Welcome, new users!

Okay this federated stuff is really growing on me.
The idea that you can sign up on any server, and still have a feed from many different servers is pretty cool.
- It’s like email but Reddit style
  
  That makes way more sense!
  The only roadblock I see is how difficult it is to follow communities outside your main instance. It would be nice if there was a log-in-as option so you can easily subscribe if you come across a page that isn't a part of your instance. Right now you have to either search it on your main, or copy the url over (which I've seen doesn't work all the time, but could be because of server load.)
  
  Yeah, I read that before, but I didn't really understand what that meant.

My first post, and hopefully the picture i attached works. This is Loki, my 27 year old macaw, one of 2 rainbow chickens i have
- This here's my birds
  
  so friggin cute! i miss having chickens. no more free breakfast!
  
  Lol this Mlem app is sweet but I can’t see your photo, it just shows up as large but I can’t scroll along it.
- cute

Hello from the forests of Quebec. I'm a huge fan of decentralization and open source tools. I will be hanging around here and watching reddit implode from afar. I was one of the digg exodus crowd, so I know that there is no way I can live without a link aggregator and discussion platform, lemmy seems like an instant win to me!

Hey fellow (mostly) Canadians! Reddit Refugee of 13 years, this is my first Lemmy experience. I originally made a Lemmy.world account, but moved here as I felt more comfortable having the server hosted in Canada for data integrity/security.
Seems like a neat place, the distributed/"federated" stuff was a bit confusing at first, but seems neat. I guess we'll see how big the migration from Reddit to here is.

Hello from Canada's best and most important and relevant province!
Manitoba!
- yessss!
- I left MB 10 years ago for Sask! I miss the lakes and trees but we have a nice little home here. It’s also cool that people who live in the cities here aren’t scared to leave them!
- I'm a recent transplant from BC, don't know if I'm allowed to call myself a Manitoban yet, but I do feel at home :)

Hello fellow humans. I’m actually from a different CA, California. But I’m a believer that you should choose an instance based upon the administration not on topic, and this one feels much more in line with my sensibilities than the other large ones. Sorry to stereotype, but the conversations feel kinder here than elsewhere (even by the already nice standards of lemmy instances overall.)
I don’t much like sharing personal type information online, so I hope you’ll forgive my brevity. I don’t work in tech, but have had a lifelong interest in it so I feel right at home here at the ground floor of a new community.

Hey! New Ontarian user here. I'm jumping ship from Reddit before my favorite app loses API access. It's a real shame Reddit went that route.
I'm a software developer by day. I love gaming, sci-fi/fantasy paper/audio books, metal and electronic music.
I hope Reddit suffers a serious exodus. Maybe the secret to ending the cycle of shitty corporate social media is to help with the open source federated approach?
- What's your favourite sci-fi era? I'm quite partial to golden age, despite it's many many maaaannnny flaws. Just something about the idea that the author would set Mr Average Joe on an adventure, which he's quite prepared for, because everyone knows how to navigate in space.
  
  Golden Age, based on your description, seems to fit the description of a lot of my favourite books. I have a hard time picking favourites, so here are a few series, plus a few singles, I absolutely loved:
  Bobiverse, Dennis E. Taylor
  Expeditionary Force, Craig Alanson
  Red Rising, Pierce Brown
  Foundation, Isaac Asimov
  The Expanse, James S. A. Corey
  Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Project Hail Mary & The Martian, Andy Weir

Hi, I'm a programmer living in beautiful rural New Brunswick. I guess you can say I'm part of the Reddit exodus, but still unsure if I'll leave that platform for good. Hoping for a much better experience and interactions here. Have an awesome day, everyone!

