Welcome New Users!

Hello! Coming over from Reddit and I'm new to Lemmy. So happy to easily find a Canadian Community!
- Welcome 😊
  
  Thank you! And thank you @Shadow@lemmy.ca for the manual verification, much appreciated!

I had no idea that communities had taken off on Lemmy since 2 years ago! I didn't even realize I still had an account on here.
Really excited to see where this goes, and to support a Canadian server. Fingers crossed that this gains more traction in Canada and can act as strong shield against misinformation and bad faith actors.
I'll be certain to spread the word about this community more to fellow Canadians. I think with current events this could be the lightning in the bottle to see more usage here.
Any communities worth looking at?
- Welcome back 😊
  Any communities worth looking at?
  If you're looking for communities related to those recent events, then !buycanadian@lemmy.ca and !canada@lemmy.ca come to mind as being relevant.
  Otherwise a lot of new communities have emerged (or migrated) from 2 years ago. We have this guide now on finding communities, you could try the lemmyverse suggestion with topics you're looking into
  https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/how-to-find-communities

Hi, I'm new to Lemmy Greetings from the Netherlands 🇳🇱🇨🇦🇪🇺
- Welcome! Hope you like it here.
  FYI, feddit.nl exists too. You could create an alt account on that site if you ever find the ping times to Canada too slow for your liking :)
- Welcome!

Learned about Lemmy recently and I immediately wanted to join so I can get out of Reddit
Good to be here.
- Welcome! Glad to have you here
- Welcome :)
  
  Thanks :)

@otter@lemmy.ca, do you know what the catalyst was for the recent influx? It’s great news!
- I'm not sure if there was a particularly viral post (aside from a few mentions of r/BuyCanadian), but I know we've also been mentioned in comment sections all over. Copying from another comment:
  Going off of what people have mentioned in the registration applications, it is a combination of
  wanting to support Canadian, and avoiding American tech companies (due to tariffs and other concerns)
  concerns with how big tech has changed for the worse these past few months
  Reddit's recent actions, such as banning (and then reversing) a bunch of communities and the recent paywall announcement
  learning about it for the first time and being excited about the concept
  The first point is why lemmy.ca has seen more relative growth this week than the others, but a lot of fediverse instances have seen growth recently

I challenge every newbies to create 1-3 posts over the first 72 h here : what do you enjoy in social media usually? It doesn’t have to be perfectly new if it’s new on Lemmy: your favourite Reddit group isn’t represented here or silent for a while : show us a glimpse of what you like and see how much engagement you receive.
- Well I challenge every newbie to create 72 new posts over the first 1 to 3 h here!

Welcome new folks!

Hey so as a Canadian, we are about to get attacked by our long time ally and the worlds military superpower. We are probably going to be steamrolled, and then become second class citizens in the Trump dictatorship cult. Am I allowed to say violent things about how that makes me feel? Or will I get banned, like on reddit?
- Purchase a long rifle and shoot it often. I say this as a staunch pacifist. Having a weapon and using it are two different things. For a thousand reasons, if a genuine war broke out it would likely destroy America. Unfortunately, likely taking Canada with it.
  Regardless, be armed and be prepared. It is not as bleak as you may think, even in the worst case scenario. Best case scenario nothing happens and you take up hunting or target shooting as a hobby!
- Just save it.. and when the time comes... we do what we gotta do
- We're pretty reasonable with moderation here. The way Lemmy works, mod actions are recorded publicly for transparency. You can access those records here, but as a warning before you open the page, "Some deleted posts may contain disturbing or adult material": https://lemmy.ca/modlog
  So far we've only banned users site wide when it was a consistent problem (ex. spam bot, harassing other users). However, we do need to remove comments that are clearly against the law in Canada, else we couldn't keep operating.
  It really comes down to what the comment is. If you look through the threads on here, a lot of people are already expressing how they feel, or what Canada's/Canadians' response should be. Where it might be a problem is if someone says they're going to do something violent/illegal, or call for someone else to do it
  Hopefully that makes sense?
  
