Block everyone! Block every instance! Block me! Block yourself!

Or maybe… just spend some time using the platform until you start to get a feel for the vibe. If you can bear to listen to opinions that don’t already align with your own, you’ll probably find that most people are pretty chill and discussions are mostly pretty civil. Disagreement is not the same thing as hostility or trolling. I’ve never blocked anything on this platform and I still find it to be miles better than reddit in terms of vibes. Rather than preemptively curating your feed based on whatever someone else’s idea of bad content is, you can form your own opinions. Block if you want, but you can also just… not engage.

There’s a lot of leftist spaces around here. I don’t mean liberal in the USA left, I mean actual socialist, communists, and anarchists. Most are fine with discussion but read the rules first. They’re usually in the side bar.

We like beans and soapy tits.

Welcome.

You may find stronger opinions here, and you may find them more popular than you’d expect.

It’s more leftist than Reddit, but just as insufferable.

People around here really love Linux.

Not saying it’s a bad thing. Linux is great.

But people around here reeeealy love Linux.

Be aware that many of the instances (ml, hexbear, etcetera) can be rather full of authoritarian leftists. Politically, there are few far-right people, but quite a few authoritarians and quite a few anarchists. That said, not everyone on ml is a tankie.

Welcome! The first thing to know is that lemmy is a software used by multiple instances (servers) that may or may not talk to each other.¹ Each instance has its own rules and culture. (It is a good idea to create an account on 2-3 instances and see which one’s atmosphere you prefer.) Some general pointers would be:-

• Votes don’t matter. Some instances don’t even have them.
• Since there is no centralised control, people will be blunt. Don’t worry about it.
• However, some things are forbidden in certain instances. Your instance, lemmy.world, forbids any discussion of file sharing. Lemmy.ml censors bad language. Hexbear may or may not officially have a ban on sexism / homophobia / transphobia, but the userbase makes sure that any offendors are bullied into silence.
• We generally like to talk about Linux and other computer stuff, bemoan the sad state of the world, and hate on cars.

¹ For example, of the ‘big four’ instances, the other three federate with lemmy.ml since it is the developers’ own instance, and lemmy.world talks to sh.itjust.works, but lw and sjw don’t talk to hexbear.net (pre-emptively, as a last resort).

Don’t use /s here.

We are adults and can tell sarcasm without training wheels.

Might want to block the .ml instances if you don’t want to see too much weird chinese propaganda… (Tankies are weird).

Beans and powdered milk are important.

You should probably block all the instances with “nsfw” in the name. It’ll remove a lot of the spammy pornographic imagery.

My 2 cents: Don’t be afraid to use the “block community” and curate your “home” from time to time, don’t keep it static. There are a lot of awesome things here that can get buried easily.

Be wary of tankies. What are tankies? It’s a pejorative term for authoritarian communists who will claim Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin have done nothing wrong. They also support modern day Russia even though they’re supposedly a liberal democracy because they’re likely Russian psy ops guys.

We’re still a pretty small community here and you’ll see a lot of familiar usernames but you’ll eventually fit right in to our tapestry of performative outrage and bickering. Depending on your home instance, you may not be able to see all the fediverse communities. I recommend hopping around until you find one that fits your style, like dbzer0.