Browse by "all" and block communities you don't like, after awhile you'll see trends of certain instances, go ahead and block them too.

At some point you might realize you like another instance more and want to jump ship, just do it.

There's a general vibe, but remember one of the huge downsides is it's very easy for the same people to keep making new accounts. Literally the most problematic people online who are banned everywhere "big" can easily spin up a new account on any of dozens of instances and jump into any federated comments section.

So give people a shot, but don't get hung up on "someone's wrong on the internet", a lot of people are just here to argue about anything and convincing them of anything is just a waste of time.

Treat it just like reddit. Or better yet as old reddit. There's a much more of a don't feed the trolls mentality here. You can curate your feed easier and no one else will do it, (besides your instance) so block anything you don't want to see. Also it's not just lemmy in for the forums, but you won't notice the difference really. (Hello from piefed).

First off, you can criticize the Apartheid State of Israel without getting banned for life.

Also talk shit about Greedy Old Pedophiles party and generally say anything but removed.

I call em Lems

The point isn't to overtake reddit, it is to create a vibrant place with actual human interaction, if we do that we win no matter how many people are here since every time someone goes to search something they are going to increasingly end up searching through fediverse threads the way people used to use reddit for information (which is something I miss dearly about the old open internet and it motivates me to build it here in a new way).

The Fediverse isn't growing amazingly fast or anything but the userbase is engaged and values this place, we will only continue to grow in the medium and longterm. When the next big wave of users come is I don't know but also in some ways I don't care, this place is already vibrant for me and I know others will see that more and more as time goes on.

How things are different

• most instances are run by non-profits / without ads
• the fediverse is designed to prevent individual sites from growing too large and monopolizing a form of social media. If an instance starts to become what reddit is today, users can migrate to another instance: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started

I've seen users called "Lemmings", but usually it's just "users". There are other interconnected platforms such as Piefed and Mbin, so "lemming" doesn't cover it well. "Fedizen" is another more general term

For growth stats see here: https://fedidb.com/software?type=forum

For differences:

• there's less content here, and no algorithm trying to keep you engaged. It's up to you how much you want to use it. If you want more content, I recommend subscribing to a lot more communities, and then sorting by scaled or something: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/finding-communities
• because of how the platform works, upvotes/down votes/mod actions are public record. This reduces vote manipulation and shenanigans, or at least lets people deal with it after the fact: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/privacy-lemmy
• grab a mobile app, Reddit used to have lots of options too: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/apps

Welcome :)

How well are the Lemmy fediverses growing? How many daily unique users do we have on this service? Will we overtake Reddit someday?

I think we're still hovering around 50k monthly active users? Enough to have discussions in the more popular subs, but far from the firehose of content that Reddit is. Will we ever overtake Reddit? At this point I doubt it. Say what you want about them, but they've been unfortunately good at boiling the frog slowly. I think they learned from the API debacle, which was the only "mass" exodus we've seen (and even that was just a couple of tens of thousands of accounts). They've been slowly enshittifying one change at a time the past year, and it seems to be working. The only final chance we have of a catalyst is the final end of old.reddit. But I don't even think that will do it, anymore. People are too entrenched.

What differences should I get used to over here from what I was used to on Reddit? Thanks in advance.

There is only one really important one, which is that subs (called Communities here) have an @-adress as part of its name. So you're more likely to see duplicate or alternative communities on here have the same name (such as !gaming@lemmy.zip and !gaming@lemmy.world and !gaming@beehaw.org ) as opposed to on Reddit where you'd have like Gaming, TrueGaming etc.

Karma doesn't matter here. Expect to see less people farming upvotes.

We're still very small. Expect less general engagement and content. BUT! We're also small enough that there are way fewer bots.

Welcome. There are dozens of us Lemmings.

Welcome! I typically say that the Threadiverse (a decent all encompassing term to mean "reddit format" e.g. link aggregator type social media that includes Piefed, bin, Lemmy etc.) is about where reddit was 10-15 years ago.

I recommend lemmyverse.com for comm discovery, sometimes your might be looking for a comm that does exist, but for whatever reason your instance just hasn't picked up on it (typically someone from your instance has to manually go to a new comm and sub to it if your instance missed the automated bot federation from Lemmy-federate.com

We’re not without our cons though, biggest problem we have are probably the Tankies, but here they’re mostly on what's known as the Tankie Triad: lemmy.ml, lemmygrad and hexbear. For the most part, grad and hex are widely defederated from (Users and content of those instances won't be "synced" and you won't see them) and you only have to worry about .ml, but on Lemmy you can do a personal instance wide block if you’d rather just not deal with them. .ml tends to be more subtle opting for censorship of dissent before things get crazy on their threads and allowing certain propaganda to flourish (If you wish to see documentation of it, checkout !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works ) or the megathread here (is .ml centric specifically) Here on Lemmy all moderator actions are public and available for viewing on what's known as the "modlog".

It's like reddit before Conde Nast. It's pretty chill, "just post" is the only real advice I've got for you. Fingers crossed it never overtakes reddit, thankfully that doesn't seem to be a goal of many devs or admins. If it starts to, someone will just have to make the next lemmy :p

I haven’t really seen a consensus term for lemmy users analogous to ‘redditor’ or ‘redditors’.