  "don't get the admins subpoenaed" is probably a good rule of thumb.
  (You folks do a great job, I appreciate the community you've fostered and tended to here)
- I can totally relate to you in those regards.
- You will be less likely to be banned. Still, be reasonable, tactful and don't be a dick about it, even if I get that you came here to express your genuine feelings.
  "Kill [person of interest]" is off limits here and on many other servers, but there are ways you can describe how your frustration in ways that aren't illegal or personally charged. "Fuck [person of interest]" is nearly universally allowed here. Even if not banned, the outcome of whether you are upvoted to heaven or downvoted to hell will depend on the person and the context.
- There's one way to find out.

- We ban spammers and remove all their content fairly quickly once we get a report, sometimes within minutes if we're online at the time. Could you report the post/message so we can deal with it?
  For what it's worth, once in a while I'll search the spam URLs and the same junk is posted across Reddit and other sites. Worse, some of those posts have been up for months

I'm happy to see new users joining Lemmy and every instance out there big and small.
One thing everyone should consider and think of is .... funding and supporting the Fediverse.
Every new user should consider and think about supporting the fediverse through a donation as they use this new community in order for it to remain free to use, open and freely available for everyone. We all like to believe that these things can be just free to use without any of us having to pay for any of it. We also like to think that people just magically and without reward or compensation just work in the background for free to keep all this software, hardware, equipment and organization running.
We don't have to spend a fortune to keep funding these projects, but we should contribute something to it even if it is a small amount. If thousands of users spend a dollar, then it would add up to thousands of dollars to keep this whole system well funded. I know I've chatted with a few of the instance owners and have read what developers have written in the past ... many of them have well paying jobs and have commercial work themselves that they do and they enjoy doing the work on Lemmy as either a hobby or passion project. However, I also know that as the popularity of these platforms grow, expenses add up for more hardware requirements, new hardware requirements, software management, security management and even having people monitoring everything online around the clock. Eventually, no matter how you cut it ... work, time, effort, equipment all ends up costing money to someone at some point. And those costs only increase as popularity grows. And those payments have to come from somewhere.
Donating a little bit and funding even just a little from everyone should be a new norm we should all accept. Otherwise, any new social media we create, no matter how open source we want it to be will slowly just be affected by corporate rot and get taken over again by those who would like to lock everything behind a wall and make the most money from it.
Donating to Lemmy.ca (run by the non-profit Fedecan)
https://fedecan.ca/en/donate
Donating to the Lemmy Software developers
https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Donating to The Fediverse Foundation
https://fediverse.foundation/en/spenden/
But also ... Donate to the instance you are on and support the people who maintain your instance.

A couple of notes and unsolicited advice as someone who is almost an old hand already...
(1) Your front-page will be more interesting as you subscribe to more things. You can subscribe to things from other Lemmy servers and they will be pulled into your feed here.
(2) Communities that are hosted on this server will show up under "Local".
(3) "All" shows all of the local content from (2), but also any content that this server had to fetch from other servers for others. Basically, when you subscribe to stuff, it'll end up in All for everyone else on this server as well. If no one on the server has subscribed to specific content from another server, it won't show up in All. As a result, All is sort of a cross section of our users' interests.
(4) If you were to sign up for another server -- say lemm.ee -- you would get a different Local and All. But you should be able to subscribe to the same things regardless of the server you chose.
(5) Some servers are not connected to others, for reasons. This is called defederation. It's basically a means to block an entire server who has a community not behaving in a way that doesn't jive well on your local server. Lemmygrad.ml is blocked from this server, for example. You probably won't notice, but on rare occasions you can't subscribe to a community on a blocked server.
(6) You can help the quieter communities grow by shitposting. Throw your backlog of old saved memes into them. There isn't as much traffic here as reddit, and the niche communities often don't exist (or are silent).
(7) Find a larger community to post to for engagement. For example, on Reddit I would subscribe to the WinnipegJets team sub, but on Lemmy it is too quiet. So instead I post my Jets content to the more general Hockey community so we can have some discussion. This will change over time.
(8) A good place to find communities to subscribe to is: https://lemmyverse.net/communities -- copy and paste the community name -- eg: !technology@lemmy.world -- into the search bar and then subscribe.
(9) Meow
(10) Try different sort options. New or Scales are my favourites.
- (11) Also don’t be afraid to curate the feed the block button is your friend, don’t like certain users, communities or instances baaam block, there’s your peace of mind.
  
