Mod: if you want to steal bits of this for an official sticky thread of your own or whatever feel free.
Newbies: Welcome to lemmy!
Where am I and what's going on?
You're on a platform called "Lemmy", a collection of discussion groups ("communities") around particular topics. You can think of it kind of like Reddit, or like a collection of old-school forums that all share a login.
Is Lemmy the Fediverse?
You might have heard the term "fediverse" thrown around, it's the name for a collection of platforms like Lemmy that all talk to each other. So Lemmy is just one small part of the Fediverse, but there are lots of others for you to investigate one day too :)
What about the Threadiverse?
Another Fediverse platform that works a bit like Lemmy does is called Kbin. Since both of them use a forum thread type structure for discussion, they became collectively known as the Threadiverse.
People keep talking about "instances" and I'm confused
Lemmy as a whole consists of lots of different websites, all running the "Lemmy" software and talking to each other. For example this community is hosted on lemmy.ca, whereas my user account is on lemm.ee, but I can post here anyway. They're two different websites (usually called "instances" or "servers"), but all part of the wider Lemmy platform.
You'll learn more about what this means as you go, but for the most part it's not super important to get started.
I clicked a link and it logged me out
Remember what we said about Lemmy actually being lots of websites? Chances are, you clicked a badly-formatted link that took you to a different one of those sites. You're not logged out of your account, you're just looking at another site.
If you're on the web, you can follow instructions in the sidebar and search for the community address from your instance's search page (magnifying glass icon at the top of the page). But if you're on a mobile app they all work differently so I can't sum that one up for you, sorry!
To create links that should work for everyone, you can use the ! syntax like so:
How do I find cool stuff?
Two main ways. First you can check out the All feed on your instance homepage. This shows all the content your instance knows about, from all the other Lemmy instances it talks to. Subscribe to any communities that catch your eye!
Alternatively you can use a search tool like https://lemmyverse.net/communities. Use the home icon in the top right to set your home instance, and search for stuff you want to talk about!
And if you're a fibre crafter, well, check out my profile because I post in a lot of relevant communities ๐
It can be hard for someone who's been here a while to explain things in a way that makes sense to absolute beginners. So if any of this was confusing, please just ask me in the comments and I'm happy to clarify.
Welcome, enjoy, and see you around!