Welcome!

In this post, I’ll attempt to explain how Lemmy works, using Reddit as comparison, so that you can use it the best you can.

Lemmy is a non-centralized system

Unlike reddit, where everything is accessed from reddit.com, Lemmy is spread across multiple servers. You might, and probably will, venture outside of lemmy.jpiolho.com from time to time.

Does this means I need multiple accounts in different websites?

No. While there’s different servers, they can connect with each other so that you can access everything from your account in lemmy.jpiolho.com

Communities

You can find them at the top of the page. These are the equivalent to subreddits. Where as reddit usually follows /r/name, here they are /c/name or name@server. One thing to keep in mind is that there can be multiple communities with the same name. They are however, located in different servers. Examples: gaming@beehaw.org and gaming@lemmy.ml

How do I sub to a community?

If you find an interesting community in lemmy.jpiolho.com, like JPiolho’s Castle 👀, you can just press the Subscribe button.

What if the community is located in another server?

You’ll need to import the community into lemmy.jpiolho.com first. The way you do this is just by copying the browser url and then pasting it in the search in lemmy.jpiolho.com. Initially this will say “No results” but wait a few seconds. The new community will be imported and then you can subscribe to it.

I’ve imported a foreign community but it doesn’t have posts or comments

This appears to be a quirk of Lemmy, but it appears that at least 1 person needs to be subscribed for it to be constantly updated with latest posts and comments from the remote server.

How can I find communities?