What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is open source software used for running individually hosted social media networks in the style of Reddit. It is built on the ActivityPub protocol, and is part of the Fediverse.

We wrote this introduction with Apes in mind, but you may also want to check out the introduction and tutorials at join-lemmy.org located at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html

How is Lemmy structured and moderated compared to Reddit?

Lemmy has Instance administrations and Community moderators

The analog is Reddit administrators and Subreddit moderators

Instance admins can perform all mod actions on all communities, just like Reddit admins can perform all mod actions on all subreddits

Meanwhile, Community/Subreddit mods only moderate their community or subreddit

What is the Fediverse?

The Fediverse refers to a collection of social media software which all are open source, independently hosted, and can choose to interact with each other. These software are all built on the same protocol and can interact with each other and share users. When instances opt in to the broader system, they are ‘federated’.

Tips for signing up

When you make an account on a federated Lemmy instance like this one, you can interact with all other instances and communities which are federated. The differences between instances are up to individual instance admins, who decide who can sign up and what content is allowed on their instance along with moderation rules.

https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/signup

When signing up, Lemmy can freeze up if the username you are trying to register already exists or if you are using a password longer than 63 characters long. As detailed in the instance policies, limiting data collection means that no email account recovery is supported. Please ensure that you save your login information somewhere securely such as a KeePass data file. After signing up, there is a verification process which is manual. Our DRS instance admins do their best to check and approve applicants quickly.

Have you reviewed our Instance Policies?

See here: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/1209

TLDR: Treat everything you submit to this instance as public. Instance admins (we) will attempt to reduce data collection as much as practicable, and will maintain open access for anyone to view posts and comments on this instance.

Different clients you can use, and how to set them up

Once you have your account created and approved, you can choose to browse Lemmy through an app or other client. You can find some apps here: https://join-lemmy.org/apps/

Web

https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org

Android

• Connect - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kuroneko.lemmy_connect&gl=us
• Jerboa - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jerboa&gl=us

iPhone

• Voyager app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voyager-for-lemmy/id6451429762
• Alternatively, how to install Voyager (f.k.a WefWef) as a progressive web app on iOS: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/10616
• ...and how to add Lemmy to the iOS home screen: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/4489

👀 Following Superstonk via Lemmy

The lemmit.online instance replicates a number of Reddit subs to Lemmy communities through an automated bot which crossposts content. You can follow those communities through your Lemmy account no matter which instance you signed up on.

For Superstonk specifically, just follow !Superstonk@lemmit.online

For other subs, find the community you are interested in following, and then paste the community’s tag (listed in the community’s sidebar) into the search function on our instance. For example:

How to start a new community on this instance

Click the Create Community option along the top. You’ll need to select the community name, the URL, and optionally can include sidebar content.

On Lemmy, Communities are automatically moderated by the person who creates them. That user can appoint other moderators, pin stickies, and moderate content on that community. It’s very similar to how Subreddits are made and operated.

On the lemmy.whynotdrs.org instance, we welcome all communities who wish to discuss the financial markets and surrounding topics including specific stocks, investing styles, rules and regulations, crypto and web3, and the culture around money itself.

List of non-local communities you may want to subscribe to

You may want to start your Lemmy journey by browsing some of the largest instances and subscribing to some of their communities. These are some of the largest general instances which cover a wide array of topics.

• https://lemmy.ml/
• https://lemmy.world/
• https://beehaw.org/

Each instance has its own user base. Your login credentials on your home instance won’t work anywhere else. If you are using the DRS instance as your home instance, how do you find and subscribe to new communities through your own instance?

How to find new Communities to follow

If you're coming over from Reddit, these three resources can help you find migrations for communities you may have followed on Reddit:

• https://sub.rehab/
• https://redditmigration.com/
• https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subreddit-migration-list-lemmy-kbin-etc.html

For finding new communities, perhaps the easiest way to find instances and communities is to search for them on https://lemmyverse.net/ - at the top of the screen, you can filter for either instances or for communities. This will parse ALL federated instances and their associated communities, and is very robust - it will search titles, domains, and sidebars in order to help you find things you are interested in.

