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VLemmy Starting Guide

(This starting guide is currently being created, if you have any suggestions of what could be included please comment below)

Welcome!

Welcome to Lemmy

About Lemmy

Lemmy is a federated social link aggregation and discussion platform.. It’s being developed by the Lemmy devs: https://github.com/LemmyNet

About Federation

What does federation mean?

It means Lemmy is using a protocol (Activitypub) which makes it possible for all Lemmy servers to interact with each other.

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 the Activitypub protocol like Mastodon

Please note that a server only starts indexing a server/community once it has been interacted with by a user of this server.

About Vlemmy

Vlemmy is a generalized Lemmy server aimed at welcoming all and providing a space for all types of topics and discussions. We are one of the many servers hosting the Lemmy software. It was started on June 7th, 2023 by @[email protected].

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] or its URL, e.g. https://[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. Please note search time may be increase if remote servers are experiencing high loads.

For a more in depth list of remote communities, visit https://browse.feddit.de From there you can copy your chosen communities URL and search for it in VLemmy.

Communities

Before you create a community make sure it doesn’t already exist. Use search (see above). Also try https://browse.feddit.de to see if there are remote communities on other Lemmy servers that aren’t known to VLemmy.net 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
If the community will contain mainly NSFW content, check the NSFW mark.
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. You shouldn’t de-select ‘Undetermined’. Some apps use ‘Undetermined’ as the 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. Also hides the post from those who choose not to see NSFW content.
Language: Specify in which language your post is.