You may come across one you just might like. They change on a regular basis. Edit for rule #2 - Trending communities show you new/active communities in the instance you are browsing from the instance's home page. Example: My account lives on lemmy.world, but if I visit lemm.ee I will be able to see that instance's newest and/or most active communities. Just another way to explore Lemmy and the fediverse from another noobie user learning things as I go along. :) Cheers!

GOODBYE RELATIVE LINKS!!! Why YSK: Sometimes, on Lemmy, links will take you off-instance, and show you content without displaying it through your instance. This prevents you from easily interacting with the content, voting or commenting or even just subscribing. Going forward, to link communities it is now enough to simply write the name of a community/magazine in the `!name@instan.ce` format, and lemmy will convert that into a clickable local link for each users instance, so they never get taken off-instance in a manner especially confusing to new users. Examples: !gameart@sopuli.xyz !titanfall@lemmy.world !anime_irl@lemmy.ml !Fediverse@kbin.social If you are on an instance now running 0.18.0, you'll see four clickable links. These are not relative markdown links, I simply wrote the name of the communities in plain-text.

Why YSK: it doesn't matter how original you might think you are, they **have** heard them before. Numerous times in fact. If you're in the habit of making name-based jokes as soon as you meet someone you should stop. At best you're mildly annoying the person, at worst you're preventing what could have been a great friendship before it even begins. Sincerely: someone named Jesse. (And yes - I know you wish you had my girl, also .. Springsteen, really?)

The financial unsustainability of traditional, car-centric American suburbs, consisting mainly of single-family units, is a critical aspect of the problem of urban sprawl. The design of these suburbs necessitates constant expansion into undeveloped land. This is because the initial infrastructure costs, such as roads, utilities, and public services, are often subsidized by development fees and future property taxes from new construction. However, as these communities age, the costs of maintaining and replacing this infrastructure can significantly exceed the revenue from property taxes, creating a financial shortfall. This is often referred to as a "growth Ponzi scheme" – new development brings in a temporary influx of revenue, which is used to pay for the cost of existing liabilities, but in the process, incurs even more long-term liabilities. Moreover, the dispersed, low-density nature of these suburbs compounds the issue, leading to inefficient public service delivery and increased per capita costs. The reliance on private vehicles, due to large distances between residences, workplaces, and essential amenities, also places a heavy financial burden on families, particularly those in lower income brackets. Affordable housing options are limited, contributing to socio-economic segregation. Furthermore, the conversion of natural and agricultural land into residential and commercial areas can lead to losses in ecosystem services, the costs of which are often not accounted for. Thus, from both a municipal and a resident perspective, traditional American suburbs present a financially unsustainable model for urban development.

Why YSK: I've been seeing an increasing number of phone photos shared online in 9:16, 9:21 or similarly tall aspect ratios, often with parts of the subject cut off. I've asked a few people why they cropped their images that way, and none of them knew they were cropped.

Santa Fe, NM has a rich history dating back to at least 900 AD. When I lived in New England, many people believed that their relatives were pioneers of civilization in North America, with ancestors that could be traced back to the 1700s. However, even by European standards, La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís is much older than Mayflower era settlements, having been founded in 1610.

Disclaimer: I am just a random stranger on the internet who likes uBlock Origin, read a handy comment, and figured out how to press F12. I am by no means a webpage expert, and these changes may have unintended consequences I wanted to bring more attention to [@linuxFan@vlemmy.net's comment](https://vlemmy.net/comment/284044) on how to block entire instances (not just specific communities on those instances) from your "all communities" feed, as well as add my own method to block them from the "list of communities" page. This only works if you are using a web browser that supports uBlock Origin (so unfortunately, will not work on any of the mobile apps). Firstly, install [uBlock Origin](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock) if you haven't already. Then, click on the uBlock extension icon -> "Gears" (settings) icon -> My Filters. Per @linuxFan@vlemmy.net, add: `your.lemmy.instance.com##.post-listing:has-text(@theInstanceYouWantToBlock.com)` Then click "Apply Changes" So if I were not interested in any of `lemmynsfw.com`'s content, I would add: `lemmy.world##.post-listing:has-text(@lemmynsfw.com)` [@linuxFan@vlemmy.net](https://vlemmy.net/u/linuxFan)'s ELI5 explanation: `lemmy.world##` - only use this filter on this site `.post-listing` - evaluate everything on the page with the class name `post-listing` `has-text(@lemmynsfw.com)` - the text we want to filter. CASE SENSITIVE! Similarly, if you want to filter entire instances out of the "list of communities" page, you would add: `your.lemmy.instance.com##tr:has-text(@theInstanceYouWantToBlock)` I believe the `tr` is `table-responsive`, which is the type of table displayed on the "list of communities" page. If there are other responsive tables on a different Lemmy page that I don't know about, it may affect those. Also, if Lemmy's website is updated, these filters may no longer work. If someone knows of a better method of doing this, please chime in. But otherwise, enjoy! Why YSK: some instances have *many* communities that are centered around topics people are not interested in, and instead of blocking all of those communities one by one, it is easier to just block the whole instance. Edit: Note that this will remove posts if a blocked instance is listed ANYWHERE in the post body. I accidentally blocked *my own post* when I tested the lemmynsfw filter just now lol Edit(s): Further clarification/typos

