My current task is to improve the Lemmy documentation, particularly to explain things better for people who are new to Lemmy and the Fediverse. For this I would like to know if there are any things that were unclear when you first joined (or even still unclear now).

To give you some idea, these are the pages which I plan to write for the first section, with average users in mind:

  • Getting started (choose an instance, register, follow, setup profile, start posting)
  • What is federation
  • Moderation
  • Censorship resistance
  • Votes and ranking
  • Media (Markdown, images, links)
  • Other features (theming, language tags, …)

Besides this I also plan to improve other parts of the documentation, to add things like documentation for the HTTP API (currently only exists for websocket), a guide to run Lemmy with TOR, and explanation of community/site options. Is there anything else where documentation is missing or requires clarification?

By the way, just like other parts of Lemmy the documentation is open source, and you are welcome to open pull requests with improvements.

  • nutomicOPAEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    Communities work in the same way as users, so like you can have @alice@mastodon.social and @alice@lemmy.ml which are completely independent from each other, its the same way with !popular_community@lemmy.ml and !popular_community@feddit.de. The software platform doesnt make any difference. The reason for this is that the ID of a federated user or community is not just the name, but the name@instance.

    It also makes sense to include more documentation links on the website.

    • rhymepurpleEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      That aligns with how I thought communities should work, but I also thought I’ve seen behavior on the web app/website that differed from that at some point. Maybe I’m misremembering or the situation was slightly different and didn’t pay close enough attention to realize what was happening (eg a post in !popular_community@lemmy.ml that mentions !popular_community@feddit.de or just searching for popular_community and seeing posts from multiple instances’ popular_community).

      Hopefully the feedback in this thread is helpful! It seems like there are some good recommendations.

      • nutomicOPAEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Sure if you only search popular_community then the results will include anything that matches the string. And yes its definitely helpful.