I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
Can I visit other instances and view/interact with their local posts from this instance? I’m getting the hang of communities but the instances are throwing me for a loop lol
When you subscribe to a a community you can see all posts to that community. You can think of it as the post getting sent to whichever instance created the community, which then distributes the post to any instances that have users subscribed to that community. AFAIK there is no way to view all posts from some other instance other than visiting that instance directly.
You should be able to see all of the posts from communities that someone on your instance has subscribed to by switching to “All” in the community selector at the top of your feed (Subscribed / Local / All).
For discovering communities right now I am just going to the top instances listed on https://join-lemmy.org/instances and seeing what communities are active and interesting. The flow to subscribe to them kinda sucks (you have to copy the community name “!asklemmy@lemmy.ml” into the search on your instance, wait for it to do some sort of handshake, and eventually you can then click into and explore that specific community). Apparently there is also a community browser you can use.
Thank you!
The community browser you mentioned is super useful. Just copy links from there into your search bar to subscribe.
https://browse.feddit.de/
Well, it’s actually a bit simpler than that.
You can directly browse a community that technically lives on another instance without ever leaving your instance.
If you’re on the start page of your instance you can e.g. change between seeing Local, Subscribed or posts from all communities (across instances).
You can click around and browse from there without having to leave your instance :)
Thanks!