This serves as a guide on how to get started using Lemmy.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a federated link/discussion sharing service. What this means in practice is each instance (such as this one) is capable of talking to other instances, each of which is run independently. The instances have their own communities (think subreddits), and people from any instance can generally post/comment on this communities.

Communities are hosted on whichever instance creates them. Each community has one or more moderators in charge of removing any offensive content. Because Lemmy instances are independent, this may vary from server to server.

How do I find communities to join?

We have a list of communities created on this server in the Communities section of the site.

If someone on our instance has already joined a community, it shows up under the Communities page, and you can easily subscribe to it.

If you are the first person on an instance to subscribe to a community, you need to do some extra steps. Find the community on their server (for example on https://lemmy.ml) and copy the URL of the community. From there, go to the search page on our server and paste the link in. It will show that there are no results unless you paste a link for a specific post. Otherwise you will now see it in the Communities tab from now on, and can subscribe to it there.

What do the different types of filters on the home page mean?

Subscribed/Local/All: Subscribed will show you posts from communities you are subscribed to, whether those are local to this server or elsewhere in the fediverse. Local will show you all posts on this instance from our local communities. All will show you all communities federated with this server, whether you are subscribed or not. A great way to find new communities to join!

Hot/Active/New: New shows new posts in the order they were created. Active shows posts based on the activity in them (from their comments) so it’s good to find active conversations. Hot filters by upvotes on the post.

Does Lemmy have mobile apps?

Yes! You can find them in the app store. Android’s is called Jerboa for Lemmy and iOS is called Mlem. These are the official apps, but others might come along eventually.