Thanks for the warm welcome smorks! Also here from reddit, and I can already tell that this is the online community I've been yearning for. People connecting with each other, engaging in discussion. There's a lot of good things that came from reddit over the years, but as I've read so many times in various relationship subreddits "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time" (sorry Maya Angelou).
Spez showed us what he really thinks of his userbase, and I'm proud to add reddit to the list of corporations I won't use because they're dicks.
Ahem.
Really glad to see a strong Canadian contingent here. May your timmies be hot and your beer cold 😁

Hello from Canada's Pants!
I'm a reddit refugee. I signed up at Beehow first, but after looking around, saw some of you fine folks from here showing up over there. Beehow seems nice, but even though I have no connection to it, I have always had an affinity for Canada, so I looked around over here and decided to make this my home. :) Although I'm thinking of setting up my own instance, too.
One of the reasons I thought I might be happier over here is that while Beehaw seems pretty neutral, my politics are not, so I figure in the long run, I probably share more in common with folks here than there.
I was on reddit since 2009 when I had my 15 minutes of fame and folks there invited me to do an AMA. I was a default mod for a while. I deleted /u/daychilde trying to escape reddit. Failed, went back, moderated some more. Left again, went back. I only mod my local city's subreddit now, and basically I'm done with reddit. Lemmy and tildes are replacements for me, and so far I'm liking them both!
I hope you will forgive me for being American and let me hang out with you fine folks :)
- Being Canadian is, like, a state of mind, eh. Welcome
  
  Wouldn't it be a province of mind? :)

I'm a reddit refugee like many others, and was delighted to find Canada well-represented in the fediverse!
Now I've been exploring various communities and have a question. Many posts seem to offer a link to another instance and all the comments are local to that instance. I don't think I can post there without opening a new account? Or am I wrong? I can comment in the post containing the link, but there is usually no activity there, so I can't join an ongoing discussion that way.
Or at least that's the way it appears to me. I'm confused!
- If you can access the thread in another community you can post there without creating another account. That's the main draw of this setup. Still new myself and there is some growing pains finding the other instances communities but once I am there it is working
  
  Thanks.
  Well, here's an example of what I'm talking about. The post contains nothing but a link but when you follow that, it says You must log in or register to comment.
  But I just noticed elsewhere it says I need to subscribe to !fediverse@lemmy.ml
  So I've gone through the motions of doing that, but when I look at Communities -> Subscribed, it now says Subscribe Pending under Fediverse@lemmy.ml.
  I'm going to assume that once approved, I can then comment?

Thanks for making this Canadian instance :) I first created my account on Lemmy.ml, but also made one here since I am Canadian. Looking forward to seeing Lemmy grow as a whole, and see more Canadians join the Fediverise :)
For anyone interested, I've made a community for posting PC hardware/accessory sales (r/bapcsalescanada). Feel free to join and contribute. And if you know how to create an RSS feed, also let me know!
- there should be an icon that will give you a link to the rss feed:
  
  Thanks for the heads up! I guess I meant using an RSS feed from somewhere else, like RFD, or the actual BAPC subreddit so it auto posts here in my community.
- Thank you!

Hello from South Eastern Ontario! Great to be here! I'm about anything tech, fitness, automotive (cars, trucks, motorcycles, ICE, Hybrid, Electric), and overall physical and mental health!
Very open minded and always will to learn. I also have this uncanny ability to change my opinion and direction as long as there is sufficient data from reputable sources :)
Let's link up and chat!

Hello from Ottawa! This is my first Lemmy post. Reddit refugee.
- Hello, fellow Ottawan. I too am here from Reddit as well.

Vancouver Island here. Happy to see a woodworking community getting going here already, and hoping to see a bigger rock climbing community on lemmy in the future. Thanks for hosting!

Hello from Eastern Ontario. I am a Reddit Refugee and this is my first day on Lemmy. I'm happy to make lemmy.ca my home. I'm interested in maple syrup making, microcontrollers and using them to make maple syrup, and my first computer was a Commodore 64 and I recently completed a SixtyClone 250466 Commodore 64 clone. I'm a small farmer, amateur welder, and I am an information security sales engineer by day. I've created three communities and hope to contribute to Lemmy. If you think I might be interested in a community please point me in the right direction.

