Lemmy’s UI seems a bit unintuitive so I’ll try to explain some things. So let’s get started by walking through how to:

1. Create an account
2. Find a community to join
3. Reading a Post
4. Add a comment on an existing post
5. Create a post in a community
6. Other Gotchas I’ve Found

Create an Account

At the top right, click “Sign Up”.

Now pick a username (this can’t be changed!), give your email if you want to be able to reset your password, and write a short thing about what you like about the area. This is to help keep the bots at bay.

Find a Community

There are two types of communities to join: Local and Federated. Local communities are hosted on this server, Federated communities are hosted on other servers.

Joining a Local Community

To find a local community on this instance, click the “Communities” button at top

Now a list shows up with the local communities, how many users, posts, and comments are in each. For this exercise, lets join the !introductions community. Click “Introductions”

Now click “Subscribe” on the right side.

Creating a Post

Navigate to the !introductions community from earlier, on the right side, click “Create Post”

Now fill in a title and content. If you want to share a link, you can paste in a URL to the URL field, give a title for the post, and write a blurb about the link.

Adding a Comment

If you navigate to the !internal_testing community, I have created a Testing thread. Click the “Testing Thread” link.

After the post contents you should see a text above other people’s comments. You can write text for your comment, then click “Post” to submit.

Other Gotchas

Issue: Unable to navigate/click links Workaround: It seems if any input fields have been modified, Lemmy won’t let you navigate. Refreshing the page appears to make things work.