How to: Start a community on a smaller instance and get your content seen
You may intuitively believe that large instances are the best place to start a new community, since that's where most people are.
The good news is it's viable to start a community on any instance, provided you take some steps to ensure that content propagates to the large ones too.
How Lemmy content federation works
A Lemmy instance will automatically receive federated content from any community on the Fediverse, as long as at least one its users has subscribed to that community. This content is visible when you click on "All" on the main menu:
For example, the content I post to [email protected] automatically propagates to the likes of lemmy.world and lemm.ee since both of those instances have at least one user that has subscribed to it.
Making your community visible
To ensure that your content propagates to the large instances, you need to have at least one subscri
How to: Find content
Finding content in Lemmy is not very intuitive if you're brand new. Here's how you can enjoy all that the Fediverse has to offer, irrespective of which instance you are on.
The buttons at the top of the home page are the secret. You can also click on the small "sorting help" button to view more information on what everything does:
"Local" will only display posts that are created on the instance you are on. "All" will display posts from all other federated instances:
If you feel like you're seeing old posts, try changing your view to "New":
That's it in a nutshell. The beautiful thing about the Fediverse is you can interact with all federated content from the comfort of your home Lemmy instance.
You may also be interested to learn [how to find commu
How-to: Find communities and subscribe to them
Finding awesome communities and subscribing to them is likely one of the first things you want to do in Lemmy. It can also be a bit confusing.
This guide will walk you through how it works and hopefully improve your experience.
The beautiful thing about the Fediverse is you can interact with all federated content from the comfort of your home Lemmy instance.
Since the best communities may not natively reside on the server you're on, the easiest way to discover them is by using one of these awesome 3rd party explorers:
Using https://lemmyverse.net/communities
- Once you've found an interesting community, click on the community Lemmy link to copy it:
- On your home Lemmy instance, click on Search (the magnifying glass) on the top-right of your screen:
- Pa
Lemmy links
This is a collection of Lemmy links that will help you in your travels.
Finding Communities
Finding Instances:
- https://join-lemmy.org/
- https://lemmyverse.net/
- https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
- https://the-federation.info/
Check instance federation:
Lemmy Resources:
Stats:
Please let me know if anything else should be on this list!
Lemmy Help
Lemmy tips
Lemmy is still in development and can be a bit quirky. This is a collection of little things I've bumped into which may help you avoid some confusion.
Browsing posts
'Local' only shows you posts from the Lemmy instance you are currently on (e.g. lemdit.com).
'All' will also include posts federated from other instances, and is typically the one you want.
Sometimes 'All' can be selected but only local posts will be displayed. If this happens, toggling between 'Local' and 'All' will fix it:
Finding content on a small instance
Your Lemmy instance will only show posts from communities on other instances if at least one user from your instance has subscribed to those communities.
If a community that interests you is missing, simply search for it and subscribe. You (along with everyone else on your instance) will now see posts from that community under 'All'.
Note: The same is true in reverse!
Intro to Lemmy and the Fediverse
If you're reading this then you likely already know that Lemmy and Kbin are alternatives to Reddit.
This is an introduction to the basics of Lemmy/Kbin and how they're different from what you're already used to.
Basics of the Fediverse
A useful comparison is to think about how e-mail works. There are different e-mail platforms (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc), but they all use a common protocol to send and receive messages between themselves.
Even though your mailbox may be with Gmail, you can exchange e-mails with any other mailbox, irrespective of either or not they are also with Gmail. None of these platforms own or control "e-mail" as a whole.
The Fediverse is a similar concept but applied to social media. Lemmy is a flavour of Fediverse software, the same as Kbin. Anyone can host a Lemmy or Kbin instance, and they all use a common protocol to communicate with each so that content posted on one is available to all. This federated network of nodes is referred to