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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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New to Lemmy
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Did you just join Lemmy? This community is for you!
Do you want to help new users around? Then this community is for also you!
Thank you all for being here, it makes a big difference
FAQ
- You don't have to post here, but it's fun!
- You don't have to post right away, come back later if you want
- You can post as many times as you want
I don't know what to post
- Share what you're looking for, or what you want to do. We'll help you find it
- Ask questions! The Fediverse is new to most people. If you're unsure about something, others are unsure as well.
- Just smile and wave, maybe someone will wave back ๐
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Thank you. And what are Lemmy users called, by the way? We're "Lemmings" just as how Reddit users are called "Redditors," correct?
Lemmings is the usual term
Take my Lemmy gold, kind stranger.
I think you're widely accepted to be a lemming, but with the nature of this place being decentralized not all the people you talk to will be. For example, I do not have a Lemmy account personally.
Fedizens is often used to refer to the broader range of people you might bump into here - citizens of the Fediverse. :)
Lemming is probably fine as an umbrella term for the Threadiverse. It's where it started, and there's really no reason to differentiate whether you're on mbin or piefed.
It's really hard being new to lemmy because people that are not new start using words lemmy made up for things we don't understand. What does decentralized mean on a forum app? And what's the fedizerse? Is that lemmy itself?
That's fair. You don't need to know any of those things to use the platforms in whatever ways best suit you.
That said:
Decentralized means no one entity "owns" Lemmy. Lemmy is free, libre, open-source software (FLOSS). This means the software (Lemmy itself) is free to use, with few restrictions (or none), and available to anyone for review and/or modification. It's also built by contributors and any member of the public can offer contributions. Most open-source projects are like this.
This is the opposite approach of the social media platforms like Facebook and such. They use proprietary software that they claim to write themselves and claim to exclusively own. Each of the big tech social media sites is owned and operated by a company. They are centralized platforms. They have a center of control and users of those platforms are bound to the whims of the owners (CEO, shareholders, etc).
Choosing to abandon those platforms and instead use social media built using FLOSS (which no one person or group owns) means no one can stop you from having and using that platform however you want. It puts the power of social media in everyone's hands instead of only the hands of the rich and exploitative.
If the Lemmy instance you use gets shut down for some reason you can just go to another instance and keep using Lemmy.
Decentralization doesn't solve every problem though. A decentralized service can still be used to create some kind of monolith. If you wanted to create your own Lemmy instance and share really important information there then you could do that. You could also try to gatekeep it in some ways. Force users to do something you want or give you something of value in order to get the important thing you have. It would be dumb to try but you could still do it.
Federation means everything gets shared by default. If I post on infosec.pub (my current home instance) that information does not stay on infosec.pub. It is automatically offered by default to every other Lemmy instance that wants it. Administrators are able to change the default settings and many do so to curate their instance in ways that are helpful.
Federation means unity that people choose. Examples would be The United Federation of Planet from Star Trek or the European Union (kind of). The "Fediverse" refers to all the different software platforms that use the ActivityPub protocol to Federate with each other. Mastodon, PieFed, Lemmy, and a bunch of other software depend on ActivityPub to make sure the information users share is shared with everyone.
Decentralization makes it tough to gate-keep things (among other benefits). Federation makes it tough to manipulate or weaponize. Bad actors still try to do those things but using software like Lemmy or Mastodon for evil looks weird to everyone. Even for people who don't know what being decentralized and federated means.
I hope that info is what you're looking for and that you find it helpful. If you've got other questions feel free to drop a reply. ๐
The info above is an overview. There's nuance I'm ignoring on purpose that some might be nitpicky about. Those people are probably correct, are also likely abysmal educators, and certainly no fun at parties.
I read every word. Thank for writing that out for me.
One thing, what's the difference between an instance and a community?
Ok in terms of technical terms an instance is a particular website running a particular fediverse software i.e. lemmy.ca, thelemmy.club, piefed.social.
A community is the name for a "subreddit" of which any given instance hosts many (and different instances can have communities about the same thing, which happens with bigger topics sometimes).
The names... aren't ideal but also you don't need to remember any of this really.
And just to fully tie this up, the federated part means the users of an instance, can join a community, even when it's hosted by a different instance, and interact there with users from many instances.
I'm sorta new here myself so I might not get all this right, but decentralized is what it sounds like; Lemmy as a whole is not hosted by one central person/company. Instead, each Lemmy server (instance?) is hosted by a different person or group, so if lemmy.world ever gets shut down you'll still be able to use all the other servers like Lemmy.zip or Lemmy.ml.
The fediverse, short for federated universe, encompasses all software that uses the ActivityPub protocol (I think) so Lemmy is only part of the fediverse. Mastodon is also part of the fediverse, although it is more similar to Twitter rather than Reddit, and since both Lemmy and Mastodon are part of the fediverse they can view and post content to each other. I don't understand the cross communication aspect well so if someone else knows I would be happy to hear.
Thanks
Sorry I wasn't being clear!
It's a bit like email. If Lemmy is Yahoo Mail, Piefed might be mailbox.com or whatever. They can talk to each other, but they're not the same platform. So unlike Redditors who are all on the site, the people you'll talk to here are scattered all over a bunch of different websites.
That's why the user names look like emails - mine being @cabbage@piefed.social because I use PieFed.
It doesn't really matter much in practice as a user so I didn't want to get technical about it, but it's part of the reason why you won't see the phrase "lemmings" as much as "redditors". :)
Lemmy is a broad term that covers a large and varied chunk of "the fediverse" but not all of it...
So yeah, "Lemmings" is what people are/were using, but honestly it's outdated already and needs to be something more general already.
Hard to make a name that's not reminiscent of "feds" tho. But a catchall name shouldn't be tied to any instance/software, because it's bigger than any instance/software
I would add to that, to switch between local, subscribed and all. Also, switch between Hot, Active, Top every 6 hours. Active seems the least active since it's the same threads with the most comments.
You're going to go through some withdrawal because it's not an angry factory here most of the time. Right now, it can get a little bit around politics because of the elections, but that's not typical.
I actually appreciate that Lemmy runs out faster than Reddit did. I use top six hours and generally don't need to go deeper than a few dozen posts (skipping most of course).
I do too. It seems to me like lemmy and piefed got most of the best of reddit to come here. There are some good conversations here and I learn a lot.
Iโve been using scaled and then going to new.
Gotta try that Top 6 hour tip!
Lemming is what makes sense and what I use, but I've been beat up in the past for doing so. ๐คท๐ผโโ๏ธ