Set your home instance first. At the top right of the screen, hit the house icon and search for your home instance. Here’s how you can select this DRS instance:

Once your home instance is set, you can easily navigate to communities on any instance by clicking the community name, which will be a generated link.

After that, just hit subscribe on the sidebar and you are good to go!

If necessary, you can create and share URLs which will navigate to any community on any instance from any instance following this formula.

https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/c/games@lemmy.world

[home instance url] [/c/] [community name] @ [hosting instance name]

Views (New vs Active, and Subscribed vs Local) and setting your default preferences

Okay! You have found some communities to follow - these could be on your home instance, on one of the largest and universal instances, or niche communities found through the network search at lemmyverse.

Just like with Reddit, you have some choices to make about how you want to interact with the communities you joined. Your main choices are the types of posts to display and the communities to display them from.

Lemmy’s own core developers explain it well here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

Blocking Users, Communities, or Instances which you want to avoid

Each user has the ability to block or hide content from specific users or specific communities.

In the case of users, you can block them in order to avoid seeing comments or posts which they make. Click on a user’s name on a comment or post and you’ll see the option at the top of the screen.

For communities, you can avoid ever seeing their posts on your various feeds. While navigating a community, the option to block it will appear on the right sidebar.

Public Moderation Logs: How they work and how to search them

Lemmy’s moderation logs for all instance administrator actions and community moderator actions are available for public review at all times - and do not require sign up to access.

https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/modlog

Moderation logs are collected together for all federated instances, and so can be difficult to parse in real time without searching for a specific mod. Once you type the name of an individual mod, select them from the dropdown and you can review all mod or admin actions they have taken. Posts which were removed can also be viewed and scrutinized here. There is complete transparency into moderation actions.

• https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/modlog?page=1&modId=2 - admin account admin history
• https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/modlog?page=1&modId=4 - Chives account admin history
• https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/modlog?page=1&modId=487 - Bibic account admin history

Tried a few times uploading different images around 11:55 a.m. central time. Response:

Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image): operation timed out

Uploading an 844 KB image times out with:

{
    "data": {
        "error": "unknown",
        "message": "Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image): operation timed out"
    },
    "state": "success"
}

Tried twice around 8:45 a.m. CST

About 2 months ago I unceremoniously shut down the Mastodon server at www.superstork.org.

I shut down this Mastodon server primarily because nobody was using it. It had no real energy.

I am a fan of Mastodon and I owe Mastodon gratitude for bringing a large amount of energy and life to the fediverse.

I initially set it up at the suggestion of somebody in superstonk, somebody who had concerns about reddit and that subreddit, and I shared those concerns. I had heard of Mastodon, and looked into it, and looked into the fediverse, and immediately I was intrigued, and I was motivated, so I spun up a Mastodon server.

But, evidently, Mastodon is simply not a valid replacement for superstonk / reddit, considering that it is a Twitter clone. It was never meant to be a discussion board. But, at that time, I hadn't even heard of Lemmy, I never gave it much thought at all. At that time, Mastodon was the hotness. Elon Musk had just finalized the purchase of Twitter, and many people had issues with this, and they left and joined Mastodon. This can be seen in usage statistics, such as can be found at: https://fediverse.observer/stats.

But, much has changed over the last year. Eventually, this Lemmy instance came to life, and I have been using it ever since. The Lemmy experience is obviously the appropriate Reddit alternative and not Mastodon.

superstork.org now redirects to gmehydra.org, which lists this Lemmy instance as the one and only current fediverse instance for GME investors.

I think originally I was expecting a bit more enthusiasm towards the fediverse, I expected other people to be as interested in it as I was, but I have learned that people can be very hard to motivate. This is why I put together gmehydra.org, because I was hoping for a large collection of fediverse servers, but they simply never came (yet).

Most people have a tendency, I think, to not want to be the ones to "risk" their personal time and energy as an early adopter of a new idea. Let other people spend their time and energy and figure it out and give it some life, and then once it has some life, maybe then it would be attractive enough to go join.