  Yes! I have so much anime softcore blocked in my feed haha.
  (12) A great way to find new communities: when you see a user who posted something interesting, click on them and see which communities they're in. Then subscribe to those :)
- Tip: sort by "Top 12 hours or 24hours". This is equivalent to reddit's "hot"
- I've been here for awhile and have a pretty good understanding of how federation works. Number (3) was a very concise way to explain how the All feed works. I sort of knew but that really helped me understand.
  Number (7), I will suggest the use of the cross-posting feature. Post to the larger community for engagement but also cross-post to the smaller communities to help them grow. Quiet communities are a cat-and-mouse game where people don't post or comment because no one else is. The more people start to engage, the more others will start to engage.
  
  What I like doing is posting to the small community first, and then cross posting from there
  That way people in the larger community can follow the link back and learn about the community if they're interested. It also helps to mention the community at the start of the cross post since Lemmy doesn't do that automatically

I find it way more easy to have civil interactions with people here. On reddit, I would either get ignored or discussions would turn to shit. Lemmy is actually way more fun to use, it just need a bit more of content.
- Yeah, well, fuck you
  
  @BeardedGingerWonder said it best, folks!! Join the community, stay for the sex!!
  
  Oh yeah?!? Well, brexit!
  
  Lost redditor?
  
  🤔

Welcome!
A social network is created by our collective social interaction. We're still small, so your posts, comments and upvotes matter. Don't just lurk, if you can. Every upvote counts! 😊
This one's ours.
- Lurking has been my primary activity on Reddit. I shall try to contribute more.
- Shucks

Glad to be here. I wanted to get off Reddit for obvious reasons.

First of all, thanks for all the work you do. I lived almost 10 years in Canada and having an account here makes me feel warm inside (not on the outside :-) ).
Any idea why the recent influx of new users? May it have anything to do with Reddit planning to put some subreddits behind a paywal?
Thanks again!
- Welcome! :)
  Going off of what people have mentioned in the registration applications, it is a combination of
  wanting to support Canadian, and avoiding American tech companies (due to tariffs and other concerns)
  concerns with how big tech has changed for the worse these past few months
  Reddit's recent actions, such as banning (and then reversing) a bunch of communities and the recent paywall announcement
  learning about it for the first time and being excited about the concept
  The first point is why lemmy.ca has seen more relative growth this week than the others, but a lot of fediverse instances have seen growth recently
  
  All of the above for me!

Thank you for hosting and for all your work! I am excited to see this community grow. I have already seen a couple of posts on Canadian reddit communities where people name dropped lemmy.ca. It'd be interesting to maybe do a census once the signups stabilize to see how much the demographic changed. (I saw that there was one made in 2023).
- Totally!
  We were planning to do another census this winter, but we got busy with the new servers and spinning up new platforms.
  You might have seen other comments asking about Pixelfed and Friendica. Pixelfed is to instagram in the way that Lemmy is to Reddit, and we're in the process of setting up a Canadian instance of Pixelfed right now. If all goes well, we may get more new people joining through there

Glad to be here! As Reddit keeps enshittifying, and the boycott USAmerica movement gains momentum, hoping more folks migrate over.

🫶 happy to be here

First off, this is great... thanks to everyone who's helped put all this together! It's a relief to finally have a Canadian alternative! And then can someone please explain to me (like I'm 5) what an "instance" is exactly?
- If you think of the "fediverse" as being like email, an instance would be like an email provider. So you can get an email address from google, protonmail, microsoft, etc, but you can still communicate with other accounts from any of the providers via the standardized protocol. In the same way you can join any particular instance and communicate with other instances.
  
