Table of contents
- What is Lemmy?
- What is an instance?
- How do I join a community from another instance?
- How can I find interesting communities?
- Why are image uploads on lemm.ee limited to 100kb?
- How can I post images hosted on external services?
- How can I ensure my community on lemm.ee gets found on other instances?
- How can I take over a community with inactive mods on lemm.ee?
- I’m still lost, how can I get assistance?
What is Lemmy?
One great way to understand Lemmy is to check out this simple infographic (author: @ulu_mulu@lemmy.world)
But if you want it in text form:
Lemmy is a link aggregator, in many ways similar to Reddit, but with one key difference - there is no one central authority controlling Lemmy. The code is open source, and more importantly, there are hundreds of Lemmy instances which are all independently run.
Even though instances are independent, they are all part of the Lemmy network, and thus, users of one instance can participate in communities of other instances.
What is an instance?
Lemmy instances are servers which run the Lemmy software. https://lemm.ee (where this post lives on) is one instance, but there are also many others.
There can be several key differences in instances:
- Some instances are small and run out of home servers, some instances are large and run on commercial hardware (lemm.ee is one of the latter)
- Each instance can define their own set of rules (lemm.ee rules are visible in the sidebar on our front page)
- Instances can decide whether downvotes are enabled for their users (lemm.ee users have the ability to downvote)
- Some instances may choose to limit community creation to admins only (lemm.ee allows all users to create communities)
- Some instances have a tight focus, others are general-purpose (lemm.ee is the latter!)
If you ever find yourself unhappy with your instance, you are always free to create an account on another one and continue using Lemmy. Unlike centralized platforms, you always have another place to go!
⚠️ Lemmy supports migrating your account from one instance to another, which makes it quite painless to move. However, your post history will remain on your old account when you create a new one on another instance.
How do I join a community from another instance?
Option 1: go to the list of communities by clicking the “Communities” link on the top navbar. Open the “All” tab and you will be able to browse and subscribe to any community from other instances that at least one lemm.ee user has previously subscribed to.
Option 2: if you know the exact name of the community you wish to join (for example, !gaming@beehaw.org), you can navigate to the search view by clicking the looking glass icon on the top navbar. Enter the exact name of the community into the search box, including the leading “!”: !gaming@beehaw.org. If at least one person from lemm.ee has previously subscribed to this community, then you should immediately see a link to open the community and subscribe to it.
Important caveat: if you are the first person to search for a community, then Lemmy will initially tell you that no results were found. Don’t worry, if the community exists, then lemm.ee will begin syncing it and you will be able to successfully search for it again in a couple of minutes.
Important caveat 2: if you are the first lemm.ee user to subscribe to a community from another instance, then historical posts and comments will not be immediately synced. This is a limitation of the Lemmy software currently. However, if old posts start getting some new activity after you’ve subscribed (like a new comment or edit), then that will trigger a sync and the old posts should start showing up for you as well.
How can I find interesting communities?
You have several options!
- You can browse our list of all communities. This includes any communities from other instances which have at least one subscriber from lemm.ee.
- You can check for ads for interesting communities in !newcommunities@lemmy.world
- You can check out https://lemmyverse.net - bonus tip, if you set your home instance on this website, then all community links will lead to your home instance!
Why are image uploads on lemm.ee limited to 500kb?
One of the scaling issues so far with Lemmy is multimedia storage. Several instances report growing their storage by significant amounts daily - if lemm.ee grew at that same pace, I would start seeing increased infrastructure bills very quickly (within months, if not weeks).
To help mitigate this, users are asked to use external image hosting providers as much as possible. On lemm.ee, we currently only allow image uploads for images up to 500kb in size.
500kb was specifically chosen as it SHOULD cover most needs for any avatars, and possibly even simple banners for communities.
How can I post images hosted on external services?
For posts, just submit the image URL directly (in other words, copy the image URL into the “URL” field of the post you are creating).
Additionally, for text posts and comments, you can use the following syntax: , for example  results in:
How can I ensure my community on lemm.ee gets found on other instances?
- First of all, you should ensure that your community looks welcoming to new users. If your sidebar has useful info and there’s perhaps some activity in the community already, then new users are much more likely to subscribe
- Once you have your new community set up, your community will soon become automatically visible in our local communities list at lemm.ee, as well as the global community indexes like https://browse.feddit.de or https://lemmyverse.net
- If you want even more exposure for your community, I recommend making a post about it in !newcommunities@lemmy.world
How can I take over a community with inactive mods on lemm.ee?
- Make a post in the community you want to take over
- DM me (@sunaurus) 1-2 sentences about what your plans are for the community, and a link to the post you made in the community
If the community you want really has no active mods, then I will be happy to pass ownership to you!
I’m still lost, how can I get assistance?
