We have gotten a lot of new signups over the past few days, and we’re all very excited to have you joining us! You’ll find that people are more than happy to help you get started and learn how to use the site.

If you feel up for it, you can introduce yourself or ask questions below!

We have put together some resources to help new users get started:

You can also read:

These guides were published very recently, and we will be updating them over time. If you find that something is confusing or missing, please let us know and we can improve them further.

For an organized list of Canadian communities (provinces/territories, Cities / Local , Sports, Schools, BuyCanadian, CanadaPolitics etc.), see this post on !Canada@lemmy.ca. You can also ask about communities in places like !CommunityPromo@lemmy.ca.

We also encourage you to check out !NewToLemmy@lemmy.ca, so that others can help you / learn from your questions.

Welcome to Lemmy :)

  • remotelove@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    Accounts and anonymity?

    For social media, I don’t mind using my real name and email to register as long as only my username shows on posts or image uploads.

    When I upload an image, what can other users see?

  • Soulforged@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Hello! Coming over from Reddit and I’m new to Lemmy. So happy to easily find a Canadian Community!

  • GrizzlyBur@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    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?

  • Dappie@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    5 days ago

    Hi, I’m new to Lemmy Greetings from the Netherlands 🇳🇱🇨🇦🇪🇺

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      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

  • wreckus@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    5 days ago

    Learned about Lemmy recently and I immediately wanted to join so I can get out of Reddit

    Good to be here.

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      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

  • Snowstorm@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • WorkshopBubby@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    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?

    • GrizzlyBur@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      4 days ago

      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!

    • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      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.

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      We’re pretty reasonable with moderation here. The way Lemmy works, mod actions are recorded publicly for transparency. You can access those record 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?

      • wise_pancake@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        “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)

  • steever@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    Is there any interest in taking donations on Librapay or Open collective again?

    • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      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

      • steever@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        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.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • Shadow@lemmy.caMEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      Oooh, that’s a good feature request but not something we could easily do.

        • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
          0·
          7 days ago

          If you’re on desktop, it might be possible to set up a JavaScript bookmarklet for that. I can take a look tonight.

          You would still open the lemmy.ca link first, but you wouldn’t need to modify the URL manually. You would click on the bookmarklet

          • ehpolitical@lemmy.caEnglish
            0·
            7 days ago

            Thanks, but I don’t want to put you through all that trouble. I’m guessing you’re busy enough already. I’m also getting used to lemmy.ca… starting to feel more at home :)

            • Otter@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
              0·
              6 days ago

              That’s very considerate, thank you :)

              I’ve played with bookmarklets before, so it wasn’t too much trouble. I don’t normally use Alexandrite, but from my quick exploration it seems that Alexandrite URLs are very similar to the default ones, where it just appends alex.lemmy.ca/ to the start. If that is the case, the following steps should work. The steps are for Firefox, but it should be similar on other browsers:

              1. Right-click on the bookmark bar and click Add Bookmark
              2. Put anything you want in the name
              3. In the URL field, paste in this block of code:
              javascript:(function(){
    let currentURL = window.location.href;
    if (currentURL.startsWith('https://lemmy.ca/')) {
        window.location.href = currentURL.replace('https://lemmy.ca/', 'https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca/');
    }
})();

              When you are on any lemmy.ca page, clicking on the bookmark should take you to the corresponding alex.lemmy.ca page. You can also make one to go in the opposite direction, with this block of code:

              javascript:(function(){
    let currentURL = window.location.href;
    if (currentURL.startsWith('https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca/')) {
        window.location.href = currentURL.replace('https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca/', 'https://lemmy.ca/');
    } else if (currentURL === 'https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca') {
        window.location.href = 'https://lemmy.ca/';
    }
})();

              Hopefully that works!