Welcome! The first thing to know is that lemmy is a software used by multiple instances (servers) that may or may not talk to each other.¹ Each instance has its own rules and culture. (It is a good idea to create an account on 2-3 instances and see which one’s atmosphere you prefer.) Some general pointers would be:-

• Votes don’t matter. Some instances don’t even have them.
• Since there is no centralised control, people will be blunt. Don’t worry about it.
• However, some things are forbidden in certain instances. Your instance, lemmy.world, forbids any discussion of file sharing. Lemmy.ml censors bad language. Hexbear may or may not officially have a ban on sexism / homophobia / transphobia, but the userbase makes sure that any offendors are bullied into silence.
• We generally like to talk about Linux and other computer stuff, bemoan the sad state of the world, and hate on cars.

¹ For example, of the ‘big four’ instances, the other three federate with lemmy.ml since it is the developers’ own instance, and lemmy.world talks to sh.itjust.works, but lw and sjw don’t talk to hexbear.net (pre-emptively, as a last resort).

There’s a lot of leftist spaces around here. I don’t mean liberal in the USA left, I mean actual socialist, communists, and anarchists. Most are fine with discussion but read the rules first. They’re usually in the side bar.

Welcome.

You may find stronger opinions here, and you may find them more popular than you’d expect.

The block feature is an important part of how you curate your feed on lemmy. It works for communities, people and entire instances.

The community here is generally friendlier than reddit in my experience, and you’ll definitely see some controversial opinions here, but even then the discourse is usually healthier.

A combination drawback and strength of the platform is the fact that communities are splintered. Instead of one monolithic communitiy for a given interest, lemmy will typically have versions of the same community split across multiple instances. This can sometimes make browsing less intuitive, but also helps stop one (or several) interest from being completely dominated by a small group of tyrants like on reddit.

Lastly, I enjoy sandwiches! If you share this affinity for foods slammed between slices of bread check out c/SandwichPosting

It’s more leftist than Reddit, but just as insufferable.

Be free

Beans and powdered milk are important.

It’s way more chill over here. You might get into a heated debate every once in a while but even when you’re in one it doesn’t feel like it’s the end of the world.

My 2 cents: Don’t be afraid to use the “block community” and curate your “home” from time to time, don’t keep it static. There are a lot of awesome things here that can get buried easily.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a social media network that works just like Reddit - but is decentralised.

Reddit is a proprietary closed source platform that strictly enforces how you interface with said platform and ls owned by a publicly traded corporation who are currently trying to speedrun the enshitification (or monetization) of their platform in order to increase shareholder value.

Lemmy is an open source project that lets everyday people run and control their own platforms on servers across the globe, who connect with each other to share users and content through the ActivityPub and ActivityStream protocols, which are public web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The big difference being that major proprietary social platforms run by multinationals have a tendency to monopolize, control, exploit and otherwise abuse their users, where as Lemmy let’s pretty much anyone be a vendor of a social media platform - which doesn’t eliminate abusive platform holders, moderators or users - but you can block any of these if you’d like, in effect giving you control over what ends up in your feed and how you access that feed, since it’s all done through a public protocol and not some proprietary client or API.

Other than that, all social media platforms are information sources, disinformation sources, entertainment hubs and voids we scream into in the hopes that somebody hears us. They are a mirror, a megaphone, a vice and a boon.

But it’s better to use a social media platform run by everyday people rather than the goddamn Epstein class. Tell your friends; make your own social media by switching to the Social Web (also known as the “Fediverse”) in order to force Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Threads into obsolescence - shareholders be damned.

People around here really love Linux.

Not saying it’s a bad thing. Linux is great.

But people around here reeeealy love Linux.

Keep an open mind, don’t be afraid of disagreement, and share your stuff! I find it so much easier to exist here as someone who’s always been resistant to fitting into rigid categories.

I already have twice the amount of comments as I did when I left Reddit almost two years ago, and I was there for nearly a decade.

Hi, welcome! Honestly, same… Still trying to find by bearings after 3 weeks use 😅

Be wary of tankies. What are tankies? It’s a pejorative term for authoritarian communists who will claim Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin have done nothing wrong. They also support modern day Russia even though they’re supposedly a liberal democracy because they’re likely Russian psy ops guys.

We’re still a pretty small community here and you’ll see a lot of familiar usernames but you’ll eventually fit right in to our tapestry of performative outrage and bickering. Depending on your home instance, you may not be able to see all the fediverse communities. I recommend hopping around until you find one that fits your style, like dbzer0.