this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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Lemmy.ca's Main Community
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Welcome to the lemmy.ca/c/main community!
All new users on lemmy.ca are automatically subscribed to this community, so this is the place to read announcements, make suggestions, and chat about the goings-on of lemmy.ca.
For support requests specific to lemmy.ca, you can use !lemmy_ca_support@lemmy.ca.
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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:
- A quick overview of Lemmy
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- Learn about the non-profit that runs this site
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.
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So, Lemmy is software that lets you build an off-the-shelf content aggregation website, similar to how Wordpress lets you build an off-the-shelf blog. There are dozens of moderate to large websites running Lemmy, and hundreds of small or tiny ones running it.
Each one of these websites can, if the users and admins enable it, subscribe to communities hosted on other Lemmy-based websites, which lets them comment on posts in those communities, or even make their own posts to them.
Because this intercommunication allows users to treat remotely-hosted communities as if they are local to the user's website, it's common for people to think of the network of Lemmy-based websites as a signular entity. In this model, each of the independent websites running Lemmy gets called an "instance".
The same terminology is used for Mastodon-based websites, and other websites that allow for similar auto-syndication of content that creates a simulacrum of a centralized content environment. So, a "Lemmy instance" is a "website running Lemmy that is participating in active content syndication", a "Mastodon instance" is "a website running Mastodon that is participating in active content syndication", etc. You can replace "Mastodon" or "Lemmy" with "mbin", "Friendica", "PieFed", "Misskey", "Hubzilla", "PeerTube", "PixelFed", "BookWyrm", "FunkWhale", "nodeBB", or any number of other website engines that are participating in this type of ecosystem.
So, it sounds (actually, 'reads)' like a treatise written by someone indoctrinated into the 'Linux - C++' ideology (theocracy? The Religion of IT? Way back in the 'olden days', we referred to 'getting a job at IBM' as 'entering the Priesthood' ). The term 'instance' comes directly out of the obscure-to-the-masses lexicon of C++, Please, translate your indoctrinated terminology into something more identifiable and familiar to the masses in order for us plebians to follow it.
Or at least provide a 'definition of terms' translation service, written without any reference to exclusively in-house terminology in the description.
Also, it would be really, really useful to modify the 'messages' coding such that, when clicking to link to the post in 'messages' to see the original post, the reader went directly to their post in the thread, instead of starting at the top and having to scroll through page after page of other irrelevant posts in order to see just the activity on their original post.
That message behavior is more or less what happens in Boost for Lemmy. Whichever app/website you're using can implement that differently.