to start: after some consideration, we’ve altered our entry question a little bit so that entry is not guaranteed. during the daytime you can basically expect waits of 30 minutes or less when it comes to approval/disapproval, but overnight it’ll be anywhere from 6-12 hours. just FYI
if you’d like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that over here
our sidebar should give you most of the information you’re looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts:
for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the comments of this post.
as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate on OpenCollective, which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations.
a few other questions occasionally pop up like “why do we have the set of communities we do?” and “why can’t people make their own?” (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can see the following post and the discussions here. we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also discussion here.
downvotes are disabled on this instance and that’s a thing we’re not liable to change. if you’d like elaboration for why that is, see this comment. this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you’ll understand why we’re doing it even if you don’t necessarily agree with it.
if you’re interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see the comment here.
feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i’ll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.
I’m really liking the idea of Lemmy.
Mastodon, like Twitter, I just don’t really “get”. Why follow people? I want to follow topics, ideas. Centering conversations on who started them, rather than what they are about, seems strange.
I never understood Twitter or used it much except occasionally to follow links from news reports or check on the status of sites that went down. I am prone to writing longer posts than fit within the character limit and also like reading more in depth content than you get with such a short character limit, so mostly Twitter didn’t seem like my sort of environment.
Even so, I was curious about the exodus to Mastodon and tried it and Calckey out. I found lots of introductions by scientists and started following their hashtags and following individual scientists in a variety of fields that I was curious about and some of them provide links to pretty interesting articles and books in their fields. I am starting to understand the appeal of following people. Sometimes the right people can provide an inside look at a topic or serve as a curator of decent quality links relating to their area of knowledge that you might not be exposed to through lay people with the same interest.
You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. If you find yourself interacting with anyone in particular, it can be nice to follow them to broaden your interactions, but that’s not required to get something out of it.