Up arrow for good, down arrow for bad. !The_Pack will tell you everything you need to know about Lemmy.

You can go to Lemmyverse to find communities about whatever you like. Type something into the search box at the top left. If you found something that looks interesting, copy the group identifier (looks like: !socialclub@lemmy.world - just click it and it should be copied to clipboard automatically) and then paste it into the search in your Lemmy app. This way, you can join that community and take part in discussions.

1. The world of Lemmy is built up on different servers, what we call instances, I am registered on lemmy.zip and you are registered on lemmy.ee, this community is running on lemmy.world.
2. As you can see, you don’t need an account on a specific instance to post on it or to interact with other users from other instances.
3. The larger instances are general instances, they are like a standard forum for every one, plenty of smaller instances are more outspoken about their interests or politics.
4. Lemmy is a federated network, when you make a post or comment, your instance will send it to the other instances, making it replicte around the network. There is no central authority of Lemmy.
5. Defederation is when an instance admin disconnects from a different instance, this can be due to any number of things, most often spamming/trolling by the users from that instance, this also means that you can’t read the communities of a defederated instance.
6. There are entire instances dedicated to porn and other NSFW material, you will see posts from them when browsing All, set your app to blur NSFW media, and take a few weeks to go through all and subscribe to the communities you want to read regularly.
7. There are entire instances primarily focused on different languages, this is not an issue when you browse your subscriptions, but can be annoying when browsing all.
8. The “feddiverse” is more than Lemmy, there are services to replace most social media in a similar way to how Lemmy replaces Reddit, here are some examples, with what the services aims to replace:

• Lemmy - Reddit alternative
• Pixelfed - Instagram alternative
• Mastodon - X formerly known as Twitter alternative
• Friendica - Facebook alternative
• Peertube - A Youtube alternative

9. You can tag someone on the feddiverse even if you are not on the same service, I have a pixelfed account where I post photos I have taken, it is on metapixl.com, so to tag me I simply write @stoy@metapixl.com and I will get an alert on that service as well.

This is just a general overview of how it works here, I hope you don’t get overwhelmed and enjoy your stay.