I don’t think lemmy is ever likely to overtake reddit in terms of userbase size.

There is a lot of overlap among communities, since there are multiple hosts available.

If you ever used Apollo on iOS, then you might enjoy the Voyager client for lemmy. I know it’s available for iOS but I don’t know about android.

Lemon parties?

what are Lemmy users called? Lemmitors?

not unless you're trying to start a fight with people

"Lemmings". Welcome! I also had a 20yo account on reddit, came over here several months back and never looked back. It's much more like reddit used to be here. Just browse all, that's what i do. Make communities you want to see.

Much less content and activity than reddit in total. However, in terms of content that isn't utter trash and non-shithead activity, they're at about equal amounts.

This place is tiny compared to what you might be used to. Being here is more of a long term commitment, than it is hanging out with all your old friends again. I'm trying to leverage the size difference to get away from the endless scrolling reddit would enable. I hope more people join though.

Lemmings.

It's alright. Just has its own set of foils and drama to contend with.

People already answered most of your questions in other comments so I just want to say welcome and hope you enjoy

If you browse on PC, I found that the Alexandrite UI (https://a.lemmy.world/) made the transition easier for me. There is also a "Old" reddit UI (https://old.lemmy.world/) . These both made it more of a familiar flow for me.

Be active, block instances with nazis. I recently overcame the boring repetitive perspective of lemmy by moving to a "All/top recent 6 hours" feed. It feels active now

"Lemmings" seems to be the consensus, and the primary differences in my experience are:

• Higher average quality of discussion; fewer trolls and bad-faith or dumb comments, although not 0
• Less users, so less niche communities

I think these are related; if we blindly wish for more users, we may attract the bad faith posters from Reddit and other more popular sites and make things worse. To improve Lemmy, we want to attract genuine people with niche interests (like you, I hope!). For now, I would learn to appreciate the smaller community, and think of any friends you could invite who would enjoy it here. No need to try to overtake Reddit, lest we become like them.

If you find communities you do like, you can subscribe to them and visit a feed of only your subscribed communities, or visit All to find new stuff. If you find your feed keeps showing you posts you've already seen, there's a setting to hide viewed posts. Keep an eye out for common usernames-- some of us post often enough that you'll see us around! You can also check the instance that people are from (after the @ in their username; for you, lemmy.ca). Some instances are more generalist (eg. lemmy.world, lemmy.ca), while others (eg. lemmy.ml, db0) will have policies or a culture that encourages more specific types of users to join that instance. This info can be useful.

And most importantly, don't be afraid to post! Posting is typically much easier here (fewer rules, no auto-rejecting, no global karma to use as a requirement) and we have fewer posts so it's almost always appreciated.

As of @Vicinus@piefed.zip's last Fediverse 'census' a month ago, the Threadiverse (Lemmy+Piefed+Mbin+PyLova) had about 38,800 monthly active users.

Lacking the marketing and development budget of Reddit, the Threadiverse won't be overtaking it any time soon, but aside from the fact that every service needs early adopters to get off the ground, there are plenty of reasons (less spam and promotion, less centralization, less top-down unaccountable moderation) why the smaller communities here can be better than their Reddit counterparts.

Lemmy (or more broadly, the "threadiverse") is basically an infinite Reddit, run by the community instead of a corporation, and spread out across various servers across the world. It's much smaller than modern Reddit, but has far fewer bots, spammers, reposters, etc. Some might say it's more like old reddit.

One key difference is that there can be multiple communities for any given topic, so you can join them all, or pick just one, or even make your own if.you dislike how the others are being run.

In my experience lemmy is like a smaller reddit. Similar political vibe with maybe more zero-tolerance ethical purity fixation.

I don't mind Lemmings, but Lemurs is appealing too.

Welcome :)

This place is full of redditors the general opinions and attitudes are the same there's just less people to dilute them.

not many niche things have had their communities come over. I would love if the arc mmos or pathfinder communities were mainly here but over time I think more and more folk are realizing how important it is to not be under corpo thumbs.

You shouldn't get suspended for calling out nazis or demanding liberty and justice for all, including women. To self-actualize and unfold as each of our unique DNA is meant to, in the short time we are conscious stardust, the cosmos observing itself. This truth sets us free from the supernatural baggage and conditional belonging.

Someone else was just asking this yesterday so I'll link to one of my responses. It's in reference to someone telling them about a couple instances to avoid (such as .ml, lemmygrad, and hexbear):

https://sopuli.xyz/comment/26587540

Hello young Lemming.

Until you say otherwise, we will suppose you like to eat beans, to compute with Linux and to watch Star Trek. Lemmy is a part of the fediverse which is a facinating piece puzzle of software to learn about. You absolutly don't need to to use Lemmy though... All you need to know is that there is tiny little websites called instances working together to make Lemmy. You barely notice which one you access but many lemmings will proudly tell you where you are. Each instance has its own moderation team and rules so check it before writting in a new community (equivalent of sub) and relax 'cause one mod won't ruin you experience.

Here is a first community go explore !superbowl@lemmy.world. Ask for recommandation.

Enjoy!

you know how if you actually read the articles posted to reddit instead of just the titles, you're more informed than a good 90% of the comments? that percentage is even higher on lemmy.

Lemmings is preferred.

Lemmitor is an insult.