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.
So, the way it works: Instance is a server your account is created and hosted on. Within the instance you registered with, people create communities - just like subreddits. You can search for communities within your instance but also from other instances. When searching for a community of interest, make sure to check option All. This will result in showing you communities from across various instances. You can participate, comment and post in the communities from other instances just as if they were created in the instance you are registered in.
One exclusion is when the instance you are registered with decided to defederate with some instance. For example Instance B is promoting illegal content so your instance decide not to federate with it. Then you won't be able to access the content on Instance B.
Makes sense?
This might explain why I can't find communities which allegedly exist, or why I can't choose my home instance in the android app to log in.
It might. I'm not getting any error which clearly states the malfunction is due to defederation.
How does one achieve clarity? Is there a map, which shows which instance is (de)federated to which other instances?
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.
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.
So what's excatly an issue you have? I might be able to help - I struggled with some stuff here as well.
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.