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
- A detailed guide on how Lemmy works
- A quick overview of 'the Fediverse'
- 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 [email protected]. You can also ask about communities in places like [email protected].
We also encourage you to check out [email protected], so that others can help you / learn from your questions.
Welcome to Lemmy :)
I'm happy to see new users joining Lemmy and every instance out there big and small.
One thing everyone should consider and think of is .... funding and supporting the Fediverse.
Every new user should consider and think about supporting the fediverse through a donation as they use this new community in order for it to remain free to use, open and freely available for everyone. We all like to believe that these things can be just free to use without any of us having to pay for any of it. We also like to think that people just magically and without reward or compensation just work in the background for free to keep all this software, hardware, equipment and organization running.
We don't have to spend a fortune to keep funding these projects, but we should contribute something to it even if it is a small amount. If thousands of users spend a dollar, then it would add up to thousands of dollars to keep this whole system well funded. I know I've chatted with a few of the instance owners and have read what developers have written in the past ... many of them have well paying jobs and have commercial work themselves that they do and they enjoy doing the work on Lemmy as either a hobby or passion project. However, I also know that as the popularity of these platforms grow, expenses add up for more hardware requirements, new hardware requirements, software management, security management and even having people monitoring everything online around the clock. Eventually, no matter how you cut it ... work, time, effort, equipment all ends up costing money to someone at some point. And those costs only increase as popularity grows. And those payments have to come from somewhere.
Donating a little bit and funding even just a little from everyone should be a new norm we should all accept. Otherwise, any new social media we create, no matter how open source we want it to be will slowly just be affected by corporate rot and get taken over again by those who would like to lock everything behind a wall and make the most money from it.
Donating to Lemmy.ca (run by the non-profit Fedecan)
https://fedecan.ca/en/donate
Donating to the Lemmy Software developers
https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Donating to The Fediverse Foundation
https://fediverse.foundation/en/spenden/
But also ... Donate to the instance you are on and support the people who maintain your instance.