Block everyone! Block every instance! Block me! Block yourself!

Or maybe… just spend some time using the platform until you start to get a feel for the vibe. If you can bear to listen to opinions that don’t already align with your own, you’ll probably find that most people are pretty chill and discussions are mostly pretty civil. Disagreement is not the same thing as hostility or trolling. I’ve never blocked anything on this platform and I still find it to be miles better than reddit in terms of vibes. Rather than preemptively curating your feed based on whatever someone else’s idea of bad content is, you can form your own opinions. Block if you want, but you can also just… not engage.

We like beans and soapy tits.

Might want to block the .ml instances if you don’t want to see too much weird chinese propaganda… (Tankies are weird).

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.

They banned me for absolutely no reason.

Because fucking u/spez uses full bot automation for moderation to mete out penalties – even permabans – for even the slightest casual remark of violence or anger or merely reading a post.

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).

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.

Beans and powdered milk are important.

Be free

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.

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.