🚀 A little guide on how to communicate with #Lemmy from #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Sharkey etc

(this is the English translation of this German post: anonsys.net/display/bf69967c-1… If something is linguistically incorrect or incomprehensible, please let me know)

Lemmy is a kind of forum software in the #Fediverse: You can subscribe to forums (called ‘communities’ in Lemmy), share links and participate in discussions. @Tealk and I have described it in more detail (in German) here.

On the one hand, you can follow #Lemmy accounts, in which case the posts will appear in your timeline and you can reply to them, share them, etc.
On the other hand, you can also create posts in Lemmy communities from Mastodon etc.

Follow a community:
The easiest way is to type the account name in full into the search or copy the URL into the search field. This applies to communities (e.g. [ät]fediversede@feddit.de) and Lemmy accounts (e.g. @caos is my Lemmy account) as well as to individual posts in Lemmy (e.g. feddit.org/post/201081 is a post in Lemmy).

Creating posts in communities:
You can create posts in Lemmy communities by tagging the community account
(It should be a public post)
If the community account is tagged with @, it will share the post and the post will also appear in the forum.
For example, this is a post I created from Mastodon in feddit’s #Tischtennis forum: metalhead.club/@caos/112749905… … and this is how it is displayed in Lemmy: feddit.org/post/556495

The only thing to note from Mastodon and Akkoma etc. is: The beginning of the post/the first paragraph becomes the title of the forum post, as Mastodon does not have a heading field. (see also: Instructions Creating a post from Mastodon)

So it is best to start the post like this (see image 1):

This is my headline (as descriptive a title as possible)
@community@lemmy-instance
This is the further text, link etc.
if necessary a picture (only in the initial post a picture is transferred from Mastodon to Lemmy, between Lemmy and Friendica all images in answers are transferred in the meantime)

Send post to multiple communities / groups at the same time
The post can only be sent to one Lemmy community at a time. If several community accounts are tagged, the post will only appear in the last one mentioned. If several different group accounts are tagged in a post, the Lemmy account should come first. According to my tests, it works in the following order: 1. lemmy community 2. friendica forum 3. a.gup.pe group . Then all groups share the post, otherwise it doesn’t work with all of them so far.

Search for communities
You can search for interesting forums/communities either on an instance page or here in the ‘Lemmy Explorer’ (see image 2).
If you are interested, enter the URL in the search field and follow the account.

If you have found an interesting community, you can copy its URL into the search field to follow the community account (see image 3) or enter the handle of the account in the form @communityname@lemmy-instance (in Friendica etc. also with !).

The past posts are then often not displayed, but those that come in the future will appear in your timeline.
What is not possible from Mastodon etc. is to create your own community. This requires a Lemmy or kbin account. Otherwise almost everything works (except for pictures in replies, which are not federated, see in detail (in German) here).

If you follow many or very active communities, it can get a bit confusing, especially in Mastodon. A clearer view is available if you view it on the page of the community itself, i.e. open it externally in the browser.
(the original URL of posts is sometimes hidden behind the #Fediverse logo)

There are also other public groups in the #Fediverse, e.g. Friendica-Forums and kbin-Magazines, which work in a similar way.

@fediverse