If you feel like anything in this guide is unclear, or if you have a general question which you believe will be useful to others in the future, please just drop a comment with your question under this post and myself or other helpful members of our community can try and help you out.
If you’re having any issues that you feel are not relevant as a comment here, then feel free to post a thread and tag me in our !support community.
Hi there, I’ve just created a community for us foragers! But I cannot for the life of me upload community banner or icon. I know the size limit as stated above, but even images that are tini-tiny I get the message “uploaded image is too large”, I have also tried the same image(41.53kb) as jpg, png, svg and webp. What am I doing wrong? Thanks.
How do I view a post from another lemmy instance on lemmy.ee? For example to comment on https://lemmy.ml/post/1437402 (I don’t really want to comment on that one, just as an example)
I’ve usually just used the search at the top.
Like put the whole link in the search box.That’s how I found the sh.itjust.works version of that post so I could mention you in a comment.
Here’s how that looks (mobile)
It’s a bit annoying that there isn’t relative post/ comment linking format like there is for communities and users.
Ah thank you! I tried searching for the title before and it didn’t work. But link is definitely more practical. I guess I’ll make a search engine shortcut for my local lemmy instance
Lemmy Universal Link Switcher works well.
Thanks, works great!
Your welcome! Please pass it on if you spot anyone struggling with local vs remote links :)
There is also this bug for “Instance agnostic links #2987”. This behavior really needs to be implemented either in the UI or the lemmy framework itself.
We currently can subscribe to communities, but is there a way to keep lists of communities that creates a unique feed of those communities?
I’d like to keep politics off of my home page, but would still like to aggregate political communities into a single feed for example.
Is it possible to have multiple usernames/accounts on the same instance?
It’s possible and generally allowed at the moment, but we reserve the right to add more rules if we see people abusing this. Vote manipulation, pretending to be different people in a single discussion, etc would definitely be considered abuse (just use common sense here)
Cool, that makes sense. Thanks!
Want to leave a comment saying how woefully painful the 2FA is on this site. I’d ticked the box for 2FA on my account (assuming I’d receive a link or email). When I didn’t I thought nothing of it and carried on my business. Turns out now I’m locked out of my account and cannot access it without providing a 2FA key (which I didn’t set up).
I’ve contacted the instance admin (/u/sunaurus | @sunaurus) but their last comment/post was a month ago, so I’m a little worried if I’ll ever get back into my (original) account.
2FA has been reworked in 0.19, and as a result, all accounts had 2FA removed during that update.
Hmm… I’m still looking for a basic “how-to,” rather than a “why not,” or a “what is.” E.g., How do I use existing mod tools? How do I permanently block the dozens of posted porn links from a lemm.ee (about orbital mechanics in a video game)? How do I limit all posts to the afore-mentioned community to only approved contributors? Once done, how do I know who has submitted a request for inclusion? I apologize if this information is already available…somewhere. I’ve read all that I could find. Perhaps I need to expand my search terms…
In any case, Thanks!
Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of documentation like that yet, and specifically in terms of mod tools, the tools themselves are still quite limited as well. Removing posts can be done (there should be an option for it under every post if you’re a moderator), but there is currently no support for approved contributors.
I’m having an issue and wondering if it’s something with the way the site works, or just me.
When I access a community that isn’t on my instance through my instance (for example, I am accessing this one although my home instance is lemmy.world, so the URL is https://lemmy.world/c/support@lemm.ee), I don’t see all the posts or comments on that community, only certain ones. I know this because when I then access the same community through it’s instance (so for example, if I go to the URL https://lemm.ee/c/support and view it, not logged in) I see posts and comments that I can’t through my instance. An example is the recent post here “How Come I don’t see most comments?” - when viewing it without logging in, I see the comments on that post, but when viewing it through my instance while logged in it appears there are no comments on it and it even says zero comments. Sometimes whole posts are missing. Is it supposed to be this way?
I checked the language settings and have both Undetermined and English highlighted.
Thanks for any help
There are a few different potential causes in such cases:
- If a community was recently synced to your home instance, then it will not have a lot of historical posts and comments.
- Missing comments may be the result of moderation (for example, an instance admin has purged a specific comment originating from another instance)
- Finally, we can’t discount technical problems with with federation (overloaded servers)
In most cases, any new responses to missing comments should sync all parent comments as well, so if there is activity going on in the comments, then everything should “self-heal” given time.
But if there is no activity, then currently, the only workaround to get missing posts/comments to sync is quite clunky - it’s documented here (specifically the “fetching posts” and “fetching comments” sections).
I’m having trouble creating a community. Is there a guide on how to make one? I have the name and the display name, no errors there. The “create” button spins for a second and then nothing.
Late reply, but just for the record-- Sunaurus helped me with this the other day by explaining that community names are limited to 20 characters. Display names can evidently be considerably larger.
