this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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Lemmy.ca's Main Community

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161 users here now


Welcome to the lemmy.ca/c/main community!

All new users on lemmy.ca are automatically subscribed to this community, so this is the place to read announcements, make suggestions, and chat about the goings-on of lemmy.ca.

For support requests specific to lemmy.ca, you can use [email protected].


founded 4 years ago
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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

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:

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 :)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 days ago (7 children)

Hey so as a Canadian, we are about to get attacked by our long time ally and the worlds military superpower. We are probably going to be steamrolled, and then become second class citizens in the Trump dictatorship cult. Am I allowed to say violent things about how that makes me feel? Or will I get banned, like on reddit?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

There's one way to find out.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Thank you for Lemmy.ca :) Go #TeamCanada

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Is there any interest in taking donations on Librapay or Open collective again?

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Another question: My email notifications take me to lemm.ca... is there any way to be directed to https://alex.lemmy.ca/lemmy.ca? Something in my settings maybe?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oooh, that's a good feature request but not something we could easily do.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No worries, I was just wondering if it was already available and I couldn't find it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you're on desktop, it might be possible to set up a JavaScript bookmarklet for that. I can take a look tonight.

You would still open the lemmy.ca link first, but you wouldn't need to modify the URL manually. You would click on the bookmarklet

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Thanks, but I don't want to put you through all that trouble. I'm guessing you're busy enough already. I'm also getting used to lemmy.ca... starting to feel more at home :)

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

Glad to be here. I wanted to get off Reddit for obvious reasons.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I find it way more easy to have civil interactions with people here. On reddit, I would either get ignored or discussions would turn to shit. Lemmy is actually way more fun to use, it just need a bit more of content.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well, well, ah fuck it, we'll probably rejoin in a few years with fewer concessions and I'll have to listen to even more nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

You should ditch the freedom units for KM/h too... If not, pretty soon it'll be color, neighbor, trunk, etc.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

No, just a joke.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thank you for hosting and for all your work! I am excited to see this community grow. I have already seen a couple of posts on Canadian reddit communities where people name dropped lemmy.ca. It'd be interesting to maybe do a census once the signups stabilize to see how much the demographic changed. (I saw that there was one made in 2023).

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Totally!

We were planning to do another census this winter, but we got busy with the new servers and spinning up new platforms.

You might have seen other comments asking about Pixelfed and Friendica. Pixelfed is to instagram in the way that Lemmy is to Reddit, and we're in the process of setting up a Canadian instance of Pixelfed right now. If all goes well, we may get more new people joining through there

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Welcome!

A social network is created by our collective social interaction. We're still small, so your posts, comments and upvotes matter. Don't just lurk, if you can. Every upvote counts! 😊

This one's ours.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

Lurking has been my primary activity on Reddit. I shall try to contribute more.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

Glad to be here! As Reddit keeps enshittifying, and the boycott USAmerica movement gains momentum, hoping more folks migrate over.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Woo! I'm from .world but wanted to make an account here too :D

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

First of all, thanks for all the work you do. I lived almost 10 years in Canada and having an account here makes me feel warm inside (not on the outside :-) ).

Any idea why the recent influx of new users? May it have anything to do with Reddit planning to put some subreddits behind a paywal?

Thanks again!

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Welcome! :)

Going off of what people have mentioned in the registration applications, it is a combination of

  • wanting to support Canadian, and avoiding American tech companies (due to tariffs and other concerns)
  • concerns with how big tech has changed for the worse these past few months
  • Reddit's recent actions, such as banning (and then reversing) a bunch of communities and the recent paywall announcement
  • learning about it for the first time and being excited about the concept

The first point is why lemmy.ca has seen more relative growth this week than the others, but a lot of fediverse instances have seen growth recently

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

All of the above for me!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

First off, this is great... thanks to everyone who's helped put all this together! It's a relief to finally have a Canadian alternative! And then can someone please explain to me (like I'm 5) what an "instance" is exactly?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

For sure! If it helps, we put together this page on what the word means more generally (for all types of fediverse websites, and not just Lemmy). The infographic style images might be helpful

https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started

For lemmy.ca specifically, you can think of the entire website as being one 'instance' of a larger network of similar websites. It is possible to shut down the 'federation' and just exist as our own isolated forum (similar to Reddit), but that defeats the purpose of running this kind of website.

This page should also help you see how it affects a Lemmy website like ours

https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/detailed-overview

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Wow, you guys have really done a terrific job on those guides!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks, that helps! Sorry if this is a stupid question or not worded correctly: In this larger network, of which lemmy.ca is one "instance", are all instances Canadian?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Nope, lemmy.ca is Canadian and so is another big Lemmy instance called sh.itjust.works. There are also lots of smaller instances that are by Canadians. Since anyone can set up an instance, more technical users (with a background in that kind of thing) have set up instances for themselves or their friends / family. A university or local government could also set one up.

But the rest of the network is vast. A lot of the other Lemmy instances (ex. feddit.uk, jlai.lu) are European, aussie.zone is Australian, etc. Many of the instances are generalist instances not focusing on any location (lemmy.world, lemm.ee, etc) or topic specific (programming.dev is focussed on that).

I hope that's not too much information, I'm excited is all :)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Lol, not too much info at all... I'm excited too! I mean, this really is amazing. I'm still using Reddit right now, but weaning myself off by the day... it always takes me a bit of time to adjust to new websites. But Reddit's been a big one lately... with everything that's going on, I couldn't figure out where else we could all meet to continue organizing or even just chat... and suddenly here it is, lemmy! Anyhow, thanks for that explanation, well put and understood! Go lemmy! :)

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

If you think of the "fediverse" as being like email, an instance would be like an email provider. So you can get an email address from google, protonmail, microsoft, etc, but you can still communicate with other accounts from any of the providers via the standardized protocol. In the same way you can join any particular instance and communicate with other instances.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

Perfect, I get it now, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Welcome new users! You've made an excellent choice.

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