New to Lemmy

No special rules. Just be mindful of your instance rules and community rules, but I myself have never run into surprising edge cases.

The rules for your post are the union of:

• The instance hosting your account to which you agreed when you registered.
• The instance hosting the community to which you are posting, which all communities on that instance are supposed to follow.
• The rules of that community.

It’s like posting to a mailing list. You have to obey the rules of your email provider, the service hosting the mailing list, and the list itself. That’s about it. In practice, this works very well and mostly reduces to the rules of the community which are conveniently provided in the sidebar or community description.

Block early, block often - people are not always nice on the internet:-).

There are many unwritten rules. One is that Lemmy.ml will ban you for saying anything critical of Russia, China, or North Korea - but they won't tell you that straight-up, you are somehow supposed to "just know".

Likewise on midwest.social you can be banned for downvoting a post or comment by the admin. Most admins are not that way, but that one is.

If any of that sounds bad to you then you may want to avoid communities on either of those instances.

Lemmy.ca though is a very nice instance - good choice:-).

You might also check out PieFed - it hasn't caught up to having as many features as Lemmy yet, but in many ways it has already surpassed it, and in particular the categories of communities can help you find communities to subscribe to with your lemmy.ca account.

Browsing by Local on Lemmy.ca is another great way to find communities that you may like. Also you can click the Communities at the top of your page, make sure it is set to All, and search for what you are looking for across the entire Threadiverse. Those stats can be misleading though, as sorting by total users disregards people that have abandoned old communities (especially happens on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world) but without "unsubscribing" - "Active Users" is a better metric, or just click each one and you'll quickly see how active the community is.

Welcome to the Threadiverse!:-)

Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in

• !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
• !communitypromo@lemmy.ca

Don't be an asshole.

Don't let assholes bait you.

Don't trust the fediverse chick.

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The block button is a great tool.

Welcome!

Welcome! Here's some communities you might enjoy:

Writing:

• !journaling@sh.itjust.works
• !writingprompts@literature.cafe
• !justonesentence@lemmy.world

Carpentry:

• !woodworking@lemmy.ca

Photography:

• !photography@lemmy.world
• !analog@lemmy.world - film photography.

Gardening:

• !houseplants@mander.xyz
• !gardening@lemmy.world

Guitar:

• !guitars@lemmy.world

Biking:

• !bicycles@lemmy.ca
• !micromobility@lemmy.world