I'm betting a week before you crash out at a communist.

Fediverse is a large network of servers which are allowed to communicate with each other. Some fediverse servers refuse to communicate with some others referred to as "Defederation". Each "instance" as we call them has its own hosts, owners, admins, and rules.

The major flavors of fediverse instances are Piefed, Lemmy, and Kbin/mbin. They're open source frameworks used to build the instances.

I strongly strongly strongly advice against instances which are still federated with Hexbear, a Chinese propoganda botnet, such as Lemmy ML or Lemmy Today, and I actually advise against all lemmy instances in general because their codebase maintainers are anti-trans, pro-genocide, pro-Trump, and pro-Russian invasion of Ukraine.

People are stupid everywhere, but there are fewer people overall here and that makes a surprisingly big difference.

One thing it's easy to miss about the fediverse is that it's not just lemmy users here. You'll see folks from friendica (which is like facebook) or pixelfed (which is like instagram) or mastodon (which is like twitter) or one of a dozen other services in the comments. Each one of them has a different culture and different ways of interacting, so assuming everyone is gonna act like you're used to from reddit is going to serve you poorly. My best advice is to always be actively kind to other people, and try not to complain too much about the mods or the admins -- no-one's get paid to be here (and many of us are actively paying for server fees) and no-one can stop you from saying anything you want, because you can always start your own community or stand up your own instance.

1. Instances communicate with each other to sync posts from the communities on each instance. This requires the instances to be federated. Some instances are federated with almost everyone. Some instances are defederated from instances their admin(s) have deemed troublesome.
2. Left leaning, but not particularly friendly to women as a whole. Not big on sports. Lots of Linux.
3. You'd have to expand on that
4. Communities not subreddits
5. Prepare for beans

I only have 2 points to mention.

1. You will find stupid people everywhere.
2. On Lemmy people can be nice in a lot of places, but there are also a lot of aggressively stupid people who hold the most batshit insane opinions you've ever seen (unless you've been to 4chan, then it's nothing of note). Sometimes it can feel like you're on Twitter. Use the block button generously, you can even block entire instances.

@finitebanjo@feddit.online explained pretty good but I want to reiterate that the instance ultimately dictates what is allowed or not. the software has defaults on some blocks and defederations but its up to the instance maintainers to keep the defaults or change that. each community then may or may not have rules. communities do not by default federate community posts the way most of the software works. It needs a user of the instance to subscribe to the community. piefed did something to allow auto subscribing to sorta fix that and its possible that has made its way out since most all the ecosystem is open source but im not sure. there are often multiple communities that have the same subject and often on different instances. some communities seem to limit or do not federate at all. Like the dedicated nsfw instance and an anime instance has communities that people only see if they have an account on the anime instance. this I think came about from changes that allowed for private communities. a bit annoying for me though the lazy bum who does not want to make multiple accounts but does want to see it all. my own instance has all the piefed defaults. its kinda stage for piefed but pretend I did not say that as it kinda rubs people the wrong way. but it generally gets the new stuff first. I don't change because again lazy and honestly the piefed defaults when I look them up pretty much line up with things im fine not seeing. for pure philosophical reasons I should move but man I like getting the new stuff fast and I like how piefed does stuff.

Most has already been spoken too re. the main devs of lemmy generally being fascist weirdos (I suggest making an account on piefed as well); so, on a somewhat lighter note the main gay af community, 196, split into three separate versions because the mods of the original comm decided to move to .world from blahaj.zone for some convoluted reason. The original comm was locked and someone set up a new comm still on blahaj because .world can be a cesspit sometimes. After much user... feedback the original comm on blahaj was unlocked; however there was already a replacement comm set up on the same instance. This left us with three separate 196 communities. Two on blahaj.zone and one on .world. The one with the cool logo (/c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone) is the newer most active one now.

1. The fediverse works a little like email. You know how you can have an account with Google's Gmail service and still send messages to your uncle's Compuserve account, your work uses Microsoft's Outlook service, and lots of businesses have their own domains? But they all talk the same protocol so these independent services can all interact? The fediverse does the same thing. The protocol is called ActivityPub, and it means that all fediverse systems can communicate to a point. You'll sometimes see Mastodon users interacting with Lemmy. Lemmy is a Reddit clone UI wise. We call subreddits "communities". The different instances are like those different email services, it's why you, with an account on thelemmy.club, created a post on asklemmy@lemmy.world where I, a user on sh.itjust.works, saw it.
2. The environment here is yin to Reddit's yang. On Reddit, Hitler did nothing wrong, on Lemmy, Mao did nothing wrong.
3. Same as Reddit, you can say whatever the mods agree with.
4. Don't call communities "subreddits." Don't mention Nicole.

Most other users have hit the important points already. Modlogs over here are public and it usually makes calling out powertripping mods a lot easier. The community for that is usually here: !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that most everything you do here is very public including how you vote. Even if Lemmy hides it from your user interface, other instances can easily see that information.

There are a few communities that will ban users if they consistently downvote every post in a community. So if there's any community with content that you don't care for, just block it to hide the posts from showing up in your feed.

As for 5., the only annoyance I have is that sometimes when you are browsing a thread and want to go back to the community front page, clicking the link takes you there but as a non-logged in user. Then you have to go back and find the correct link that still keeps you logged on.

I suppose it's something like you have to browse through your own instance where you're logged in, and just navigating to the other instance will show you as a non-logged in guest. But I'm not entirely sure how that works.

I am new here

Joined: 2 months ago

1. Enjoy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum
2. Lurk more
3. RTFM if any