother u.
New to lemmy system.
Trying to subscribe to You Should Know@lemmy.world via communities from dbzer0 says " Subscribe Pending " . Is this because of dbzer0 settings or because of lemmy.world?
Could you help me figure what I'm doing wrong when it comes to adding the anarchy chess instance? I have and have been trying the exclamation point thing, but it doesn't seem to want add on Jerboa. Is it not federated or am I just not doing it right?
For now there's a bug in the app that doesn't let you subscribe to communities that haven't been federated. Until they fix it you have to go to the website if nobody here searched for it from the site yet.
I searched for !anarchychess@sopuli.xyz now though so you should be able to subscribe through the app.
Sorry for the late reply. Thank you so much for the answer. I guess with how active and busy lemmy has gotten, that it might be overwhelming/over loading the system until it catches up and federates everything. I'm on the good ol' anarchy chess now.
Thanks for asking and I really appreciate everything you're doing here and and for the community. Sorry I wasn't able to respond sooner. Some IRL things got in the way. Underscores kind of came to the rescue with the insight I needed. Guess the instance hadn't federated yet, but now it's showing and I'm subscribed. Still getting used to this lemmy thing.
So I'm using the progressive web app for Lemmy , which does not have a URL bar. How am I supposed to subscribe to a community if it's not showing up in search? It is way too much work to find and subscribe to communities
Huh, didn't realize this instance was SFW only before I signed up. If I'm browsing a verifiably NSFW community on another instance, I can still participate as long as I'm not breaking their rules, right? Sorry if that's a really stupid question.
When I'm browsing "All" I'll get half way down the page and it'll start federating/updating from another instance. Is there a way to set this to only happen on refresh? It a bit of a pain when your feed is regularly quickly expanding from the top. It makes scrolling a pita.
Trying to understand how to add a new community in jerboa. I search for something but cannot find the community. Also once inside a community how do you searxh within it like say I'm in a community that's about food how would I searxh within it for steak?
For now the app only searches communities that have already been federated. Until someone fixes that you need to use the website to find new communities and search through posts.
Can I check if I want to use the same image repeatedly for each post I need to re-upload it each time to get a unique url? as using the same one seems to make the post invisible within the same community?
Disclaimer: spent <20 minutes looking this up for myself.
From what I could gather, all the iOS apps are either in invite-only mode via Test Flight or were under closed development. “Mlem” is supposedly full, while “Memmy” sounded like they still had slots open.
The other option, which I’ve been using, is using it as a progressive web app. In Safari: share page -> add to home screen. It’s a nicer form of the web page, but it’s nothing like a native app.
So I'm logged into dbzer0 and I've managed to subscribe to ELI5 on kbin. When I go to https://kbin.social/m/ELI5 I can see posts etc but when I try to access the page from dbzer0 it's not showing any posts or subscribers, what gives?
I really have a hard time finding stuff. Like Privacy sub, MeIRL, Dank Memes, just the important stuff? If there is nothing similar, how do I start one?
Do I need to create a profile for each instance?
No! Each instance can access each other instance, unless it’s been defederated because its admins are toxic (this is why I told you not to join right-wing instances earlier).
me who has created 4 different accounts in different instances...
It seems like you’re the first one here to search and subscribe to it. When I searched for it, it came up immediately. At this point, it could be a caching issue, but it’s hard to say when I’m not seeing the same issue.