You could consider using !photography@lemmy.glasgow.social, which seem more popular than !photography@lemmy.ml

That sounds like the right approach. I’ve found if a server is too overloaded, then it gives you the spinning circle when trying to sign up. I’d recommend trying to make an account on a smaller instance and see if that works.

I was able to find it from the instance I’m on

What’s the community you’re trying to get working?

Even though you don’t know what code is running on their server, the bitwarden client used to communicate with their server is open source & auditable. End-to-end encryption only requires that the client code is trustworthy.

Ah got it thanks. Then does the !community I’m posting to just act as a tag to stay organized and help others find the post? Or is it used in the federation of the post to other servers?

For example, from my account on beehaw.org I post to !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml. This writes to beehaw.org’s database and lets lemmy.ml know about the new post (lemmy.ml saves a copy). Do other instances who have a user subscribed to !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml reach out to lemmy.ml to get a list of posts under that community? Or do other instances reach out to beehaw.org to see if there are any posts to !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml?

I guess I’m mostly just confused on how !communities are used in the federation process.

That link didn’t work for me, so I’m trying this: !oldweb@lemmy.ml