Varies wildly from instance to instance. At this point, most instances have their own “culture” and ideological leanings, if you go against your instance’s grain then you will run into more friction. I can help if you give a broad overview of your political leanings and interests, or you can browse the major instances and see which most appeals to you.

I try to be nice to all users.

Even ones who put catsup on hotdogs.

I say somewhat - it really depends on which server you’re on, because that defines the initial community that will be immediately available to you. There’s also plenty of mods and admins that have very pronounced political views and will exercise their power according to them.

I’ve found that the discussion is better here, although slower, and there are far fewer bots and trolls (although Fediverse trolls tend to be heartier and more persistent than their Reddit cousins).

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I’ve found lemmy to be kind most of the time but my original experience coming here was 2 years ago

Lemmy is, in general, very welcoming of newcomers. We are always happy to see one more person escape the hell hole that is reddit. We all hope you have an amazing time here! Though a lot of it depends on what home instance you are on, but feel free to hop around from instance to instance to find one that suits you, or maybe you already feel nice and cozy just where you are.

Completely random, unorganized and improvised tips and tricks and other miscellaneous information

Reminder to use the subscribe button to curate a nice Subscribed feed!

Subreddits here are called “communities”.

Use ! to link to a community. Like so !linux@lemmy.ml.

Need help? Ask something on the adequate support communities, like !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml.

The All feed only shows posts from communities that at least one person from your own instance is subscribed to, so might make sense to look on other instances Local community lists to find a community you might not find on Lemmy’s horrible search function.

You might know on Lemmy, multiple instances share content. This content sharing happens through a proccess called “federation”. When two instances are sharing content, we say they are federated, when they stop sharing content, we say they are defederated (like lemmy.world and lemmygrad.ml).

You might be confused with all the @ everywhere in community names and user names. Let me explain:

Username are structured like so: Username @ instance link.

username@host.instance

And communities much the same way:

communityname@host.instance

If you do not see a @ in a community or username, it means they are on the same instance you are on right now!

There might be duplicate communities of the same topic on different instances, so if you like one, you might want to subscribe to all of them. (There are like… 3 meme communities for example: !memes@lemmy.ml, !memes@lemmy.world, !memes@sopuli.xyz )

Before posting in a community, make sure to read the rules of both the community and the instance it is hosted in.

It is worth noting, though, that due to recent political… events… politically related skirmishes have gotten somewhat more common. Also, as more people join Lemmy, some of them are bound to be morons so… reminder the block button exists if you are not interested in that. Most of the skirmishes are between liberals and Marxist-Leninist.

I hope my unorganized guide might of of some use to you! ( ^ ω ^ )

It’s essential to align with communities that share your perspective, as there’s limited space for meaningful dialogue in some spaces. While some communities foster open discussions, others quickly become hostile to differing opinions, escalating to such an intense level that it almost becomes humorous. Finding the right group where respectful conversation thrives is key.

As long as you are not a bootlicker, you will do fine.

Honestly, it’s been better than Reddit so far, probably because of who’s self-selected into being here. In the long run, I expect it will be the same.

Like someone else said, there’s prominent Marxist-Leninist instances, including this one to a degree, so this probably isn’t the place if you want to talk about your cool new landlord sidehustle (for one example). Most of Lemmy (like everywhere I’ve been, probably even NCD) leans left of the IRL center, but it sounds like that won’t slip you up.

It really depends on the community you’re in.

As others have eluded to, there is a massive glazing for Linux here and any objections to it are usually downvoted.

The same for FOSS services.

It made me ponder how much of an echo chamber we are in. If you think of it like this: Most of the people here are here because we were passionate about a de-federated alternative to Reddit. For me it was over the API changes.

So if you think about being on Reddit already puts you into a small subset of society, then look at how many came here and stayed over the API issue, then we can see that some of the views here are not at all indicative of the world as here we have about 50k MAU (monthly active users).

As an example, I got sucked in my the pro Linux rhetoric and wiped windows from my PC. It did not go as plain sailing as people would have you believe. My reservations were about maintaining the system and just not wanting to have to geek out when I’m not in work. I’m a software engineer so it’s far from a skill issue, but people here will tell you easy to switch and you won’t have any issues which isn’t the case.

It gave me pause for thought to get out of here every once in a while to gauge the actual populations views on something and not just the circle jerk in here.

On the whole though I can get more interaction with people here than on Reddit as there are less people and people seem willing to just chat about anything.

I hardly ever check how old anyone’s account is. I try to be nice to everyone regardless of who they are, and discuss issues rather than posters.

That depends. What operating system do you use?

If you arent homophobic, transphobic, anti-communist, in support of china or russia, in support of israel, religious, in support of non-opensource software, against linux, calling a lot of people nazis, or against murdering, then probably

I agree with most of these, but sometimes it feels like you cant disagree with people without them becoming angry

Lemmy has a hardon for FOSS, and an irrational hatred for windows.

Aside from that, it’s quite nice imo

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