Why YSK: Transparent background images often don’t look very nice on Reddit, but they can be quite sleek over here. For some examples just look at the profile pictures of mod list for this community on the sidebar. They also work well for communities. Be careful to pick colors that aren’t too dark or too light, and which contrast well with your community’s banner.

Why YSK: I’ve noticed in recent years more people using “neoliberal” to mean “Democrat/Labor/Social Democrat politicians I don’t like”. This confusion arises from the different meanings “liberal” has in American politics and further muddies the waters. Neoliberalism came to the fore during the 80’s under Reagan and Thatcher and have continued mostly uninterrupted since. Clinton, both Bushs, Obama, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Johnson, and many other world leaders and national parties support neoliberal policies, despite their nominal opposition to one another at the ballot box. It is important that people understand how neoliberalism has reshaped the world economy in the past four decades, especially people who are too young to remember what things were like before. Deregulation and privatization were touted as cost-saving measures, but the practical effect for most people is that many aspects of our lives are now run by corporations who (by law!) put profits above all else. Neoliberalism has hollowed out national economies by allowing the offshoring of general labor jobs from developed countries. In the 80’s and 90’s there was an “anti-globalization” movement of the left that sought to oppose these changes. The consequences they warned of have come to pass. Sadly, most organized opposition to neoliberal policies these days comes from the right. Both Trump and the Brexit campaign were premised on reinvigorating national economies. Naturally, both failed, in part because they had no cohesive plan or understanding that they were going against 40 years of precedent. So, yes, establishment Democrats are neoliberals, but so are most Republicans.

Why YSK: It makes viewing images fast and easy, with no clicks. I got used to this on the site that shall not be named, sometimes I don't want to open the whole image or post. With the addon if I hover over the image button that would expand the image, it will show the image full size for as long as I hover over it, no clicking needed, this works with gifs as well.

Why YSK: If we want to keep the Fediverse in the hands of its users and prevent "enshittification" (search it), it's good to know how corporations kill grassroots projects like this. I saw this in another thread on /c/Showerthoughts. I think it's important for this to be circulated widely so that the broader Fediverse community is aligned. We don't want admins second-guessing their decisions when users start infighting. We should be united in our thinking and ready to protect our platform.

Why YSK? Comments you reply positively to, should definitely get your upvote. Comments you disagree with should be at your discretion. Trolls deserve downvotes (seriously, they live for those). Disagreeing with someone in the midst of a good discussion doesn't necessarily warrant one, and might deserve an upvote. Even if you don't reply, but you agree with the comment, give it your vote. Also, this has nothing to do with propping up folks' egos. Comments with more upvotes will likely be seen first the longer the post is up. Alternatively, downvoted posts are less likely to be seen unless users are looking for them. Of course, this can lead to folks accusing communities of having leftist/right-wing bias, but I think overall it improves the usage of the site. Personally, the thing I liked most about Reddit was the conversations in the comments. Usually the ones with the most upvotes were more worth the read & engagement.

I just found out today that if something you bought from Harbor Freight broke them most likely you can buy a replacement part for it. They have a list you can download and look through and find the part you need and can call and order it. Here is the list: https://www.harborfreight.com/parts

Why you should know: StackOverflow is facing a mod strike in a similar way as Reddit's mod strike. They are doing this in response to StackOverflow's failure to address it's promises and provide moderation tools

Both their functionings are complex, so people can get impressed. But for both of them, all the complexity is inside the device and there isn’t much to put together; and the way they hook up to your house is really simple. Why YSK: so you don’t live too long with a broken toilet or garbage disposal, thinking it will be too hard to replace. Those two are some of the simplest things to DIY.

