You Should Know
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
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ELI5: What does “pick an instance” mean? What would I be deciding on?
Basically do you like the administration policies of the instance. All instances can speak to all other instances, unless instances block each other.
Lemmy isn't one website, it's a bunch of websites talking to each other and people choose to moderate in their own manner, and can also choose to stop talking to other websites if they deem them to be a problem.
It's less obvious when picking between big general ones, but here's some examples:
Then other than that, you have the big general ones such as lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, and so on. Each of those will have their own rules, but tend to be about anything and everything, but it's still important to learn how they moderate their instances!
Don't forget though, no matter which instance you pick, you can still interact with all the other instances unless they are blocked (which they are in some cases for various reasons).
Will my account work at all instances or does it only work for lemmy.world (where i first registered it)?
Your account only works where you registered it. You browse other communities through your lemmy.world instance. Use the search function or the All tab and you'll see what I mean.
Imagine you're on a forum with your account, but then you can use the search feature to search posts on another forum and reply to them from there.
All users and communities have names like e-mail addresses, like
user@instanceorcommunity@instance, anything that doesn't have the middle @ is on the same instance as you.It'll make sense after some browsing.
This is great info. Thank you!
I did browse and try a bunch of stuff today and it does make a lot more sense now. I just hope the performance is going to be able to keep up with the demand! There was a lot of glitches and I'm guessing it's because of all the new users (like me lol)
OP here: IMO choosing an instance is mostly a big decision about nothing. What I mean is its an annoying barrier of a decision you gotta make to play that’s both cheap to change AND probably will have very little impact on your experience.
In two weeks you probably won’t care which instance you picked. 90% of instances are going to be relatively generic: same posts, same communities, same federation.
If for some reason you do regret your first pick in a couple weeks, you’ll know, and you probably won’t feel like its a big deal to switch. There’s no karma, and losing your account’s link to a couple weeks of post/comment history is, at least to me, a little 🤷♀️.
My advice would be: pick any semi generic instance to start (e.g. lemmy.world), and if you’re curious about more curated instances (there’s a lot less of these, most notable is beehaw.org) make an account on them a few days later just to check out the vibe.
The only wrong decision is to waffle lol.
It would probably be a good idea not to keep recommending lemmy.world as the default instance at this point, given how much larger it has become compared to other instances.
Lemm.ee is a much better recommendation. The server is stable, well-run, and has a lot of room for large growth.
If I want to switch to say, Beehaw, would I need a different username? Also, I just looked at the Politics community on Beehaw, and it’s different than the Politics community on LemmyWorld. Shouldn’t they be the same?
Well you already did! There's different servers that host lemmy, each with their own admins and rules. You've signed up on lemmy.world, and you can use this one account to interact with other federated instances.
Well hey! Look at me go! :)