So, for obvious reasons, Lemmy is the superior practical app compared to Mastodon, for the purposes of GME investors having a place where long form discussions can be had.

Also, side note, I am happy to be moving away from any kind of name that in any way is similar to or might be thought to be associated with "superstonk".
Initially, I grabbed the name superstork because I thought it was kind of a fun and unserious play on the name superstonk. One kind Redditor had previously purchased the domain superstonk.net, and kindly offered to give that domain name to me for my Mastodon purposes. I respectfully declined the offer at that time, as I did not want to be seen trying to take or co-opt the name superstonk for my own purposes, I didn't feel comfortable with it.

Now, a year later, I don't want to have anything at all to do with that "brand". Even if I had wanted to keep the Mastodon instance running, I wasn't really happy with the domain that I had, it was too similar.

---

As we move forward I still expect that the fediverse will continue to grow, and eventually there will be additional instances for the purposes of GME investors, or at least instances that share common purposes.

As for right now, this instance is one of my favorite places in the social media landscape for discussing GME and other related information.

Lemmy is cool. I'm a big fan.

Sure, there are numerous valid criticisms that can be made against Lemmy. However if you add up all the pros and all the cons, what I personally see is a great platform with a ton of long term potential.

It's really exciting to me how any community existing around a specific subject, in this case primarily DRS & GME, can set up their own instance and simply "plug in" to the rest of Lemmy / the fediverse.

This instance currently has around 780 user accounts, and of those, only about 50 monthly active users at this time.

However, the largest community on this instance, drs_your_gme, has a total of roughly 1100 subscribers and 165 monthly active users.

I think this necessarily means that, of all the active users in the drs_your_gme community on this instance, the majority of them are accounts hosted on instances other than this one. Roughly 1/3 from this instance, 2/3 from outside of this instance.

Personally i think that is very cool. It's so powerful!

If we were using some non-federated platform for example, something else other than Lemmy that otherwise serves the functionality that Reddit has, but not federated, not otherwise connected to the fediverse -- we would only have our small little bubble and that's it.

But because of how the fediverse works, we get the benefit of connecting to potentially thousands of additional people, maybe one day millions. We get to enjoy other content on Lemmy, and other Lemmy users get to see our content too, if they so choose.

Sometimes content is posted in the drs_your_gme community that maybe isn't specifically about DRS or GME, but has larger general appeal, and gains the attention of users outside of this instance. I love it when that happens. And of those users, some of them might be totally unaware or otherwise ambivalent towards GME or towards DRS, but by being exposed to this community organically through the natural machinations of the fediverse, they may feel inclined to subscribe here and learn a little bit more about what we like to discuss.

On Reddit, any sufficiently large subreddit that might get a lot of attention, that might make it for example to r/all, Reddit always retains the ability to prevent that exposure from happening, if they want. I can't remember the last time anything at all GME related ever made it to the front page of reddit. Not because the content isn't good enough or popular enough, but I think because Reddit has very specific controls about what does and does not make it onto the front page of r/all.

Here on Lemmy, we have an opportunity to speak our truth and to let it exist without fear of a centralized authority deciding that they don't want our community to have a voice and unilaterally preventing us from having one.

There might be a long ways to go, but as the fediverse grows it will continue to demonstrate its value as a viable alternative social media platform.

Cheers everyone! 🥂

Attempting to upload twice a 774 KB .jpg during Create Post to community DRS Your GME.

Front end red popup:

SyntaxError: Unexpected token 'R', "Request er"... is not valid JSON

Payload response:

Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image): operation timed out

Tried 3 times uploading an image during Create Post.

The error message in the bottom left corner: SyntaxError: Unexpected token 'R', "Request er"... is not valid JSON

Edit 1: Also tried uploading an image via the comment section's GUI, but it also fails with the same error message.

Edit 2: Similar to https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1489

• But not the same as user dcx's comment that it was due to file size greater than 1 meg. The file I'm uploading is 766 KB.
• Tested with 264 KB and 20 KB files, both fail to upload.
• Tested from multiple browsers, upload also fails.