There are a few users joining now every day, and I was thinking it would be nice with some short introductions, if you want to. :)

I for one has grown really tired of what social media is today, and I wanted to try out alternatives where people can actually relax and communicate without being tracked and subjected to horrible ads. Since im a technical guy who currently works in devops, I figured I would start https://lemmy.today, and try to be of service to the community in that way.

Im so tired of internet ads, and I have installed https://pi-hole.net as a network ad blocker at home. So this means my entire family benefits also (everyone on the wifi). Its super interesting to watch how windows and mac machines are constantly calling home, reporting activity, even when the devices are idle. I recommend you guys to do the same if you have the know-how.

Im a long time linux user, and even though it has its frustrations sometimes, specially with screen sharing, its worth it for me to just feel like I own my computer and whats running on it.

So I guess thats a little bit about me. I would love to hear from you guys if you feel confident making a post and share who you are and why you got interested in Lemmy. And also why you are looking for alternatives to reddit. :)

Thank you!

Due to current migration from reddit and lots of signups on Lemmy instances, you may get temporary errors when trying to subscribe to their communities.

Lemmy.ml also currently have their homepage down and you get this message trying to visit it:

404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site? reason: Unexpected token 'T', "Timeout oc"... is not valid JSON

So try to subscribe to communities from other instances if you get errors trying to subscribe to theirs, and then try again later.

Just wanted to write this so new users dont get confused by the errors. They are not related to this instance.

You may have noticed we dont have many local communities here. Its partly because we are quite new, and partly because there are so many good communities on other instances.

You are free to create communities on this instance, but since we are small right now, they wont have a lot of discussions in the beginning.

The best part about Lemmy being federated is that you can subscribe to any community on any other instance and take part in discussions right from this instance, without actually having an account on that instance.

How to subscribe to communities on other instances

Easiest way right now is to open a new tab in your browser, go to https://lemmyverse.net/communities and do this:

• Click on the link under each community you want to join (like !technology@beehaw.org) to copy it into your clipboard.

• Click the search button in the upper right area here on https://lemmy.today

• Paste the link into the search box and click Search.

It may say "No results" but wait for like at least 5 seconds. It sometimes takes time for it to show up.

Sometimes you get a lot of results because its mentioned in discussions that will also generate search hits. The link you are looking for looks like this, as an example:

Technology@lemmy.ml - 1 subscriber

• Click on the link and in the Sidebar to the right, there is a Subscribe button. Hit that and now you are subscribed. Now you will start seeing new content filling your feed here on https://lemmy.today.

If you have any questions, just ask!

If you decided to join this instance, I just wanted to say welcome and hope you have a good time!

There are some basic rules in place but it basically boils down to being a nice person. This instance is located in the US because I figured it would be a fast location for most people.

We dont have many local communities but feel free to create new ones if you want. Otherwise you can just subscribe to any community from any instance from here as well. There is another post here how to do that.

Enjoy and have a good time!