Fifteen-year veteran of reddit checking in. So glad to be a part of this societal shift, and excited to see where we go from here!
If anyone else is missing an old-reddit/digg style UI on the desktop, I've published Rediggit for Lemmy. It's very much a work-in-progress, but it should scratch that immediate itch for more legroom. Currently for light theme only, but more coming (and feel free to hack away and shape my mess into something even better).
- nice work! if I have some free time I may work this into a custom theme (with your approval, of course).
  
  By all means! Mine itself is based off DarkFox's Old reddit-ish Lemmy. I hope to do a full rewrite in the coming weeks, to incorporate dark mode and make it all more robust, but wanted to share for any other ex-redditors looking for a hotfix.

Checking in from Nova Scotia! Fellow Rexxiter (?) looking for a new location to plant roots with a good community. Primary interests are in automotive, woodworking, cycling, and electronics.
Happy to be here with you all!
- No need for a question mark, rexxit is great, haha.

Thanks for the warm welcome! While things are still new, I know it will pick up. I feel like this is my new home after 12 years on reddit

Hi folks!
I'm Anvil, a student in his final term of an I.T. program. I moved to Ontario for school, so it's been a bit of a wild ride. I'm hoping to find a good Reddit alternative for after RIF goes down due to corporate greed.
General interests include games (PC, switch, PS5), books (fantasy and sci-fi mostly), movies, and music. Big fan of board games and TTRPGs too (#ForeverDM)
Here's to the future!

I'm pleasantly surprised there are so many people here already. The experience has been a lot better than I expected. The UI is nice and lean. It was super easy to subscribe to communities from this and other instances. It's really exciting to be a part of something for which the core mission is not shareholder value.

Reddit old-timer from Toronto here. Happy to see how fast the Fediverse is evolving thanks to u/spez. Feels like the internet again.

Hey all, I'm an ex-pat living in the UK, Scotland to be precise...er. I'm from Vancouver, and I'm on lemmy.ml, as .ca didn't appear to be an option when I signed up.
I'm a Stone Mason, have a cat who's a bit of a shithead, and I make electronic music as a hobby.

Introducing myself here. I'm a refugee from Reddit. I'm a father, Catholic, lawyer from rural Alberta near Calgary.
I've always been a big fan of open source software and I'm trying to figure out the federated model of social media. I figured this is probably the right place for me to pop into and branch out from here.
Looking forward to eventually replacing Reddit entirely if the Lemmy instances get to that point.

Who is the admin for this server? Can you tell us about yourself? What makes this server different from some others (except for its Canadian bias, of course).
Is it run on AWS instance, and are you self funding it?
- i'm the admin. i'm a software developer, living in Winnipeg, MB. I spend a lot of time watching my son play baseball in the spring/summer, own a dog that sometimes acts like a cat.
  Not sure what makes this server different from others? I will do my best to make this place a safe, welcoming space for all. Will probably need some help along the way as we grow.
  It's currently run on a VPS on lunanode, a canadian provider. I'm currently self funding it, but plan on accepting donations to help run it as well.
  
  Software dev here as well. Expat living in Seattle. I can donate for instance upkeep if needed. Reach out if you need any other assitance as well.
  
  Do you mind sharing how big of a VPS is required to run an instance this size? One of the issues with Mastodon is that it's written in Ruby and it requires a lot of money to run a decently sized server. I'm wondering if Lemmy is more efficient given that it's written in Rust
  
  Interesting. I'm curious as I'm new to this lemmy thing. Did you set it up to be scalable in the event that this server gets much bigger ?

Greetings from the Wet Coast, fellow Canuckleheads! Another Reddit Refugee. I've had such a great experience with Mastodon, I'm looking at other ways the fediverse and distributed social networks can inform and entertain, while preserving privacy and not selling its users information as product.
Interests include technology, Linux, tabletop RPGs, computer games, science, Indigenous language revitalization, plus whatever might make me curious.

