Hi, new user coming from Reddit, as many. Trying to orient with Lemmy, I realize that I still don’t understand the idea of instances well enough. Or maybe the fediverse. So there are plenty of instances, and each is supposed to be dedicated to a topic, but this is a very fluid definition. Anyhow, how do I search for instances? I mean, if I’m in Lemmy.world, I can click “instances” and I get the list of instances that are relevant. Sure, I can use google for that, but my logic tells me that there should be a more organic way.

And this leads to another question, how can I browses communities on other instances with my already existing account? What about platforms such as mastodon where I’m supposed to be able to browse and submit and such?

And finally, is there a search per community possibility?

Sorry, I’m still confused about these.

  • CoachDomEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Sure you can!

    If you scroll all the way down in a desktop browser, click into Instances. On the right it will tell you what instances are defederated.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      Nice, thank you! There is only one defederated, the infamous lemmygrad.

      Though I don’t think this explains the issues I have. Maybe it’s the overall load due to the reddit migration.

      • CoachDomEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        So what’s excatly an issue you have? I might be able to help - I struggled with some stuff here as well.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•1 year ago

          Thanks, that’s very kind!

          Someone shared this link: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/4331/The-growing-list-of-subreddits-going-to-be-dark-but

          If I understand this correctly, that’s a list of communities I should be able to subscribe to. I can visit https://lemmy.ml/c/atheism and https://lemmy.ml/c/gamedev, but they open as a new (?) lemmy to which I am not logged in. When I try to find them via ‘Communities’, I get “No results”, so I cannot subscribe.

          So it feels like some parts of the network are inaccessible (or even invisible, the internal serach does not show these two examples) and I don’t know why.

          • CoachDomEnglish
            0•1 year ago

            Right! I know exactly what it is!

            So here is what happens when you open " https://lemmy.ml/c/gamedev " - it opens the gamedev community that is hosted on the lemmy.ml instance but also it’s opening it as if you are accessing it from lemmy.ml instance.

            If you format the link like this: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/[email protected]

            you will be taken to this community, from this instance but you will be accessing it through your instance. There is a better way, supposedly, which will mean you can access lemmy through your instance and search for [email protected] and it should show you this community and you will be able to access through your instance, but it doesn’t work for me like it doesn’t work for you. I reckon it’s some kind of bug.

            After you successfully subscribed to this community, its easy accessing it from now on, as it will show in the right hand side (subscribed tab)

            Hope it helps (please correct me anybody if I’m wrong)