Probably the biggest issue is getting all the “find a community” stuff together: the communities for new communities, and the crawlers that list communities and let you search them.

It’d be a good idea to have a pinned post to links explaining or guides on how lemmy and the fediverse works.

I used this guides 1, 2, 3 and 4. As someone who didn’t know anything about the Fediverse, it was daunting at first and I delayed creating an account, but it’s hasn’t been as hard as it may seem (at least so far)

Teaching new users how to find, subscribe and be able to post to communities that aren’t on their own instances is the biggest hurdle in the Fediverse I’ve come across so far. To find this community for example, all they have to do is put “!reddit@lemmy.world” in the search box while logged in on their instance and they’ll find it and be able to subscribe. Also getting the idea across that they don’t have to have an account on the instance where their favorite community is in order to subscribe and post there.

Aside from that, maybe a list of communities in the Fediverse that closely match popular subs on Reddit eg: /r/all, /r/worldnews, /r/videogames, etc.

I’m pretty new here and have no real idea what the fediverse or instances really are or how to navigate my way to find communities like I belonged to on R. A brief welcome and a primer to getting started in easy to understand language would have been most appreciated when I first migrated here as well as now as I try to find my way around.

The infographic for the API changes that was circulating reddit seemed to be really good at conveying a message.

This idea might sound farfetched, but what if we had a welcome infographic that basically summed up what Lemmy and the Fediverse is about? So we can catch people up to speed on the lingo we use, how stuff works, and how they can navigate Lemmy

It could explain terms like the fediverse, lemmy, federated, etc. As well as how accounts work on different lemmy servers, apps that can be used to browse Lemmy, etc.

I think whatever guides are given, they need to be simple.

I delayed making the jump to Lemmy for a while because every time I saw someone explain it, they got into all the complexities of the fediverse that weren’t really relevant to me yet, and it seemed like too much trouble.

A list of apps available or under development might be helpful, as well as some simple PWA installation instructions.

I found this diagram useful for picturing the Fediverse vs Reddit:

https://mastodon.online/@binoctdechex/110538120775065728

I wrote this guide for my community.

Feel free to edit it for your own.

As Lemmy is a different beast than Reddit, I feel the need to summarize the Lemmy situation for everyone. Especially with how it affects this community.

1. Federation vs Defederation – This is turning out to be more important than I recognized initially. But not “too important”. As long as Federation works, we’re not supposed to think about it. But… when things don’t work… well… we gotta start talking specifics. The long-story short is that https://lemmy.world is where !realtesla exists, and thus any federation and/or defederation issue that affects lemmy.world will be affecting this community. Keeping track of this will be a pain, but hopefully the lemmy community figures these things out in the long term.

2. https://beehaw.org – Defederated with https://lemmy.world for internet drama/political reasons. In particular, beehaw.org does not want open signups, not until more moderation tools become available. https://lemmy.world is aiming at a Reddit-like open signup scheme, so its fundamentally conflicting with https://beehaw.org’s philosophies. The expectation is for better moderation tools to be invented and eventually allow the two servers to federate again.

3. .18 vs .17 – https://lemmy.world has been hit with a huge number of bot-accounts, so the admins around here have enabled CAPTCHA-enrollment. However, CAPTCHA was broken in .18, so https://lemmy.world has decided to stay on .17. This seems to have broken federation to some extent (not fully decoupled like Beehaw.org… but there’s a HUGE number of glitches occurring right now with .18 instances).

You lemmy.ca users? (I know you exist, we talked on Discord, lol), you’re on .18. You’re gonna get glitches with a .17 instance like Lemmy.world. But Lemmy.world will not upgrade until the promised .18.1 CAPTCHA release.

4. kbin – kbin, especially kbin.social, is entirely different software from Lemmy. There is only one glitch I’m aware of: the Lemmy-post will break if you forget to select a language (ex: “English”) when you write a response to kbin users and/or kbin.social.

5. Search to bring in a community – An interesting “Lemmyism”, is that communities in the Federation don’t exist until a user searches for it. For example, if there is a newCommunity@programming.dev that https://lemmy.world is unaware of, “someone” on the server needs to search for it before the https://lemmy.world server is aware of its existence. This sets off some kind of backend process where the https://lemmy.world server begins to download all the posts / history that makes it possible to subscribe to that community. Eventually, the user needs to subscribe to fully bring the community into lemmy.world. This process can take a long time, minutes or even hours. I don’t know. If anyone is having issues finding a community across the federation, you can message me to help bring it into the https://lemmy.world server. Or message me if you wanna learn how to do it on your own server. I’m still learning the details myself, but its obviously not the easiest process.

That should cover it for now. This federation thing will be a pain to keep track of, but it offers benefits. Lets hope the benefits outweigh the downsides.

Something that needs to be explain as well is how to block instances and communities

I would add the URL link to https://lemmyverse.net/communities, as well. A lot of the Lemmy mobile apps have “Lemmy.ml” as the default Instance login and it’s going to get dogpiled tomorrow if folks don’t have a way to search for their favorite community.

It would be good if there could be an explanation of the different instances and how to pick one that’s right for you.