[First specifically reported](https://lemmy.world/post/354404) a little over a week ago, [more](https://lemmy.world/post/406956) and [more reports](https://lemmy.world/post/574368) have been [showing up](https://lemmy.world/post/646742) concerning the issue. The admins are well aware of this, and it's being worked on as Lemmy continues to undergo development, so hopefully we'll see this mitigated further with each update, and find ourselves with a better synced federated community. For the time being, just be aware that your posts to linked/remote instances from Lemmy.world may not be getting through to others, so don't feel too bummed if you think people are ignoring your posts or comments...Chances are they aren't, they may just not be seeing them! As to what you may do to work around this, you may want to make accounts in less bogged down instances so that you can more reliably post across instances, but if you're content with the local communities of lemmy.world, then you may post & chat here till the issues are minimized.

Why YSK: I use the web version of Lemmy both on desktop and mobile. By going directly to the 2nd page of posts, I get rid of both the neverending stream of new posts and of the same old posts that keep sticking to the 1st page. It works for all the filters: active, hot... No need to scroll down, just change the number in the end of the URL from 1 to 2 and save it to favourites or whatever.

YSK because the first hot spell is when most people discover their AC unit is broken. Several years ago I waited to turn on my AC. This is how I found out about one of the busiest times for repairmen and had to sweat for two weeks. Now I do a test run a couple of weeks before it heats up. Same goes for the furnace at the end of Autumn. Edit to add: YSK line (Rule 2)

YSK you can take advantage of free air conditioning in designated public spaces to beat the heat. Many Californian cities have designated Cool Zones sites. These are air-conditioned settings where seniors and others can gather to escape the heat. For example, the libraries in my area are all designated cool zones. Anyone can take advantage of these sites to escape the heat and there may be one close to you. It's free and you can linger as long as you need to, at least until closing. Libraries also offer free wifi, if you are able to work online. If you are not in California, check online for similar programs in your area. Seniors are especially susceptible to heat sickness and death so please remember to check on elderly neighbors and relatives during high heat times.

Why: Save money and headache, not just on software or services, but on your tax bill. Software and preparation services won't necessarily teach you about deductions or credits that you can get, saving you money. Example 1: [HSAs](https://www.madfientist.com/ultimate-retirement-account/). HDHP are popular right now which open up the possibility of an HSA. You can invest funds, tax free, in an HSA much like you would a 401k. If you reach the age 65 or become disabled, you can withdraw from it without a tax penalty. Some HSAs even let you use a standard brokerage account like TD Ameritrade or Schwab. It gets better. If your HR doesn't suck and sets it up under cafeteria rules, the money deposited doesn't even get taxed on Social Security or Medicare. If you have this option, use it before any unmatched 401 contributions. So if your federal marginal rate is 12%, your state marginal rate is 5%, and FICA is ~7.65%, you end up with with roughly 250-500 more dollars in your pocket depending on if you the single or family max applies to you. Example 2: [Retirement contribution credit](https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/plan-participant-employee/retirement-savings-contributions-savers-credit). If you are lower income, you can get up to a 50% tax credit for retirement account contributions. So if your AGI is low enough, a $1000 IRA contribution only costs $500 because of the tax credit, unless your total tax bill is already 0. Then it doesn't matter. In that case, you should probably use a taxable account so you can access the money without paying a 10% penalty. You don't make nearly enough to be taxed on dividends or capital gains at this point. Understanding these things can save you big or keep you from tying up money in tax shelters unnecessarily. The FIRE community is a great resource for this sort of thing.

It seems that posts on Lemmy cannot exceed 10000 characters. If you type in more than 10000 characters and try to submit the post, you will see that the post submission is being processed but you won't come any further than that. The post submission will remain in status pending indefinitely. Edit: Let me add some context to my observation to help you understand why I find the information about the length restrictions useful. Recently I've tried to publish a very long post on Lemmy. As a new user to the platform I initially assumed that there is a lot of traffic on the server and because of that my post takes longer to publish. After some time without any success publishing the post I assumed that there is a server issue and I decided to try again later. A few hours later my post still didn't want to publish so I assumed that there might be a length restriction that originates from the basic principles of the fediverse (i.e., instances communicating with one another sending copies of their posts and comments to other instances). To test my hypothesis about the length restrictions I tried posting only the first paragraph of my post. A few seconds later the post was already online. Then I've started adding one paragraph at a time and hitting publish until I've encountered the same issue (i.e., submission pending indefinitely). When I've analysed the edited post I've realised that it was almost 10000 characters long. Had I known from the beginning about the length restriction, then I would have saved a few hours trying to publish the post by splitting it in parts and posting the parts as comments.