Nice to meet you all! Still getting used to the website, I have some instances who work always great, and others working meh, but hey, I think a lot of tweaks will have to be made because we are a lot to migrate here lol

Hi everyone! I’m another Reddit lurker checking out Lemmy in light of the upcoming changes there. I’m in Ontario near the GTA and looking forward to what the community builds. Thanks for hosting the server!
- From yet another long time lurker, yes, thanks for all the care and effort thus far!

Hi There,
Yet another reddit refugee from Canada's West Coast. I've been in reddit for 15 years, mostly as a lurker with intermittent contributions (mostly comments in discussion threads). I used to use old.reddit, so would not have been affected (yet) by the announced API changes directly, but I am disappointed in the most recent behaviour of the admins over there and their disregard for the communities at large and the countless contributions of volunteer moderators, developers and content contributors that helped reddit to grow to what it is today.
I'm looking forward to explore Lemmy and Tildes and enjoy the reddit feel of the earlier days.

Hello! Came over from Reddit based on recommendations from Mastodon friends. Looking forward to interact on food, Habs, wine, Canadian politics, and tv shows. My last favourite was Succession. I can't start a new show for fear of being disappointed. What are you watching?
- You got me thinking- I don't think I've watched a new TV show in at least a year, there's so many old favourites to binge through out there. I'm currently rewatching The X-Files.
- The Ghost Stories dub.
  A true 90s masterpiece.

Hello fellow Canucks! Slowly getting used to how this all works and gotta admit, it's kind of neat so far! Looking forward to trading my crippling reddit addiction for a crippling Lemmy addiction.

Hi all from Québec city, I came here searching for a new home, since reddit is likely dying, and had been getting less friendly as time went on. I am still finding my way around here. Thanks to everyone who is making this community possible.

I'm from Kansas City! We're kinda like Canadians!
- My down vote is all in good fun :D

Hey all! Came here after the Reddit news like a lot of you. Getting my feet wet around here, but I'm into technology and metal so that's where I'll head out to.

Hi. Canadian living in South East Asia. On Mastodon, @elias@go.arkadi.one Linux, coffee, and board game enthusiast.
Checking out this Lemmy thing until I try self-hosting it myself.

Hello everyone,
Still trying to get used to the new setup over on Lemmy, however trying to make some new communities work. Want to get /c/ontario and /c/waterloo running with some active discussions and people. Hopefully we can make a difference. :)
Edit: I'd also love to know the hardware that you're running this on!
- Hello & welcome!
  I'm currently running this on a small VPS at linode, but i've been thinking about switching to a more canadian-based vps that i've used in the past.
  lemmy the software has very low system requirements, so it's currently running on a 1 CPU 2 GB RAM vm.
  edit: whoops meant to say "low", not "slow"!
  
  Cool, I figured it would need more resources. But I suppose scaling is tomorrows problem. :D
- thanks for the posts!

Omg did I actually figure out how to join? Yay
- Welcome :)

Fediverse fan here, joining here as there's no Irish lemmy that I could find. I'll be looking for Music/Guitar/Piano communities, and software/programming type groups.

Thanks for having a place for us Canucks to congregate eh!
I have a background in IT/Networking/Infrastructure, so if you need a hand or a brain to pick for running this place, just drop me a DM! Also if you need donations to cover costs, best to get OpenCollective/Patreon going on sooner rather than later.
- thanks! i appreciate it! i think i'm going to set something up soon, as it seems there's some interest in that.
  
  Will you accept monero?

Good Afternoon My Fellow Canucks (Canadians) and Canadian Lovers Eh!
Like many of you, I have also left Reddit and plan to make my home here. I'm in York Region in Ontario and well have a distributed set of friends all over the place. Lots of love to my brothers and sisters in the surrounding Provinces.
As for me, well I tend to read about technology, play allot of board games, and seem to dabble in Linux land while helping people with techie issues. I'm currently trying to learn the board game "Earth" which at some point will teach at game night.
Hope you all have a great day!

