I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, for example, is the “Gaming” community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org and will I need to join both?
That’s right. [email protected] is different from [email protected]
Note that you can use your same account to subscribe to both of them, as one may be more active than the other. Feel free to pick one or both it doesn’t really matter. Different websites/servers have slightly different rules and different culture, so the posts and comments will be slightly different community to community.
well that’s confusing
Its different from centralized services, and better. Rather than there being a single universal gaming community, people can make their own, with their own rules. If one gaming community has bad mods, or one server has bad admins, you can move to a different one.
wait, what about if you have two communities where mods and admins are fine. Are there any options to federate those communities?
all this time I was under impression that communities already federate
There is not a single, god community. Any instance can make /c/startrek, and people can subscribe to both.
expired
The only “universal community search” tool that we know of so far, is https://browse.feddit.de/ .
But I’d be very open to adding this type of functionality into lemmy’s apps, and this UI too.
expired
Just pick the one with most activity.
Also be aware that Beehaw doesn’t federate with Lemmy.world, the biggest instance in the Lemmyverse.
You can have multis, and you can subscribe to multiples at once.
I have about twenty different gaming subs on all different servers subscribed, so I’ll see any one of them in my feed.
Does it matter which one posted what I’m looking at?
Not really.
So that’s how you do it. Nice so you can also combine closely-related topics. I do think as a new user (like myself) it’s a bit daunting that I can’t just subscribe to 1 of each topic but potentially have to go seek out the multiple versions of it on different servers, let alone keep up in case new servers come around.
Maybe there could be a centralized list of multis you can subscribe to and these would be maintained for you, or something like that.
O wait, the whole federation allows federation of just users and not communities?
So all this time I have been looking at posts just on the main instance and not posts across all instances?
fugggggggg so now I have to go search for communities of same name on all other instances as well and subscribe to them? ok, fine. How do I do this? there should really be something that automates this processNo, communities are the main federated item in lemmy.
For example, [email protected] is also viewable from here: https://lemmy.ml/c/[email protected]
I would argue that “viewable from” is a far cry from truly federated. The fact that I have to subscribe to infinitely many individual communities to see all, say, “Technology” content across all of lemmy seems like a near-fatal flaw to me.