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.

  • a new sad me@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Hmmm… I understand the analogy, but I’m still not sure I accept it. I mean, with emails I need to actively search for specific people elsewhere. The basic idea is not to discover new users and such. I don’t think it is only semantics and the reason is exactly the reason I’ve placed my original post. My intention with it wasn’t clear enough, probably.

    To crystallize my question: what’s the point of making theme-based instances if I cannot browse specifically these instances for their local community. E.g., my account is registered on lemmy.world, and I see an instance dedicated to sad things. If I want to browse specifically that instance, see what sad communities I can find there. How can I do that? And if I can, how does that works with the statement I saw on the beginner’s guide that it doesn’t mater which instance I register on?

    • Kresten@feddit.dkEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      That’s actually the main issue I had with mastodon. Because it was just an instance and users, there weren’t any way to group them (except for hashtags, they are a great tool, but still bot quite what I was looking for).

      The advantage of Lemmy is it has Instance > community > user. Think of an instance theme as more of a grouping of communities, it doesn’t really serve a real purpose. If you subscribe to all communities under an instance you’d get the local experience. This wouldn’t make sense for mastodon, why would you follow every single user on an instance.