There has been a steady trickle of new users here today, and in the past little while, mostly due to the bad decisions that reddit is currently making.

Anyways, welcome! Feel free to look around, and if you have any questions about anything lemmy related, feel free to ask!

Also, if you feel up to it, introduce yourself in the comments below!

edit: Here’s a nice getting started guide for lemmy: https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/

i should have added it here a while ago!

  • machei@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    So… still wrapping my head around the whole concept of of federated spaces. By way of comparison, if I go to Reddit, and I search for subreddits, it searches all of reddit, and pulls up the relevant information. If I do a search here, am I searching ONLY the Lemmy.ca server, or does that search ALL of the Lemmy fediverse? If not, how does one do that? CAN one do that? Sorry for the newbie questions. I want to make the move from Twitter/Reddit to Mastodon/Lemmy, but I want to get it so I can indoctrinate my over cautious, set-in-their-ways friends. :)

    • smorks@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I could be wrong, but I believe when you search it searches all constant that has been “federated” to the server your searching on. in other words, any remote communities that are subscribed by users on this instance will be searched. something along those lines, anyways, haha.

      • machei@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Thank you for your reply! See, that’s what I thought, but I tried a few searches that I was sure would pull up a community–things like “fashion” or “volkswagen” or “Beatles” and I come up with no search results. I’d buy that those communities may not exist in a new(er) Canadian-focused server, but across the whole Fediverse of servers? I dunno. I still think there’s things about this place that I don’t get. Ah well, in time, I’ll learn I’m sure. Thank you again for taking the time to reply.

        • smorks@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I just ran a quick test. I found the fashion community from lemmy.ml (by searching directly on their site), and subscribed to it. now when you search here for fashion it shows up. so you might be better off searching some of the bigger instances directly, then subscribing to them from here.

          • machei@lemmy.caEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Oh… so you need to search directly on other instances to find communities. Hmm… bit of a shot in the dark there, but I’ll give it a try. Thank you for the guidance!

            • smorks@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
              3·
              1 year ago

              yeah, basically. if no one from this instance is subscribed to a remote community then it won’t show up in the search.

              • machei@lemmy.caEnglish
                4·
                1 year ago

                Hold up, so if anyone as a member of this instance has subscribed to any community outside of this instance, it becomes searchable from within this instance, while if the community is entirely unknown within this instance, you need to find it ‘out there’ somewhere and subscribe whereupon you’re good (and it can then be found by any member of this instance)? That’s my understanding based on this discussion, anyway. :)

          • Em Adespoton@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            So how do you subscribe to communities that aren’t listed yet? I get subscribe links for ones that have been federated, but so far have found no way to subscribe to a non-federated community, even when I know its name. I’m using the mobile interface.

            • smorks@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              if you have the url for the community (usually https://<instance>/c/<community>, for example: https://beehaw.org/c/music), click on the top-right menu bar, then the magnifying glass. enter/paste the community url into the search field, click on search. it should show up as one of the results (and sometimes takes a try or two for some reason?).

              the result you want will look something like this:

              also, if you know the url, you can also just figure out the url for the local instance:

              https://lemmy.ca/c/<community>@<instance>, for example: https://lemmy.ca/c/music@beehaw.org

              hope that makes sense!