Lemmy is fairly small compared to other social media sites so instead of restricting yourself to a handful of communities I'd recommend browsing the "all" feed and just seeing everything.
Keep an eye on the instance each community is hosted on as there's often a social or political bias.
You can then block communities and instances that you aren't interested in or would rather not see.
Here you go. I'd consider these beginner-friendly because they're not focused on tech or politics.
click here for a list of communities that are NOT politics, tech, or meme -related.
Most are currently active (except for the ones with a * which were less active last I checked) Sometimes politics, tech or memes sneak in but they're not the focus.
Most of these are currently active. (except for the ones with a * which were less active last I checked). Sometimes these include politics but that's not the sole focus.
What are you in to? Communities are small here but growing
If your into cute things, search for Otters the .world community is good. If your into Star Trek or Linux your options are vast. Lots of politics unfortunately do to the U.S. moves, but also there are great communities everywhere. I'll follow up if you have any hints. Dullmensclub may be nice?
That said you can create filters to weed out things that make you depressed like Terms involving Musk or such.
Now, on email you can send mail to users from other mail servers like from hotmail to gmail, right? It works the same way on lemmy, and also the fediverse. You can see posts made on other instances, reply on them and upvote them.
Communities are similar to subreddits, with the main difference that there are many servers (instances) instead of just over main website. I find it helpful to think of it as IRC servers on the larger networks: your user is associated with one instance, but you can access users and Communities associated with different ones more or less seamlessly.
It's like Reddit, but not owned by a large faceless corporation intent on using it for social engineering. That being said, if you disagree with the political ideology of some instances they'll give you a ban for racism and not qualify it. Eg don't talk badly about Russia or Palestine on lemmy.ml posts. Generally, be nice and people will reciprocate. Except lemmy.ml.
A few instances are ideologically driven. So lemmy.world and lemm.ee tend to be pretty straightforward instances politically slightly left of centre but there are others like lemmy.ml and hexbear that push Kremlin/CCP propaganda. Anyone can set up an instance and federate with the other instances. But instances can also de-federate with specific instances. For example most instances have de-federated from hexbear and threads so posts made to them won't show up for users who use lemmy.world for example.
some instances or communities will flat out ban you for almost nothing, just accept that there are bad actors participating in lemmy and don't worry about blocking instances or users when you see it happening
after a bit you wont notice them and you will be better off for it
There's no algorithm so it's up to you to block communities you don't have an interest in. If you see a user you constantly don't like you can block them too. By structuring it that way you'll get a feed of things you want to see and people you want to hear from.
(You can always un-do a block if you change your mind)