Just read the rules and you’d be fine. But, a lot of people don’t read the rules and wonder why their posts get removed.

It’s pretty easy imo. Don’t say anything too stupid, but if you do say something controversial once in a while, people probably won’t hate you too much for it, or even remember it, unless it’s REALLY weird, like the two separate people that were talking about stomachs getting pierced in fencing (both made it sound like a fetish). Most people are pretty left-leaning, you’ll find some tankies once in a while, it’s probably better that you ignore them. Most people have an obsession with Linux. A lot of us like piracy. Most people do seem to talk about politics a lot, although that may just be my personal homepage. Besides all that, it’s simple, just have fun with it. You’ll start recognizing the same 25 names over and over again if you’re here for a while.

Welcome! Hope you like beans!

If you browse all, do be aware of what community something is posted in -before- you reply to it. Make it a habit to check. A lot of our communities are for minority/minority-on-Lemmy groups (vegans, trans people, women, etc), or intended to serve people from any number of countries. The posts in these specific-group-serving communities frequently show up in all, just because of the size of this place and how the system works. Don’t comment in English on the German posts which will flood your feed every morning if you sort by top, 6 hrs, and don’t have it blocked (I don’t block them cuz I’m very slowly learning bad German via memes!). Not a woman or trans person? Don’t post in the women’s stuff community. That sort of thing. These rules are usually listed in the side bar for the community, so it’s easy to check before you reply, but you can also ask if you don’t know and can’t find the answer yourself.

Another important thing is IF you are going to use AI, whether image generation or text generation, only post it in AI-friendly communities. If you don’t know if a community is AI-friendly, assume they aren’t until you find out otherwise. A large chunk of comms and users are actively trying to avoid AI content, and most of us don’t want to read a bot post you had generated, so you’ll get downvoted for it. Downvotes don’t really matter, but they do give you a sense of how your comment is received. You should be able to disable downvotes if you don’t want to see them, I think, or it might just be a piefed feature, I’m not sure (it’s fully interoperable with Lemmy, but with better tools).

Couple of rules: (1) You must be running linux on your pc (2) start developing a fursona right away (3) get a job in IT and (4) don’t engage the tankies. /s for real though the discussions here are much more real than on reddit - reddit devolved into comment sections of soundbytes and ‘inside’ jokes. For me Lemmy seemed empty at first, but I’ve since found and subscribed to many communities and my feed is full of interesting things. Welcome

Block the .ml and .dbzer0 instances if you like and want to keep your brain cells.

Other than that, you can pretty much speak your mind here and there’s no automated bots banning you for saying an ever growing list of keywords, like on Reddit. And unlike Reddit, posts can stay active for multiple days before dying off, allowing for more actual conversation.

I think the most confusing idea for newcomers is federation. You and I, we’re on lemmy.world, which is kind of like Reddit, but we’re connected to a million other servers. Some of them are other servers like Reddit, kind of like if you could comment on Reddit posts from Digg. Some of them are not, kind of like if you could comment on Reddit posts from Twitter, or Instagram. Every instance has a little different culture — lemmy.world is the “default” instance so our culture is pretty dilute, but some other instances have very strong cultures, for instance the stridently communist lemmy.ml server.

Welcome! The rules are made up and the points don’t matter, other than that be cool to other people unless they’re a dick first. You can block users or communities you don’t want to interact with, and once you’ve been around awhile you may want to consider moving from world to another instance if you want to see a different local, to see instances blocked by world, or if your administration preferences align better with a different instance. People can see who votes for what at lemvotes.org and mod logs are public too.

Welcome River

I haven’t seen any rules as such but there might be some guides on how a fediverse works.

Its not really a Karma driven place, Its quite chill, a little boring for some. Niche communities are very slow here, you often wont get a quick response or much engagement. Its not personal its just how things are. It’s almost the opposite of reddit in some ways.

If there is something you are passionate in there is lots of opportunity to contribute to smaller communities or even start a new one.

Tailoring what you see takes a bit of tinkering, some adding, some blocking. You can also block individuals. If you can get past the initial slowness, its quite a nice social spot.

Don’t take anyone from hexbear or .ml seriously. They are crazy little rascals.

First of all: Welcome. There isn’t a rule regarding karma, but account age is taken into account when trying to gauge when a question is by a repost-bot.

Outside of that, there are some instances that you are better off blocking in an effort to stay sane. And in an half-assed effort to stay neutral, I will not mention which three instances this might be. You will probably notice yourself is you browse “All” for long enough.

And if you wanna fit in: Installing Linux will solve all the world’s problems. And no matter which distro, half the internet will shit on your choice.

Mostly just check the sidebar of any particular community before you post. There are upvotes/downvotes but no persistent karma. There are some communities and instances that are heavily moderated, try not to be offended if you catch a ban without ever participating its probably not personal. Also you can block users, communities, or entire instances, so you’ll have pretty good control of what you want your feed to look like if you familiarize yourself with those.

Nice to meet you, and hope you enjoy your time here

Tip: You can block all the weird anime/furry posts by blocking the community. You can also block the person posting it, because you know that horny bastard is going to start more weird communities too.

Also, Linux drives a lot of the conversations here.

Assuming you’re on browser and have uBlock Origin installed you can filter out posts based on keywords with a custom filter

lemmy.world##div.post-listing:has(span:has-text(/trump/i))
lemmy.world##div.post-listing:has(span:has-text(/maga/i))
lemmy.world##div.post-listing:has(span:has-text(/republican/i))

And so on…

Just note that filters like “ICE” block every post with a word in it that contains those letters. You can prevent false positives by adding spaces on both sides of the word but then it doesn’t trigger if the post title starts or ends with that word. Either way it helps a lot. Half of the threads on my personal front page regularly get filtered out.

Am I even allowed to create a thread even though this is my first time here?

Yep.

Or are there rules like Karma points, like in Reddit?

Nope. Just avoid acting like if you knew everything better when you don’t. It’s ok to be a newcomer and to make mistakes, as long as they’re only mistakes.

Any input would be appreciated

Learn to use keywords filtering and maybe limit you home feed to ‘Subscribed’ instead of ‘All’. That will limit the content to whatever is being posted in those communities you’re subscribed to. Removing all the rest. In my case it helps making sure I don’t see much (no memes, barely anything political and barely any news beside the few niche topics I’m interested in).

Also, don’t be afraid to block people when you realize they’re becoming a nuisance. Your time is precious, or it should be, don’t waste it with people that just wish to trigger you. I certainly don’t hesitate myself.

Thanks. And nice meeting you all!

Nice to meet you and welcome, obviously :)

Greetings and salutations!

1. Take some time to add & block communities according to taste.

2. Know up front that our resident weirdo instance is known as lemmy.ml. knowbody seems to know its origins for sure, but when you read ridiculous false Russian propaganda, its .ml. The current game is to see how quickly you can get banned from there. It’s like a badge of honour.

3. Unfortunately, there is a lot of bigotry and bad faith discussions on controversial topics, but it settles out quite quickly when you block the bigots and they block you. Then there is interesting convos on a wide variety of topics.

4. The community is generally educated with a high tech and science ratio. You can find a broad spectrum of expertise. Lots of great humour here.

5. Diversity is very welcome by the community and very supportive.