  Perfect, I get it now, thanks!
- For sure! If it helps, we put together this page on what the word means more generally (for all types of fediverse websites, and not just Lemmy). The infographic style images might be helpful
  https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started
  For lemmy.ca specifically, you can think of the entire website as being one 'instance' of a larger network of similar websites. It is possible to shut down the 'federation' and just exist as our own isolated forum (similar to Reddit), but that defeats the purpose of running this kind of website.
  This page should also help you see how it affects a Lemmy website like ours
  https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/detailed-overview
  
  Wow, you guys have really done a terrific job on those guides!
  
  Thanks, that helps! Sorry if this is a stupid question or not worded correctly: In this larger network, of which lemmy.ca is one "instance", are all instances Canadian?

You guys are awesome.
Any updates on when Pixelfed and Friendica will be ready? I’m waiting for the fedecan instance before I sign up for those :)
- Pixelfed soon. We have a domain registered and I've started provisioning the infra.
  Friendica isn't on our todo list yet, not sure if it will be or not since none of us are regular Facebook users.
  Edit: Enough people are asking about friendica that I promise to investigate more after pixelfed is up.
  
  A Friendica server would be amazing!
  I feel like the similarity to Facebook is way overstated. I wonder how much that association hurts Friendica since even people who use FB a lot think it's super lame. It's the most similar to FB compared to others but it's really the Swiss Army knife of the Fediverse -- and the most powerful tool for accessing it. Coming from Mastodon, and even the Misskey forks, it's crazy what you can do with Friendica.
  A Canadian server would be incredible but it'd also be such a benefit to Friendica to have more servers run by people who know what they're doing.
  
  Actually I am ashamed to tell that I am on Facebook, but more out of necessity and to keep in touch with relatives 😬
  
  Thank you!
  I want to join Pixelfed, I joined a server but it isn't even updated to work with the app yet.
  So I've been eagerly anticipating the fedecan one because I'm sure you guys will do a great job.
  I couldn't see converting a lot of friends over to lemmy, but Pixelfed and loops is something I can see my friends being interested in.
  
  fwiw I would join a friendica instance in a heartbeat and lobby for people I know on fb to sign up.
  
  I posted about Fedecan and the fediverse on Facebook a few weeks ago. Might just be my friend group, but a lot of people seemed interested in ditching Facebook in the wake of all the Trump stuff.
  I know it takes time and resources, but I would love to see you hosting an instance for each alternative to the major platforms.
  Anyway, great work! I appreciate you. Keep it up! :)
  
  That’s exciting news!
- ~~We're in the process of getting pixelfed together :)~~ see Shadow's comment
  
  I love it.

Thank you for Lemmy.ca :) Go #TeamCanada

Woo! I'm from .world but wanted to make an account here too :D
- Ditto!

Is there any interest in taking donations on Librapay or Open collective again?
- We haven't revisited our donation methods yet, but we will at some point.
  If you have a moment, could you share why you'd prefer to have Librapay / Open collective over the existing options? No wrong answers, I just wanted to copy it into our notes for when we revisit all that
  
  I think I’d like those options for a couple of reasons. First would be recurring payments in Canadian dollars. Second would be more visibility for financial contributions, help to see you’re apart of community of donors, and lastly I think these two institutions seem aligned with the values of federation, and bottom up community driven initiatives.

Another question: My email notifications take me to lemm.ca... is there any way to be directed to https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca? Something in my settings maybe?
- Oooh, that's a good feature request but not something we could easily do.
  
  No worries, I was just wondering if it was already available and I couldn't find it.

Welcome new users! You've made an excellent choice.

Here are some more tips, put together by @Rentlar@lemmy.ca in this post
Quick FAQ:

Make yourselves at home!
Please check out !taneggs@lemmy.ca and !modelparliament@lemmy.ca