cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2212

Quick post to answer some basic usage questions that can throw off new users.

Where should I register?

The age old question of fediverse. The answer is pick an instance that is not right-wing and you should be fine.

https://join-lemmy.org/instances makes this very easy. Once you find an instance, just go to its /signup endpoint. For the instance you’re reading right now, it would be: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/signup

Do I need to create a profile for each instance?

No! Each instance can access each other instance, unless it’s been defederated because its admins are toxic (this is why I told you not to join right-wing instances earlier).

I joined an instance, but the community I am interested in is in a different instance

No problem. Simply add the instance domain at the end of the url endpoint.

For example, say you’re in lemmy.ml and you realized that stable_diffusion is in lemmy.dbzer0.com. To access it, simply add @lemmy.dbzer0.com at the end of the url after the community name. So:

https://lemmy.ml/c/stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Or to put it differently, you can access any community, in any instance by adding /c/ (The requivalet of reddit /r/) and then community_name@instance.domain

If this doesn’t work, then it’s likely this instance is not yet federated with yours. To solve this, you need to search for it. See the next section.

But how do I even find the community I want to if it exists in any of hundreds of instances?

Use the search, it’s really good to find the community you’re looking for.

Note that if you search for an community in an lemmy instance your own instance doesn’t yet know about, it won’t find it. You need to give it more precice instructions to find it, which require the whole “address”. To follow our example above, you would put !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com in your search field.

When searching for a community in a new instance, it might take a few minutes to take effect. The first search will not return anything, but if you search again after a couple of minutes, it should appear.

Community? Instance?

An instance is a lemmy server hosted by someone. it has its own set of users and communities. lemmy.dbzer0.com is an instance. You can access (almost) every instance from any other instance.

a community is like a subreddit in reddit, or a channel in discord. It’s a topic in inside an instance. stable_diffusion is a community inside the instance lemmy.dbzer0.com.

In more plain terms, consider a lemmy instance like a street, and a community like a number on that street. When you write !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com you are giving the exact address and number to search for.

I keep seeing the same posts

In you’re in a smaller instance and you’ve subscribed to communities in other places, you might have set up your default visibility to not show them.

Switch your view to Subscribed/Hot to get a similar view like the reddit frontpage.

Switch to All/Hot to get a similar view to reddit /r/all

You can store this setting permanently as default in your user settings

Also see