> Behold the most nauseating and mesmerizing swim advisories floating around.

Why YSK: Popcorn fans often want a buttery flavor, but plain butter is a bad choice for popping popcorn in a pot, because the proteins and sugars smoke and burn around the same temperature where it's hot enough to pop the kernels. Ghee, or Indian-style clarified butter, is butter that's been simmered and the milk solids (proteins and sugars) skimmed off. This leaves a clear yellow oil that doesn't smoke when it's heated and doesn't go rancid quickly, but has a distinct toasty butter flavor. Vegetable oil is either flavorless or faintly bitter, and some high-temperature vegetable oils tend to start polymerizing (i.e. becoming plastic) when heated in small amounts. This is also not good for popcorn. Good-quality popcorn popped in ghee reliably produces lots of ["butterfly" popcorn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn#/media/File:Mushroom_and_butterfly_popcorn.jpg) with few unpopped "duds" and no scorched kernels or batches ruined by smoke. Try it! I'm sure not going back to canola oil.

EDIT: After reading some posts on the topic, i agree that "communities" is preferable to "sublemmies" so i changed it. Why YSK: it's convenient but there's no "my communities" button that makes it totally obvious, so if you are like me and get confused by anything not totally obvious, you should know these two ways to see a list of your communities: 1) Click "communities" on the home page. In the "Subscribed / Local / All" button, click "Subscribed". HA! That was almost totally obvious! 2) Click your user name on the main page, then in the drop-menu click "profile". Your subscribed communities appear on the right.

So this Lemmy place is pretty awesome, and I see it growing by the hour! Just like others link external sites for content here, we should really also **share Lemmy content** to external (e.g. Reddit, Twitter, etc.) to show others where the users are going now. Redditors will talk about Lemmy and moving communities here, but it is really best shown that the communities are rebuilding here. Thoughts? I’ve started with a few memes and am starting a new community here as well!

