Help and FAQ

• How can I browse WG?

We offer multiple frontends for Lemmy. The default lemmy-ui is what you normally see when viewing walledgarden.xyz from a browser. We also support the MLMYM and Voyager frontends which are accessible from their respective subdomains:

mlmym.walledgarden.xyz

voyager.walledgarden.xyz

There are also a number of excellent apps in your preferred app store including Thunder, Boost, Jerboa, Voyager, and more! Just remember to change your home instance to walledgarden.xyz before logging in.

• How can I find communities that interest me on Lemmy?

Check out our dedicated post for a bunch of options.

• I subscribed to a community but it doesn't show anything/looks dead.

There's a good chance you joined a community on another instance. If you're the first person from our instance to join it there can be a delay before the content starts showing up. Check back in a few minutes and you should see things starting to come in. Be aware that sometimes this process can take significantly longer.

If you're seeing older content in a community but nothing new, it's likely someone else from our instance used to be subscribed there before and unsubscribed. If no one locally is subscribed our instance will stop updating the community until someone resubscribes to it. Communities can die out and instances can shut down though so if you aren't seeing any updates after days or weeks it's likely the community is no longer active.

• I can/can't see a post or comment from another account that I can't/can see here. Why?

It could be a number of things but there are a few likely culprits.

Instances can choose to federate or de-federate with one another for any reason. WG is federated with all other instances with open federation and does not block or de-federate from anyone else. If another instance can't see ours or we can't see them it's likely no one from our respective instances has subscribed to anything from the other.

NSFW and Language settings on your account will also completely hide content from you. Make sure you have your settings adjusted appropriately to be able to see the content you are looking for. It's not uncommon to select every language option to make sure you are seeing everything.

This post will be updated as more topics come up.

Getting Started

We've done our best to get everyone started with the Fediverse by offering some of the most popular communities on Lemmy from our All page, but this is only a tiny fraction of what the fediverse has to offer!

An unfortunate side effect of how federation works is that communities behave like they don't exist until someone from your home instance discovers and subscribes to them. What this means is a lot of the time you won't be able to easily find communities on other instances. If you do find them it's very common for them to appear with no posts/subscribers/etc until someone subscribes and the instances have a chance to start sharing the data. Usually that only takes a few seconds to begin but can sometimes take days or weeks to fully populate if the community is very old or active.

We've cached several thousand Lemmy communities in the database so that most of them will at least show up when you search for them. If you aren't finding what you're looking for there are tools across the Fediverse designed to help.

Outside Resources

Lemmyverse is a search engine designed to help people find new communities and instances. They offer over 28,000 communities to search through with convenient features like setting your home instance so that all the links you click will open right here on WG.

There are also a number of communities for discovery of new places on the Fediverse.

New Communities is a great place to find out about the newest places.

Trending Communities offers a daily bot post highlighting some of the most popular and up and coming communities.

Community Promo is where new and existing communities let you know they want you!

Communities is another bot post community but this one offers daily links with descriptions for established communities you may have missed.

Reddit Migration

If you're coming from reddit and want to find Lemmy versions of your favorite spaces you've got a few convenient options.

The Voyager interfaces offer a useful tool for finding Lemmy versions of your subscribed reddit communities. They offer apps for Android and iOS along with a webui. WG deploys a Voyager frontend at voyager.walledgarden.xyz.

Reddit Migration is a directory for reddit equivalent communities around the fediverse.

Quippd maps subreddits that have formed new communities on the fediverse.

sub.rehab attempts to categorize popular subreddits and show federated alternatives.

At some point this post was accidentally marked NSFW. My apologies.

Hello! Welcome to walledgarden.xyz!

Now that you're here you may be trying to figure out what exactly it is you've found. In short, walledgarden (WG) is a type of social media. It works a little differently from what you might be used to!

WG runs on a platform called Lemmy, a federated social network/link aggregator often compared to reddit. If you're interested in learning more about the technology there are some great resources over at join-lemmy that do a great job of explaining some of the features of federated social media.

I don't understand any of that and never used reddit. Is WG the place for me?

Maybe.

It's helpful to understand that Lemmy is still very early in development and adoption. It isn't as polished or as large as some of the social networks you might be used to. There are bugs that pop up fairly regularly and not everything works as intuitively as it probably should, but it's worth experimenting with and we'd love to have you around!

Don't be intimidated! We've done our best to make sure your Lemmy experience is enjoyable whether you care about how it works or not, but we're always here to help each other out if you run into trouble.

If you're not a member yet and you're ready to join the application is just a click away!

What is expected of me as a WG member?

Live and let live.

One of the core tenets of our community is that the majority of negativity on social media is meaningless, toxic behavior.

Some examples of how our community combats this behavior:

• Downvoting is disabled. Local and federated content is not subject to attempts at censorship, harassment, or brigading via downvotes. To our members they simply do not exist.
• Member applications require manual approval. This adds a short delay to new members being able to use the instance, but also prevents bots and trolls from easily creating accounts used for spamming and harassment.
• Capped membership. WG will never be a gigantic, unmanageable instance. Our numbers will be kept relatively low to help foster a sense of community and friendship.

Somewhere along the way many of us have forgotten that there is a living, breathing person behind a username. WG members are expected to treat each other and the wider fediverse respectfully at a bare minimum. The internet is full of people and opinions that won't always match your own beliefs. Engaging with each other in good faith and honesty is of the utmost importance to maintaining a culture of acceptance and positivity, and our members should embody this. Trolls, bad-faith actors, and instigators are not welcome here and never will be.

We do the best we can to keep the rules in our community to a minimum with the assumption that our members understand how to behave themselves. The Anarchist Code of Conduct is a decent guide for acceptable behavior while using our instance. Our intention is to be federated with all other instances regardless of viewpoints. Anything done that jeopardizes that will be dealt with harshly. If you do things that cause us grief your account will be purged from the instance. Don't bring drama here and don't cause problems with other people or places.

While we do the best we can to filter out potential trouble makers some are bound to slip through as our numbers increase. Please don't hesitate to ask questions or report content you believe is out of place on our instance and we'll do our best to get it taken care of.

These guidelines may evolve as our instance continues to grow.