The way Lemmy works right now is you search a community in your instance for it to then get shown, so you need to first discover that community from elsewhere. With that in mind, what are some growing communities that you discovered that could get some more love?

  • MDKAOD
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Something I haven’t been able to wrap my head around, do I need a username on each instance for federated instances? If not, how does one participate in communities in other instances? I’m with lemmy.ml, but if I want to interact with a post on beehaw, how do I do that?

    • Toebeans@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I think it works like this: each account belongs to an instance which is your home instance. You can go to other instances to interact with their communities, but your profile (where your history is) is on your home instance. The only difference I’ve notice is that, posting on your home instance then your post is just username, but on away instances it’s username@homeinstance. Otherwise it seems to work the exact same as interacting with communities on your home instance. But I’ve only just signed up so I am making guessing!

      • BuxtonWater
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        You can also hide your home instance by using a display name I believe. Also new so only 77% sure.

    • Pumpkin@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      The short answer is no, you dont.

      Think of this like email, you sign up to a mail provider (gmail, yahoo, fastmail, etc) or even if you’re feeling up to it run you own email server with you own domain. You can then use that account to send emails to anyone regardless of which provider they picked and anyone can send you email too.

      Lemmy (and ActivityPub, the underlying protocol) works the same. ActivityPub under the hood even uses the same concept of an inbox and outbox. You pick your provider and you can comment, post, etc. to anywhere regardless of which instance the other users or community is on.

      If you see a post on another instance (e.g. Beehaw) you can just comment in the webui or app and it’ll just work.

        • Pumpkin@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          8
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Nope, you only need one account. It works like email, it dosn’t matter if you’re on gmail, yahoo or fastmail, you can still send and receive emails from other providers. You can subscribe to communities on other instances and post comments or submit new posts regardless of which instance the community is on.

          • Arthur BesseA
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            7
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Nope, you only need one account

            well, almost… your account can only see what its instance lets you, eg from where i’m posting from (lemmy.ml) i can see things on lemmygrad.ml but many instances, including the one you’re on sh.itjust.works, have blocked them.

          • generalEdo@lemmy.fmhy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Thanks for the reply, I think I got it now. What confused me was the “it’s like email” part. I understand I can send to/receive from yahoo, AOL etc. But I can’t log into them with my Gmail. So I was thinking I would need a sing-in for beehaw and others.

    • ketcham1009
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      You only need one username for each group of federated servers/instances. Click Communities at the top, then click All under List of communities. that should list all communities known to lemmy.ml. If a community is not known, you would need to search for it (eg. Technology@beehaw.org).