Hello! Another Reddit refugee here. Saskatoon is home for me. Looking forward to figuring out how Lemmy and the Fediverse differs from what I'm used to.
- I am also from Saskatoon, I think we need a community here for the city
- I’m from Saskatoon too! Surprised to find people from my hometown so soon

Hello from Vancouver! Like many others I'm a Reddit refugee. My interests include AI, data science, homemade vegan ice cream, Linux, tech, Linux gaming, and Pathfinder 2e.

New Brunswick Reddit refuge....

BC here, yet another reddit refugee. New to the fediverse and still trying to figure it out.

Question on the nuance of federation-- is there a reason to spin up a community locally in .ca if a really popular one already exists in another server? Would most people here just sync up to that other server and ignore the local one? I'm thinking we might want to avoid having 500 communities for everything
Coming from a reddit mindset where it was easier because you just had one community to think about
edit: by this I don't mean "can we" but rather what's best practice or what does the existing community tend to default to
- if you are happy with the rules/moderation/whatever of the other community, then there really isn't any reason to create one here.
  even in reddit there are multiple subreddits for the same thing, and new subreddits were created when the original one wasn't to their liking as well.
  hope that helps!

Hello, Lemmy community! Greetings from BC.
I've been a reddit user for a lot of years, and have been looking for an alternative for a while now. Maybe this is it? I like things that are free, open-source, distributed, federated, etc. I want to give my energy to this kind of community, not something run by a corporation.

I'm not exactly a Reddit refugee, since I've been using a variety of decentralized communications systems for a while. I even still make small use of Usenet! That said, now seems like a good time to get signed up on a lemmy instance with my "real" username.
I chose this instance for several reasons. It seems like a solid and sane instance (from my perspective!). It helps keep the load off of the "main" instance (which load would be less if someone put some effort into not making it seem like the obvious place to sign up). Last but not least, hello from Southern Saskatchewan!

Hi, i am not canadian but chose here because i dont want to contribute to one server such as lemmy.ml getting to large. I have actually had this account for a while and am a frequent mastodon user but hadnt really kicked the tires much around here.
- Great to have you here. There is some interoperability between lemmy and mastodon now, but I think there might be some issues?
  
  Yeah, primarily that when you follow sublemmys every single comment shows up as a boost in your home timeline. If it was just the OP and you had to open it to see the comments that would be much better.

Another Western Canadian reddit refugee here. I still can't decide if I consider myself Albertan or British Columbian. I've spent about an equal amount of my life in each province. Alberta does have the lower drinking age and less taxes so it might edge out the competition.

Just joined today! Going to be fun to find new communities to interact with.
Thank you for making a Canadian instance. I became a citizen this month, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Hi. Calgarian checking in. I am happy to find this!
Love Sci fi, fishing, minesweeper and astronomy.

Hi everybody! Nice to meet you all. :D I'm over in Ottawa, and I'm completely new to Lemmy (immigrating from Reddit), so I hope I can learn the culture of this place okay!
First thing's first: I'm going to figure out how to navigate this place, and then I'm going to start talking to folks. Wish me luck (or wish me a For Redditors help guide). :P
Edit: This is probably going to make the OG Lemmings (Lemmites?) cry, but I think this place makes easier sense if I go at it like:
Instance = subreddit
Community = post flair
Because each instance is its own website with its own admin, and each community is a group within that instance. I can join a community to chat about whatever the community's about, but if I want to go to the communities in a different instance, it's like going to a different subreddit; I can't just find it by trying to 'filter' the communities by their 'flair' since that community isn't 'here'. It's at a completely different subreddit/instance/website. :)

Thank-you for the welcome. Looking forward to the non-centralized fun

Hi! I just joined as well. I haven’t decided yet whether I give up Reddit or not. I am happy with my move to Mastodon so I figured I try Lemmy as well. I am in Alberta 👋🏻