We have gotten a lot of new signups over the past few days, and we’re all very excited to have you joining us! You’ll find that people are more than happy to help you get started and learn how to use the site.

If you feel up for it, you can introduce yourself or ask questions below!

We have put together some resources to help new users get started:

You can also read:

These guides were published very recently, and we will be updating them over time. If you find that something is confusing or missing, please let us know and we can improve them further.

For an organized list of Canadian communities (provinces/territories, Cities / Local , Sports, Schools, BuyCanadian, CanadaPolitics etc.), see this post on !Canada@lemmy.ca. You can also ask about communities in places like !CommunityPromo@lemmy.ca.

We also encourage you to check out !NewToLemmy@lemmy.ca, so that others can help you / learn from your questions.

Welcome to Lemmy :)

  • Soulforged@lemmy.caEnglish
    16·
    4 days ago

    Hello! Coming over from Reddit and I’m new to Lemmy. So happy to easily find a Canadian Community!

  • remotelove@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    Accounts and anonymity?

    For social media, I don’t mind using my real name and email to register as long as only my username shows on posts or image uploads.

    When I upload an image, what can other users see?

  • GrizzlyBur@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    4 days ago

    I had no idea that communities had taken off on Lemmy since 2 years ago! I didn’t even realize I still had an account on here.

    Really excited to see where this goes, and to support a Canadian server. Fingers crossed that this gains more traction in Canada and can act as strong shield against misinformation and bad faith actors.

    I’ll be certain to spread the word about this community more to fellow Canadians. I think with current events this could be the lightning in the bottle to see more usage here.

    Any communities worth looking at?

  • Dappie@lemmy.caEnglish
    13·
    5 days ago

    Hi, I’m new to Lemmy Greetings from the Netherlands 🇳🇱🇨🇦🇪🇺

  • wreckus@lemmy.caEnglish
    12·
    5 days ago

    Learned about Lemmy recently and I immediately wanted to join so I can get out of Reddit

    Good to be here.

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      13·
      5 days ago

      I’m not sure if there was a particularly viral post (aside from a few mentions of r/BuyCanadian), but I know we’ve also been mentioned in comment sections all over. Copying from another comment:

      Going off of what people have mentioned in the registration applications, it is a combination of

      • wanting to support Canadian, and avoiding American tech companies (due to tariffs and other concerns)
      • concerns with how big tech has changed for the worse these past few months
      • Reddit’s recent actions, such as banning (and then reversing) a bunch of communities and the recent paywall announcement
      • learning about it for the first time and being excited about the concept

      The first point is why lemmy.ca has seen more relative growth this week than the others, but a lot of fediverse instances have seen growth recently

  • WorkshopBubby@lemmy.caEnglish
    212·
    7 days ago

    Hey so as a Canadian, we are about to get attacked by our long time ally and the worlds military superpower. We are probably going to be steamrolled, and then become second class citizens in the Trump dictatorship cult. Am I allowed to say violent things about how that makes me feel? Or will I get banned, like on reddit?

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      16·
      6 days ago

      We’re pretty reasonable with moderation here. The way Lemmy works, mod actions are recorded publicly for transparency. You can access those records here, but as a warning before you open the page, “Some deleted posts may contain disturbing or adult material”: https://lemmy.ca/modlog

      So far we’ve only banned users site wide when it was a consistent problem (ex. spam bot, harassing other users). However, we do need to remove comments that are clearly against the law in Canada, else we couldn’t keep operating.

      It really comes down to what the comment is. If you look through the threads on here, a lot of people are already expressing how they feel, or what Canada’s/Canadians’ response should be. Where it might be a problem is if someone says they’re going to do something violent/illegal, or call for someone else to do it

      Hopefully that makes sense?

      • wise_pancake@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        6 days ago

        “don’t get the admins subpoenaed” is probably a good rule of thumb.

        (You folks do a great job, I appreciate the community you’ve fostered and tended to here)

    • GrizzlyBur@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Purchase a long rifle and shoot it often. I say this as a staunch pacifist. Having a weapon and using it are two different things. For a thousand reasons, if a genuine war broke out it would likely destroy America. Unfortunately, likely taking Canada with it.

      Regardless, be armed and be prepared. It is not as bleak as you may think, even in the worst case scenario. Best case scenario nothing happens and you take up hunting or target shooting as a hobby!

    • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      You will be less likely to be banned. Still, be reasonable, tactful and don’t be a dick about it, even if I get that you came here to express your genuine feelings.

      “Kill [person of interest]” is off limits here and on many other servers, but there are ways you can describe how your frustration in ways that aren’t illegal or personally charged. “Fuck [person of interest]” is nearly universally allowed here. Even if not banned, the outcome of whether you are upvoted to heaven or downvoted to hell will depend on the person and the context.

