Below you'll find answers to some of the most commonly asked questions from new Lemmy users. If you don't see the answers you're looking for feel free to ask here or start a new post. Updates will be added as needed.
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How can I find communities that interest me on Lemmy?
We've done our best to get everyone started with the Fediverse by offering some of the most popular communities on Lemmy on our All page, but this is only a tiny fraction of what the fediverse has to offer!
An unfortunate side effect of how federation works is that communities don't start sharing data until someone from your home instance discovers and subscribes to them. What this means is a lot of the time you won't be able to easily find communities on other instances if you're the first one to search for that topic on our instance. Luckily there are lots of tools around the Fediverse to help out!
Lemmyverse is a search engine designed to help people find new communities and instances. They index over 20,000 communities to search through with convenient features like setting your home instance so that all the links you click will open here for easy subscribing.
Community Promo is where new and existing communities let you know they're looking for people with shared interests. If you've started a community be sure to announce it here.
New Communities is a great resource to find out about the newest places or announce a space you've created.
Trending Communities offers a daily bot post highlighting a mix of the most popular and up and coming communities.
Communities is another bot post community but this one offers daily links with descriptions for established communities you may not have seen yet.
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I subscribed to a community but it doesn't show anything/looks dead.
There's a good chance you joined a community on another instance. If you're the first person from our instance to join it there can be a delay before the content starts showing up. Refresh the page or check back in a few minutes and you should see things starting to come in. Be aware that sometimes this process can take significantly longer if the community isn't very active.
If you're seeing older content in a community but nothing new, it's likely someone else from our instance used to be subscribed there and unsubscribed. If no one locally is subscribed our instance will stop updating the community until someone resubscribes to it. Communities can die out and instances can shut down though so if you aren't seeing any updates after days or weeks it's likely the community is no longer active.
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I can/can't see a post or comment from another account that I can't/can see here. Why?
It could be a number of things but there are a few likely culprits.
NSFW and Language settings on your account can completely hide content from you. Make sure you have your settings adjusted appropriately to be able to see the content you are looking for. It's not uncommon to select every language option to make sure you are seeing everything on Lemmy. The only content we intentionally block is CSAM and spam.
Federation lag can also occur, causing data to be delayed by several minutes or even days between instances. Under normal conditions this shouldn't happen and should be reported if you notice it. Please provide any supporting data and links when reporting.
Instances can choose to federate or de-federate with one another for any reason. We are federated with all other instances with open federation and only de-federate from instances being used for malicious activities. If another instance can't see ours or we can't see them it's likely no one from our respective instances has subscribed to anything from the other, but you can check the instances list to see if they're being blocked on our side. Other instances should have a similar link near the bottom of the page on their site. If you believe an instance has been de-federated by mistake don't hesitate to contact us.
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Where is the downvote button?
Our instance has chosen to disable downvotes. If you're using Lemmy through a browser you won't see the downvote button at all. If you use a mobile app you may still see the option to downvote but it doesn't do anything here. To our instance they simply do not exist. What this means is that local and federated content is not subject to attempts at censorship, harassment, or brigading via downvotes. We prefer to let our members decide how to filter their feed through subscriptions and blocks instead of allowing content to be buried by the downvotes of others.
On the other hand, we should be proud we have something worth protecting. Lemmy may not be perfect but we're not shackled by the rules of corporate behemoths. We can work together and solve this and make a better space for everyone. Harassment has no place on the Fediverse.