Welcome!

Here is a post we made recently for new users, and it has links to some guides (infographic style)

https://lemmy.ca/post/39167034

The 'detailed guide on how Lemmy works' goes over the local vs federated communities, and I think the visuals help with understanding that

There's also a guide for the apps, but the short answer is that there are so many apps because it's very easy to make them. It's all open and the platform is designed to make it easy to connect to. My advice is to stick to whichever app you feel comfortable with, and then if there is a feature you're looking for then you can post about it in !lemmyapps@lemmy.world. That way either someone can tell you about an app that has what you want, or the various developers will get your feedback and start working on implementing it.

As for what an instance is, see the 'quick overview of the fediverse' guide.

~~For photos, I'm not familiar with lemm.ee's policies but it could be a bug? We don't have as much of the "account must be X days old to participate" type stuff here~~. You can also always upload to Imgur or Catbox and link the image.

Edit: my bad, I see the note about lemm.ee's image policy. The Imgur thing should work in the meantime

Hopefully that helps, and I'm happy to answer any follow-up questions :) Especially if there's something confusing with the guides, so that we can improve them

Reddit is a single website, made up of a collection of (link and post sharing) subreddits, each with its own moderators, policies and content preferences, but with one overall admin team who work for one overall boss, u/spez, with one overall aim - to make money from user generated content.

The creators of lemmy felt that the profit motive was actively harmful for this type of website, and decided to remove the single, powerful, profit-motivated owner model, so...

Lemmy is a collection of websites all running the same open source software, that globally shares (federates) all the user generated content, each website (instance) has a (local) collection of (link and post sharing) communities, each with their own moderators, policies and content preferences, but each lemmy website has their own admin or admin team, who are generally just the tech folk who decided set up the website (instance) and run it, so instead of one overall agenda that reddit has, you have many overall agendas.

Of course this sets up the possibility that different instances disagree with each other (what should count as nsfw, what's acceptable speech, what's acceptable moderation, which type of politics is unacceptable), and instances disagreeing definitely happens, but that's kind of by-design to prevent one set of admins from controlling all of lemmy. Some of them defederate (stop sharing with) some of the others.

As far as I can tell, the money to run the computers on which the instances run is usually crowd sourced from (a minority of) the users themselves. Small instances are just run in people's spare computers at home, I think. Anyone can download the software and make a new instance, again by design.

What is an instance?

Lemmy instances are like email servers.

Imagine my email address is whatever@gmail.com. I can send emails to other addresses on the gmail.com email server. But I can also send email to people who have accounts on the proton.me or outlook.com email servers, for example.

In the same way, my Lemmy account is on the slrpnk.net instance. There are several "solarpunk"-related communities there like !climate@slrpnk.net that I can post to. But I can also post to communities like this one, !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, which is on the lemmy.ca instance.

In the same way that gmail might block emails from a spam server, a lemmy instance might block interactions with another instance. This is called "defederation". I wouldn't worry about it too much, just use your account for a while to get the hang of things, but if you really want to explore defederation you can do so here: https://defed.xyz/

Apps are fine, but I'll say it... the web UI actually works.
The browser already has features I want that most dedicated apps don't have:

• Bookmarks
• Multi-tabs
• uBlock Origin

I was used to never using reddit outside of a third party app, but that's mostly because their mobile web UI is actively hostile
Here, the mobile web UI... works.
Just a thought, might wanna give it a try.

The instance is just your provider, similar to an email provider. Yours is lemm.ee.

There are a lot of apps because it's an open platform and people have a lot of good ideas about how to best organize things. Voyager is one of the best in terms of popularity, development, and ease of use. Stick with it for a while. Check out !lemmyapps@lemmy.world in the meantime to see what's going on with different apps.

Local vs federated communities are basically the same for starters, but you will eventually come across some technical differences that may be interesting or relevant to you in the future. Most instances are general purpose, so use the global feed for now.

Follow Communities that sound interesting. Use the sort function to see what's hot or scaled (popular wrt size of community) to see what's going on and discover new things.

Comment, vote, post...

Have fun, and welcome!

Local communities are ones created at the same place you signed up.

Edit: so I signed up at sh.itjust.works, therefore if I make a community it will not be local to you, but would be to others users who registered where I did.

Unless its a themed instance I wouldn't worry about it much.

Voyager is essentially an Apollo clone. And, if you liked Apollo to begin with as opposed to other options, you'll primary probably end up back on voyager. But there's no reason to not try others. You aren't obligated to, for sure, and you should wait a few days if you decide to check things out, but why not try new stuff eventually?

Iirc lemm.ee has a two or three day limit for pic uploads as an anti spam thing. So it won't be long.

Instance means a server running lemmy. Each instance has its own admin and reputation, but they're mostly the same experience and it doesn't matter for your first account.

Local communities are hosted by the instance hosting your account, but accounts from other lemmy instances can still comment and subscribe like normal.

Federated communities are hosted by other instances that are connected (federated) with yours, but you can still comment and subscribe.