  • Snowstorm@lemmy.caEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    I challenge every newbies to create 1-3 posts over the first 72 h here : what do you enjoy in social media usually? It doesn’t have to be perfectly new if it’s new on Lemmy: your favourite Reddit group isn’t represented here or silent for a while : show us a glimpse of what you like and see how much engagement you receive.

  • steever@lemmy.caEnglish
    7·
    7 days ago

    Is there any interest in taking donations on Librapay or Open collective again?

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      We haven’t revisited our donation methods yet, but we will at some point.

      If you have a moment, could you share why you’d prefer to have Librapay / Open collective over the existing options? No wrong answers, I just wanted to copy it into our notes for when we revisit all that

      • steever@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        6 days ago

        I think I’d like those options for a couple of reasons. First would be recurring payments in Canadian dollars. Second would be more visibility for financial contributions, help to see you’re apart of community of donors, and lastly I think these two institutions seem aligned with the values of federation, and bottom up community driven initiatives.

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      5·
      5 days ago

      We ban spammers and remove all their content fairly quickly once we get a report, sometimes within minutes if we’re online at the time. Could you report the post/message so we can deal with it?

      For what it’s worth, once in a while I’ll search the spam URLs and the same junk is posted across Reddit and other sites. Worse, some of those posts have been up for months

  • Troy@lemmy.caEnglish
    51·
    7 days ago

    A couple of notes and unsolicited advice as someone who is almost an old hand already…

    (1) Your front-page will be more interesting as you subscribe to more things. You can subscribe to things from other Lemmy servers and they will be pulled into your feed here.

    (2) Communities that are hosted on this server will show up under “Local”.

    (3) “All” shows all of the local content from (2), but also any content that this server had to fetch from other servers for others. Basically, when you subscribe to stuff, it’ll end up in All for everyone else on this server as well. If no one on the server has subscribed to specific content from another server, it won’t show up in All. As a result, All is sort of a cross section of our users’ interests.

    (4) If you were to sign up for another server – say lemm.ee – you would get a different Local and All. But you should be able to subscribe to the same things regardless of the server you chose.

    (5) Some servers are not connected to others, for reasons. This is called defederation. It’s basically a means to block an entire server who has a community not behaving in a way that doesn’t jive well on your local server. Lemmygrad.ml is blocked from this server, for example. You probably won’t notice, but on rare occasions you can’t subscribe to a community on a blocked server.

    (6) You can help the quieter communities grow by shitposting. Throw your backlog of old saved memes into them. There isn’t as much traffic here as reddit, and the niche communities often don’t exist (or are silent).

    (7) Find a larger community to post to for engagement. For example, on Reddit I would subscribe to the WinnipegJets team sub, but on Lemmy it is too quiet. So instead I post my Jets content to the more general Hockey community so we can have some discussion. This will change over time.

    (8) A good place to find communities to subscribe to is: https://lemmyverse.net/communities – copy and paste the community name – eg: !technology@lemmy.world – into the search bar and then subscribe.

    (9) Meow

    (10) Try different sort options. New or Scales are my favourites.

    • RandAlThor@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      Tip: sort by “Top 12 hours or 24hours”. This is equivalent to reddit’s “hot”

    • Sunshine (she/her)@lemmy.caEnglish
      28·
      7 days ago

      (11) Also don’t be afraid to curate the feed the block button is your friend, don’t like certain users, communities or instances baaam block, there’s your peace of mind.

      • Troy@lemmy.caEnglish
        17·
        7 days ago

        Yes! I have so much anime softcore blocked in my feed haha.

        (12) A great way to find new communities: when you see a user who posted something interesting, click on them and see which communities they’re in. Then subscribe to those :)

    • Undearius@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      7 days ago

      I’ve been here for awhile and have a pretty good understanding of how federation works. Number (3) was a very concise way to explain how the All feed works. I sort of knew but that really helped me understand.

      Number (7), I will suggest the use of the cross-posting feature. Post to the larger community for engagement but also cross-post to the smaller communities to help them grow. Quiet communities are a cat-and-mouse game where people don’t post or comment because no one else is. The more people start to engage, the more others will start to engage.

      • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
        14·
        7 days ago

        What I like doing is posting to the small community first, and then cross posting from there

        That way people in the larger community can follow the link back and learn about the community if they’re interested. It also helps to mention the community at the start of the cross post since Lemmy doesn’t do that automatically

  • Yerbouti@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    31·
    7 days ago

    I find it way more easy to have civil interactions with people here. On reddit, I would either get ignored or discussions would turn to shit. Lemmy is actually way more fun to use, it just need a bit more of content.