Hello World!
The last week or so we have seen quite a big 'boost' in the amount of new users signing up so we thought it would be a good time to highlight some things that are of interest to new users.
CODE OF CONDUCT
Lemmy World is not a free speech instance, there are a couple of ground rules that need to be followed. If you're new, I would advise you to read our Code of Conduct.
NEW USER QUESTIONS
If you are new to the fediverse as a whole, it might all be a bit overwhelming. What is Lemmy? What is federation? What even is an instance? For those questions I would suggest you have a look at the getting starting guide. It should cover most of your questions.
STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?
You can head over to the !support@lemmy.world community. This community should be used for questions regarding Lemmy World and is not the support community for the Lemmy software this site uses.
Our Admin @quinten recently made a post covering the most recurring questions there too. Read about that here.
ALTERNATIVE USER INTERFACES
Lemmy World hosts a few custom User Interfaces which give you a completely different experience both on the desktop as on mobile.
- https://a.lemmy.world - Alexandrite is a beautiful and convenient desktop-first alternate web UI for Lemmy. Official site https://alexandrite.app
- https://p.lemmy.world - Photon A sleek client for Lemmy with powerful mod and admin tools. The only alternative client with feature parity to the official client. Official site https://phtn.app
- https://m.lemmy.world - Voyager was one of the first alternative UI's that became available. Optimized for Mobile. Official site https://vger.app
- https://old.lemmy.world - a familiar desktop experience for lemmy. Official site https://mlmym.org
THIRD PARTY APPS
There are a lot of Third Party apps available for Lemmy. From Paid to Open Source, you will find something that suits you easily.
For a complete list of apps have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ (Thanks Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de).
EDIT: Updated the apps list. Also some more interesting links in @otter@lemmy.ca's post here: https://lemmy.world/comment/3962001
EDIT 2: Instead of https://photon.lemmy.world you can now just go to https://p.lemmy.world. You can thank @Rootiest@lemmy.world laziness for that.
So, on that topic of "security" - just remember that whenever you post, your post is essentially sent to every "instance" that is federated (and listening for the community you posted to). Each instance is it's own server running it's own version of an activitypub implementation (lemmy, mastadon, etc).
So on lemmy.world that means your post is sent to literally thousands of servers that you cannot directly influence. If you delete a post, a request is made to those servers to also delete the post, but if that instance is modified or unavailable when the request is sent (it'll re-try, but there's a limit how many times), then it's possible your post will not be deleted and you'll never know.
Keep in mind this also means that anyone, say a government or private company, can establish an instance, federate, and receive the posts of everyone. Their instance may be nearly completely invisible - so you won't know they're collecting that information.
However, lemmy stores and sends almost no information about any user. A user profile does not contain IP address or country or anything. All of that stays in the server logs of the instance you originate from, and never enters the database. So your "true" personal information isn't shared, but your account name, and a link to your account, and the post content (whatever text you add) is shared.
Lastly, images tend to be shared. Lemmy uses "pict-rs" which is a FOSS image hosting server, and when an instance receives a federated post, if there is an image in the "URL" field, then it will ask pict-rs to download that image to its server for easier serving to its users.
Great point, however, I would rather have my posts be sent to like minded peers than to some walled-garden company like Reddit. Also, what data would any supposed malicious instance get that isn’t already available to the public? As for account names, text and images from posts, etc. aren’t these the very definition of social media? What kind of social media is not sharing text or images anyway?
Yep, I don't disagree, just wanted to make it clear what is shared and what isn't. I suppose if you don't like people training AI on the text you write, then you may not like that they could gather it with literally no effort. Most other sites would require that they put some effort either into web scraping, using an api to request the post, or just buy the content in some text dump format.
But ya, I mean, this is a minor difference between platforms, overall.