Pick an instance you like browsing locally, and use that, rather than trying to browse as much content as possible. Specialized and niche instances are often way more interesting.

Don’t hesitate to block communities and people if they become annoying to you. People on Lemmy can be very passionate, I would know as I was am sometimes still am included in that set. This combined with how vastly different the culture of each instance can be will lead to strong disagreements sometimes, if you choose to engage do so in good faith but don’t expect to convince anyone of anything lol.

Also you are gonna see some very radical politics if you are not used to that

Floss, drink water and live active!

There’s no algorithm here, so use the different sorting options (for both posts and comments), as well as setting your favourite as default once you see what works for you.

Voting doesn’t tune your algorithm, so I’d say only use downvoting for things that are low quality, trolling, in the wrong sub, duplicate posts, etc. Your votes aren’t private, by the way - although Lemmy itself doesn’t display voters’ names, that info is in every server’s database, and some other software in the Fediverse does show them.

There are quite a few apps available, I like Voyager on Android and I stick to the default website on my computer.

Make use of the block function. Lemmy makes it super easy to block assholes and it just makes life more pleasant. In ~2 years, I’ve amassed a block list of 39 users. It turns out that the vast majority of shittiness comes from a very small number of people.

Use https://lemmyverse.net/ to find communities (subreddits) to subscribe to.

Psst if you want newbie oriented advice ask on [email protected]

One piece of advice as a freebie: Don’t judge yourself too hard if an honest and genuine comment you make now-and-then gets downvoted. Often times the best thing to do is just to move on. You can try to reach a mutual understanding through conversation, but recognize the signs when a back-and-forth isn’t leading anywhere productive and simply back off.

Read the rules for a community before posting or commenting. Take this community, for instance:

3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below

Welcome! My little tips:

You can change your default sorting. I recommend setting it to hot instead of active.

You can filter things by word content in titles. Useful for filtering out some political content if you need a breather.

Have fun! 😁

Main one is applicable to any online space.

Hang back when you check out a new place. Get a feel for things before jumping in because, like reddit, not only does lemmy have a culture, each instance does, and each community on each instance does.

You go to a meme community in one place and crack a dark joke, everyone laughs. You do it on another, you get banned. Yet another and you’re in a flame war.

But it doesn’t just apply to things that controversial. It can be simple things like calling someone dude. Or talking about cars, or dogs, or weather. Sometimes, in some places, there’s a culture that isn’t obvious until you’ve scrolled through for a while. Again, this isn’t specific to lemmy, or even only online.

Always do a vibe check when you’re new somewhere, anywhere.

Visit [email protected]

Just do it!

Steer clear from some instances, or at least, take everything they say with a massive grain of salt. Hexbear, Lemmygrad and lemmy.world come to mind.

If your client allows it, use the tag function to tag the same users from different instances, all the cross posts will become very obvious.

You might get contacted by Nicole, a bot that took a dark turn recently, just report and block.
Also report and block spam, sometimes it’s porn, sometimes it’s gore, other times it’s ads, just report and block.

Don’t be an asshole, and contribute by commenting and posting, or financially supporting Lemmy development or running your instance (if you can afford it obviously). Join smaller instances if you can, the more decentralized, the better. Also given the federated nature of Lemmy, you might see a whole different feed from one instance to the other, it’s nice to have that option.