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?
Your questions about how to find communities, I'd like to point you to the Lemmy Community Browser: https://browse.feddit.de/
I also recommend reading through Lemmy Support since these questions have been covered a lot in the past couple of days and you will find many and more detailed answers there. I don't mean to discourage you to ask questions though, but it will also help to make yourself familiar with the new platform.
Hi, thanks for answering. But I still have some questions.
First about reading through Lemmy support, I wanted to do that. I'm sure that my question was asked before. So I wanted to search within the community, but I don't seem to be able to. Am I missing something? (I used a browser on Lemmy.world).
About the link for search community, it does answers my question, actually. Suppose there is an instance "Lemmy_for_being_sad.ml" and I want to see/search what communities there are on it, how çan I do it? The only way is to go to that instance?
And also about mastodon. I saw in several places that there won't be a problem to comment on mastodon using a Lemmy acount. But, how do I get to that mastodon post to begin with?
I tried to look through the join-lemmy guide before opening the account here, but I couldn't figure that out.
I think what you mean by searching through a community is not implemented yet. Keep in mind that Lemmy is a young service and many features are still in development. What I was referring to was opening https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support and then scroll through the posts to see if there are some about the topic. Cause that way you will find posts around the same topic but that are worded differently so you wouldn't have found them anyway :).
I'm not sure how it works on Lemmy.world since I'm on Lemmy.ml, but here I can click on Communities and it shows me all available communities and I can subscribe to them. When I search for communites on other instances, I either discover them by reading "All" posts, or I search the community browser for my interests, for example "books". So I'm going the other way round, I don't check what communities an instance hosts, I look for what I'm interested in regardless where it's located.
Can't comment on Mastodon since I don't like Microblogging very much, but - without trying to confuse you - there is another service (fork of) like Lemmy, that has an easy to understand Mastodon integration: kbin.social
Thanks for the answer. I find the lack of search capability surprising, but... I guess that it will come. As you said, Lemmy is still young.
I've replied elsewhere about the searching-for-communities question. I think that I should have phrased my question better. In a sense, it's a question about why the instances solve the issue.