Lemmy.world starting guide
Lemmy.world starting guide
(I'm creating a starting guide post here. Have patience, it will take some time...)
Disclaimer: I am new to Lemmy like most of you. Still finding my way. If you see something that isn't right, let me know. Also additions, please comment!
Welcome!
Welcome to Lemmy (on whichever server you're reading this)
About Lemmy
Lemmy is a federated platform for news aggregagtion / discussion. It's being developed by the Lemmy devs: https://github.com/LemmyNet
About Federation
What does this federation mean?
It means Lemmy is using a protocol (Activitypub) which makes it possible for all Lemmy servers to interact.
- You can search and view communities on remote servers from here
- You can create posts in remote communities
- You can respond to remote posts
- You will be notified (if you wish) of comments on your remote posts
- You can follow Lemmy users/communities on other platforms that also use Activitypub (like Mastodon, Calckey etc) (There's currently a known issue with that, see here
Please note that a server only starts indexing a server/community once it has been interacted with by a user of this server.
A great image describing this, made by @[email protected] : https://imgur.com/a/uyoYySY
About Lemmy.world
Lemmy.world is one of the many servers hosting the Lemmy software. It was started on June 1st, 2023 by @[email protected] , who is also running https://mastodon.world, https://calckey.world and others.
A list of Lemmy servers and their statistics can be found at FediDB
Quick start guide
Account
You can use your account you created to log in to the server on which you created it. Not on other servers. Content is federated to other servers, users/accounts are not.
Searching
In the top menu, you'll see the search icon. There, you can search for posts, communities etc.
You can just enter a search-word and it will find the Post-titles, post-content, communities etc containing that word that the server knows of. So any content any user of this server ever interacted with.
You can also search for a community by it's link, e.g. [email protected]. Even if the server hasn't ever seen that community, it will look it up remotely. Sometimes it takes some time for it to fetch the info (and displays 'No results' meanwhile..) so just be patient and search a second time after a few seconds.
Creating communities
First, make sure the community doesn't already exist. Use search (see above). Also try https://browse.feddit.de/ to see if there are remote communities on other Lemmy instances that aren't known to Lemmy.world yet.
If you're sure it doesn't exist yet, go to the homepage and click 'Create a Community'.
It will open up the following page:
Here you can fill out:
- Name: should be all lowercase letters. This will be the /c/
- Display name: As to be expected, this will be the displayed name.
- You can upload an icon and banner image. Looks pretty.
- The sidebar should contain things like description, rules, links etc. You can use Markdown (yey!)
- If the community will contain mainly NSFW content, check the NSFW mark. NSFW is allowed as long as it doesn't break the rules
- If you only want moderators to be able to post, check that checkbox.
- Select any language you want people to be able to post in. Apparently you shouldn't de-select 'Undetermined'. I was told some apps use 'Undetermined' as default language so don't work if you don't have it selected
Reading
I think the reading is obvious. Just click the post and you can read it. SOmetimes when there are many comments, they will partly be collapsed.
Posting
When viewing a community, you can create a new post in it. First of all make sure to check the community's rules, probably stated in the sidebar.
In the Create Post page these are the fields:
- URL: Here you can paste a link which will be shown at the top of the post. Also the thumbnail of the post will link there. Alternatively you can upload an image using the image icon to the right of the field. That image will also be displayed as thumbnail for the post.
- Title: The title of the post.
- Body: Here you can type your post. You can use Markdown if you want.
- Community: select the community where you want this post created, defaults to the community you were in when you clicked 'create post'
- NSFW: Select this if you post any NSFW material, this blurs the thumbnail and displays 'NSFW' behind the post title.
- Language: Specify in which language your post is.
Also see the Lemmy documentation on formatting etc.
Commenting
Moderating / Reporting
Client apps
There are some apps available or in testing. See this post for a list!
Issues
When you find any issue, please report so here: https://lemmy.world/post/15786 if you think it's server related (or not sure).
Report any issues or improvement requests for the Lemmy software itself here: https://github.com/LemmyNet
Known issues
Known issues can be found in the beforementioned post, one of the most annoying ones is the fact that post/reply in a somewhat larger community can take up to 10 seconds. It seems like that's related to the number of subscribers of the community.
I'll be looking into that one, and hope the devs are too.
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Thanks for this post, @[email protected]. I’ve setup my own instance and am enjoying the lemmy experience so far.
At least the latest RC cut the post and save time in half, for me. That’s a measurable improvement. It definitely must be due to server load, as posting and saving to [email protected] from my instance seems pretty snappy.
Yes it halved it here too, but half of 20 is still 10 seconds which is just too long. But hey, 3.2k users and it's still working so won't complain too much...
3.2k users is impressive. But yes, 10 seconds is bad. 2.5 seconds is about the max I find acceptable. If you don’t mind me asking, what are you running on, in terms of hardware?
I’m tempted to fire up jmeter, or locust, or k6 and push some load against my instance to see how things look internally under load.
I don't see too much on the OS level that could cause it. Probably more likely a bad DB query or locking. As I'm a DBA I could look into that, if only I had the time. Bit busy at the moment.
Would be funny if it was missing an index and doing a full table scan for some odd reason...
I focus on application performance in my day-to-day work, and missing indexes, greedy upoptimized queries, etc, are the root of a lot of issues. Hopefully you can get to the bottom of it.
Quick note: I'm not seeing a big delay (10+ seconds) when posting or saving on lemmy.ml, or my own instance.
Yeah that's weird. They use the same version. (If you have some time and would like to dig into the database... be my guest..)
I suppose I could, but, I've honestly spent the majority of today on lemmy answering "support" questions for people lol... Maybe I can try to take a look tomorrow. 🤷
Actually, saving edits on lemmy.ml is also slow, about 4-5 seconds. It’s probably a combination of user load and non-optimized queries.
You have probably seen it, but there is a call for help about lemmy's code here: https://beehaw.org/post/470024
I did see it, thanks. I’m hoping to find some time to contribute this week.
In an extreme scenario, what happens if there are 50,000 users? Is the capacity something we should be worried about?
I'm hoping more instances pop up. I'm personally wanting to host an instance myself specific to fitness
If you don't mind me asking, do you see private instances as being sustainable for an individual, in the long run? I went that route with Mastodon and realized that with the nature of how it all works there would be a lot of overhead, for some time to come, with having to perform pre-fetch tricks to see follow-ups and stuff like that.
My initial impression is that Lemmy might be easier to contend with because each instance has it's own channels (pardon if that's the wrong term; I've been here all of 5 seconds) so the whole conversation is instantly available anytime you select a post. Just weighing whether going the private route is a good choice before I really start branching out and establishing my "identity".
Hi there! Please keep in mind I've only been a fedditor for a few days now, and have been running an instance for one day, and that day was mostly banging my head against the wall troubleshooting and figuring out setup issues (again thanks to the folks over at [email protected]). My instance also isn't private, and I have no problem if folks sign up on it and use it.
do you see private instances as being sustainable for an individual, in the long run?
I think that depends on the individual running the instance. I enjoy it, and the cost of the instance I setup is roughly $15 (USD) a month, plus I use it for other projects as well so it's not just for hosting lemmy. Regarding pitfalls of running an instance and overhead, well, I just don't know enough about it yet to comment on it.
Fair enough. Thanks!