Why YSK: Because intuitive explanations are few and far between, and the technical explanations often present too many "trees" and not enough "forest", which is just how technically-minded people are trained to approach things. Forests are, after all, made of trees, and it's not their fault we don't care about individual "trees". This then, is my unprofessional attempt to consolidate everything I've read over the past three days into one, easy-to-understand explanation of how all this shit works in lay-person's terms. Due to my amateur background, I may have details incorrect, and I would request that anyone who catches anywhere where I have made a mistake, even a small detail, to please correct me. I will also include a few links to my best sources at the bottom. tl;dr style explanations will be included after every paragraph in parenthesis. So, let's begin: Imagine you have reddit. Fantastic, it's a giant forum composed of a whole bunch of smaller, sub-forums. But let's take this one step further. Why have just one reddit? Why can't we have lots of reddits, each capable of having its own complete set of subs, where each reddit is independent of every other one and has its own web address? Okay, let's do this, and push it to the extreme. Let's make it so everyone can make their own reddit, even individuals. So you, if you wanted, could set up your own complete reddit, with just you in it. You could have all the subs, r/TIL, r/TIHI, r/pics, etc etc, all with just you in them. You have total control! But you have no content and are probably pretty lonely, right? We'll get to that. Let's call this Self-Hosting though. (So, we now have a situation where many whole reddits can individually exist, each in the vacuum of space.) Now let's fix that content and loneliness problem. What if we allowed each reddit to communicate and share content with every other reddit, similar to how subs can communicate with each other? Boom. We just created a spider-webbed network, of countless individual reddits, each composed of subs, that can now all share content back and forth. Let's call this big spiderweb an over-reddit, to contrast it with subreddits. (Now instead of a two-tier system of isolated reddits and their subs, we have a three-tier system, of over-reddit [the "Lemmy-verse"], reddits [Lemmys or Instances or Servers], and subs [communities or sub-lemmies].) But, we actually have a technical problem. How do these individual reddits find each other? How do they know the other ones even exist? They could be on servers on opposite sides of the planet, with random web addresses. Obviously we can't just guess. So, okay, let's let users solve this for us via crowd-sourced labor. We don't have to find all the reddits for them. Let's just design the system so that the reddits only find out about each other after any random-ass user introduces them to each other. We'll call this batching, they can do it with the reddit search bar. Then, we'll wait for that random-ass user to actually *subscribe* to any new sub/community over there, which they'll only do if it's any good. Once this is done, now the two reddits and that one sub become connected, not just for that user, but *their whole reddit userbase too*. The rando doing the search and subscribing simply introduced two good reddits to each other. Now that they know about each other though, they'll share content back and forth freely, with comments, votes and posts all being visible to both reddits. Let's call this "federating with each other". It's not too different from neurons in the brain reaching out to each other, really. (To find and connect the disparate, scattered reddits into our over-reddit, we use crowd-sourced labor.) Well, that's it. That's the Lemmy-verse. But what about this Fediverse? Well, okay, remember what we did with reddit, and giving it a third tier of over-reddit? Let's do the same exact thing with twitter, facebook, youtube and every other thing we can pull out of our asses. Let's let all of them share and access each other's content with the exact same structure and system, so now you, hanging out in your reddit, can get all the tweets too. We've made a fourth tier now. The Fediverse, which is most comparable to the internet itself, and includes the Mastadon-verse, the PeerTube-verse, etc etc. (Why stop there...? reddit is chump change, let's just do this to everything.) So, that's it in a nutshell. That's how this shit works. And the next time someone says it's like email, I'm going to climb through their computer screen and smack them. It's only like email at that technical, "trees" level, and when you go up to the more intuitive "forest" level, this just serves to confuse the ever-living hell out of everyone. (I'm a bit of a dick.) One last detail: Admins can whitelist (allow-list) or blacklist (shadowban) other Instances/servers. As an example, one of the other largest Instances has blacklisted (shadowbanned) us here at lemmy.world, because we were producing too much spam. As a result, until they undo this, all of us here are shadowbanned from their Instance/server. We can see their content, they can't see ours. This enables them to control how much connection they have to the rest of the Fediverse. (Let's not forget to give admins the power to stop people from other places bothering them, if they do not approve of the content. Very important feature.) Sources: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software) https://github.com/amirzaidi/lemmy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36387939 Again, if I've made any errors, regardless of how small, please let me know below. This is intended to be another reference material for lay-people, so accuracy is important. However, outside of major errors, I will not be editing this post to correct it, as I would prefer any corrections to be delivered from the full perspective of someone's individual expertise, instead of being translated into my own words. (I don't actually know what I'm talking about. Scroll down for people who do.) Hope this helps. edit for grammar/cleanup

Why YSK: We have a significant number of users now, and yet the amount of content to scroll through is still fairly small. This is because not all users are the same, and while the majority prefer to lurk, and a much smaller minority prefer to comment, the percentage that really likes making posts, memes, art, rants, videos etc is extremely small. One way that we can all assist with this is to simply make content ourselves. But even if you don't want to do that, you can still help by finding productive creators elsewhere on the internet and telling them about us. Many reddit users are still simply unaware that we exist. They don't know that there is a community of consumers here, waiting for content. They don't know that if you can navigate reddit, then you can navigate this. Lemmy is just not as complicated as it can sound at first. So, if you want, simply invite them. Give them a link to a community down here that would fit the content they like to produce, and let them know we'd love to have them. Because we really would love to have them. Let them know that you, as a fan, would love to see them here. After all, wouldn't you? Thanks for reading.

Give us the sexiest letter "i" you can.

Welcome to YSK, a community aiming to be one of the most useful out there. The rules for posting and commenting, besides the [rules defined here for lemmy.world](https://mastodon.world/about), are as follows: **Rules for Posting** 1-All posts must begin with YSK. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help yourself improve on activities, skills and various other tasks in life. YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things, not for facts and figures. 2-In your post’s text body, you must include the reason “Why YSK:” 3- Non-factual ideas or concepts based on conspiracy theories will be removed. 4-No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind. **Community Moderation** As there is currently little activity, I am the only moderator here. For any inquiries you may message me or comment here. Let’s help Lemmy grow! **Featured Communities** [No Stupid Questions](https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions) [Jokes](https://lemmy.world/c/jokes) To partner with our community and be included here, you are free to message me or comment on our pinned post. Also YSK: the best way to help us grow is to create posts and comment!

Why YSK:” So you see post that are not the big reddit related mega threads.

Why YSK: Until Lemmy version 0.18 address this bug, you can browse the front page without it being auto updated and spammed with new posts. Just browse page 0 instead of 1: https://lemmy.world/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Hot/page/0 (*1 changed to 0*)