How does Lemmy work (in detail)?
If you haven't already, please see the introduction to Lemmy in the previous page.
Where are the communities?
With a traditional forum style website, one website will contain the communities. You can only interact with the communities on that website.
Fedecan (the organization that made this guide) runs a Lemmy instance called lemmy.ca. People have made communities on lemmy.ca for a variety of topics, including c/Canada and c/Woodworking for example.
Another team runs an instance called programming.dev, and they have their own communities, such as c/Programming. A different team runs mander.xyz, and their communities include c/science_memes and c/DataIsBeautiful.
Subscribing to communities
If you make an account on lemmy.ca, you can interact with all of these communities as if they were all on lemmy.ca. This includes subscribing, making posts, comments, moderating, etc.
This is true for any instance that lemmy.ca knows about. If you find a new community somewhere, that no one on lemmy.ca has subscribed to before, it won't show up at first. However once you search for it once on lemmy.ca, it will look like any other community on lemmy.ca!
What about 'bad' communities or instances?
If there is a community that you don't like, you can block it. If you find that you don't like an entire instance, you can block the entire instance and you won't see their users, communities, or posts anymore. For instructions on how to do this, see this section.
If there is a particular community or instance that you think is especially bad, you can let the admins of your instance know. They can block it for everyone on your instance.
If you are on lemmy.ca, you can let us know by posting in c/[email protected].
What if two instances have the same community name?
This is possible, and it is intentional! If two communities have the same name, but were created on different instances, they are considered separate communities. It's similar to traditional forums when you might have two communities for the same topic, with slightly different names.
This allows different people to moderate the communities in a way that they see fit. For example, one community might be more strict about what content is allowed, while another might be more relaxed.
This is also why you should include the instance name when you are linking to a community. For example:
These are small differences, but you'll get used to them soon enough 😃