Also, before posting on a community, make sure to skim the community info, rules are found there. This one seems to not be intented for support questions, usually they are named “Meta” or something similar.

If you use/want to use mobile, find a good client and for for relevant advice on the menus and UI for that client. Personally use Jerboa, but doesn’t matter which popular one you use.

Browse the all feed of your instance and start subscribing to communities you like.

please remember your data in the 'verse is generally public, including your voting history.

You just posted, so first step achived.

@azriel welcome! I see you made your first post okay!

I think if you’re on lemmy you post as threads in various communities. (Kbin/mbin also posts shortform blogs that are more like mastodon and interface with it). You can also create your own communities on most instances.

The easiest way to find communities when you’re first starting is to either join from all or to use the Communities tab and search.

Worth noting that it doesn’t really tell you how many people are subscribed to a community, only how many subscribe from your own instance, so you can’t always tell what is active until you get there.

If you want a list of things to search for, one good starting place is the lists at kbin.social/magazines/collections, just copy and paste what interests you into blahaj community search.

Use lemmyverse.net to find interesting communities and instances.

There are a couple of communities focused in finding other communities, like
!communitypromo@lemmy.ca !newcommunities@lemmy.world !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl

And general fediverse news:
!fediverse@lemmy.world
!fediverse@lemmy.ml

Contribute to communities you like even if they’re kinda empty. The important part is to get the conversation moving in a lot of these places, and someone has to start that.

Also remember to play around with different sorting algorithms. If active is getting stale, try hot. If you aren’t seeing enough small communities, try scaled. I also like using Top X Hours, from 6 to 24.

Welcome! When you say you’re already used to microblogging, are you already familiar with mastodon and firefish?

If you are looking at microblogging in the feddiverse, then Mastodon is probably a good alternative.

One thing to note about the feddiverse, it is more public than most social media, anyone can set up an instance, and on that instance they set their own rules.

There is little stopping an instance from ignoring requests form other instances to delete or edit a comment.

Some instances of Lemmy also shows more information than what you might expect, kbin for example shows who has up/downvoted individual comments, for example.

So expect that anything you put on the feddiverse will stay public forever and act accordingly.

Not a very in-depth guide, but more of a “cliff notes” kind of answer:

• There are many lemmy servers (referred to as instances). These are connected together, so you can view content of one instance, even though your username belongs to a different instance.

• Instance admins set their own rules. This includes refusing to federate with other instances for reasons that can be ideological, concern of quality, or anything else really.

• It doesn’t really matter that much which instance you join. It mostly boils down to if the instance has a strong ideological lean that you may or may not agree with (such as lemmygrad), whether they allow nsfw content, and overall what kind of rules they enforce. Personally I use feddit.nl for no particular reason other than being popular enough to have a reasonably broad userbase and stability. Some instances also have automated censorship of certain words or phrases.

• Note that multiple communities can have the same name, as they’re on different instances. This tends to result in one “main” community as well as a handful of smaller less active ones. When posting or looking for a community, you most likely want to make sure you do so in the larger ones. There’s nothing wrong with being subscribed to several seemingly identical communities.

Despite the fact that this isn’t Reddit, I’d recommend you peruse the “Reddiquette” guide. It’s a very good code of conduct for using this style of forum.

Big difference between microblock like Calckey or Xitter and threaded conversation like Lemmy or reddit is that, here you post in a community to trigger a discussion. For example if you want to talk about rpg you go to !rpg@ttrpg.network and if you want to talk about world news you go to !world@lemmy.world and so on. The great part is that you’ll interact way more than with just people following you.

If you’re interested by the micro-blog feature, check mbin which has threaded conversations and micro blogs together (and of course fully compatible with lemmy).

The big difference between lemmy and microblogging is lemmy is organized by topic, not by people. You don’t follow people, you follow communities (that are each based around a topic). And if you want to post something, you find a community around that topic (or create one if it doesn’t exist).

Have fun!