Welcome to all users, new and comparatively old!

Our Lemmy instance is starting to grow, and Lemmy as a whole is growing like crazy. You’ll surely have questions, so I’ll try to preemptively answer them, and if your question isn’t covered then feel free to reply!

You might prefer a video, so have a look at this one that @[email protected] has suggested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6xCw9zb5kw

What is Lemmy, anyway?

Lemmy is like reddit meets email. Anyone who signs up to email can contact anyone else using email, which is different to Reddit, where you can only sign up and interact on Reddit.com. Lemmy allows different sites to all host independent communities which also seamlessly connect to each other.

For more, see How does this all work, anyway?.

Is this the right server for me?

Largely, It doesn’t matter! Seriously! Ok, there are some small differences, but effectively (like email) it doesn’t matter where you sign up. We are aiming for an NZ audience, so if you’re not from NZ then perhaps search the Instance list to try to find one for your location, or for a topic that interests you. It doesn’t matter, you can still subscribe to communities here and take part in discussions!

You can post, up/downvote, and reply to content on any server. Think of it like the difference between signing up with Outlook or Gmail, it’s a little different but in the end, it doesn’t really matter.

There are a few caveats:

• Lemmy.nz doesn’t allow users to create communities, and Lemmy doesn’t currently have the ability to let users create communities on another instance. If creating a community is important to you, then consider creating your account on the instance you want to create a community on.
• If someone else from your server has found a community on another server, it makes it easier for others on the same server to find. So if you’re not so technical, it may be easier to pick a server that has a decent number of users. Lemmy.nz has enough that most communities are already synced here, but you may occasionally find ones (especially brand new ones) that aren’t.
• Medium sized is best. The giant lemmy servers can be slow, have more downtime because they are targeted for attacks, and in general can struggle with the number of users. Plus the idea of Lemmy is to not centralise too much on only one or two servers, but to spread out. Very small instances can mean the “Local” feed isn’t useful, and can make it harder to find new communities. I feel Lemmy.nz is a nice sweet spot. We have enough users to make finding content easy, our Local feed has NZ content so it’s easy to find, and we are small enough that we don’t get targeted for attacks very often, and have a generally speedy experience.

How can I see posts from all of Lemmy?

On the home page, there are three options for the kind of posts you see:

• Subscribed: Posts from Communities you are subscribed to (similar to reddit’s home page)
• Local: Only posts on our server. There’s no similar concept from reddit, but think of this as like a multi-reddit that shows content from all the communities on just the lemmy.nz server.
• All: Posts from all of the Lemmy communities that our server knows about - sort of like reddit’s /r/all

You can set a default in your account settings - on the website, click your name at the top right, choose “Settings”, then change the setting “Type”.

How do I find new communities to subscribe to

You can see a list of communities that lemmy.nz knows about by clicking “Communities” at the top of the website, then choose “All”.

There is also a list of NZ-related communities.

All alternate (and often easier) way is to use the community browser someone set up at https://lemmyverse.net/communities At the top right of the page, click the house to set your home instance. Enter “lemmy.nz”. Now the links to the communities will take you to the lemmy.nz page where you can subscribe.

There is also a community browser as https://browse.feddit.de but this isn’t as fancy.

Where should I create a post about X?

At the top of the page, click “Communities”. On the “Local” tab, you can see all the communities that we have created on our server. For the most part these are all NZ related. For example, regional communities, NZ Politics, New Zealand (for NZ related posts not otherwise covered), and an Off Topic community for things that may not be NZ related but you’d still like to discuss with an NZ audience.

If you want to create a post about something not NZ related, consider posting to another instance. See above for how to find communities. For example, you can post to [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected]. Note there are some quirks with links at the moment, which brings me to:

Something isn’t working right

Lemmy is a platform, and is not made by lemmy.nz. The developers are working like crazy trying to fix bugs and improve performance, but ultimately there will be some quirks.

If you are finding something working a bit weird, feel free to create a post in [email protected]. But in most cases it won’t be something we can fix, though it’s still worth creating a post because others may have helpful suggestions for you!

If Lemmy.nz isn’t run by Lemmy itself, who owns it?

I have set up Lemmy myself. Most Lemmy instances survive on donations, and this one is no exception. The hosting and other support is being provided by fediservices.nz, and you can donate to them here. I’m not affiliated with them, but they have reached out to offer their support.

I want a community about X, how do I create it?

Some Lemmy instances allow users to create their own communities, we do not. This is mostly because we don’t want a bunch of empty communities making it harder to find the ones in use, and also because there is a high risk of duplicate communities across Lemmy. In the same way [email protected] and [email protected] are different email addresses, there is nothing stopping us creating [email protected]. However, this wouldn’t make sense. If every server made their own copy then no one would talk to each other. So rather than letting people make their own communities, instead create a post requesting it and as a community we can discuss the idea and either create it, or point you to an existing community that would be more appropriate.

End of FAQ

Feel free to reply with any questions, and I can update this post if it seems appropriate.

You can also create a post in [email protected] if that seems more appropriate.