I’m here from Reddit. They banned me for absolutely no reason. That’s frustrating. How works Lemmy ?
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.<sup>1</sup> 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.
<sup>1</sup> 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).
Yeah, that pretty much covers the basics
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.
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.
WARNING: this is an Illicit comment, with adult themes about ethical and moral implications, as well measurement units and curse words - reader discretion is advised
As an addendum and a sidenote:
This is a call to arms for statisticians, sociologists, criminologists and journalists to figure out the metrics necessary to create a new unit of measurement .
What needs to be taken into account is ofc the burden of proof, but also how gamed a judiciary is by how it gives slaps on the wrist for a certain immoral, unethical and illegal activity that elites keep getting away with, to create a rating system, a scoring system, where you want the score to ideally be a perfect 0.
The working acronym and title of this unit is CFPM, which is short for Children Fucked Per Month and will be used to score companies, organizations, government bodies, political parties, products, services, platforms, etc.
The idea is that if even a single “nubile princess” gets defiled as a result of doing business (even if it was decades ago), your brand, name, party, product, service - whatever - will have a rating with exponentially increasing decimals over the years.
This is because even having a CFPM rating of 0,000000000000000001 is too damned much and should have your brand, service, government body, political parties, etc - boicoted, sanctioned, embargoed, dissolved and publicly shamed, forever.
What do you think Reddits CFPM rating would be? How quickly do you think this type of comment would be nuked from Reddit, also resulting in the deletion of my account? The Epstein class don’t like it when you make fun of their moral and ethical degeneracy, y’know…
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.
Yeah every now and then i check “All” or “Local” to see if there’s any news communities that have started to flourish since i last checked that i might want in on.
People around here really love Linux.
Not saying it’s a bad thing. Linux is great.
But people around here reeeealy love Linux.
I really really reaaheeeheeheeheely love Linux. But the rest shouldn’t be an ass about it. Even though it is superior (my opinion) there is plenty of OS’es to go around for everyone. And to each their own.
The choice of an OS doesn’t give anyone permission to be smug and condenscending.
By the way I use whatever works at the moment.
IMO, Linux users (myself among them, fwiw) are broadly less insufferable now that Windows shat the bed so hard and replacing/upgrading machines became unaffordable.
I see a lot less “only rubes use Windows, I run Linux 😎” attitudes and more “Linux gave me my computer back” which reconverted me after a long Linux hiatus sparked by impossible driver puzzles on a busted netbook in the early 2010s.
Every machine in my home runs CachyOS and it removed stress from our lives. Windows at this point is like a neglectful ex, and KDE the new partner that treats me right 😊
Mmmm fuck yeah Linux so good 😫💦
And decentralized online infrastructure
I don’t like to think of it as not having a home, more like home is everywhere.
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.
It definitely feels easier to converse with people on here i think. People are rarely trying to one up each other for internet points and are willing to have actual discussions and debates more often in good faith rather than in a toxic kind of way i see more often on other social media.
Like what reddit once was a very long time ago. Before Steve Huffman and the VC vultures started picking at it
Its got the old-internet small town vibe for sure
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.
There are close to 0 Pol Pot supporters on Lemmy, and practically nobody thinks Mao and Stalin did nothing wrong. Many people here think Mao and Stalin did more good than bad, but nobody thinks they were perfect. Further, support for the Russian Federation is purely as it relates to resisting the US Empire, the biggest threat to the global south in the world today and the biggest obstacle for socialism.
Yes, there are many Marxist-Leninists here, but at least do the bare minimum and explain our views correctly. Go praise Pol Pot on Hexbear.net or Lemmygrad.ml and get bombarded with replies, downvotes, and maybe even a ban.
Eviltoast is also pretty rad. It’s where the geeks butter their bytes.
