How do I open something in my instance on Lemmy?

If you come across a community while browsing Lemmy normally, you can usually just join it by clicking the button on the community page.

However, if someone messages you a link or you find a link on some website (like the ones you will find on this page below), you will need to first open it in your instance.

Search by URL

You can simply paste the URL into the search bar. If you don't see what you are looking for in the results, you can filter further to narrow it down. For example, you can select Communities when pasting the URL for a community page.

Search by community shorthand

A community link will have two parts, the name of the community and the instance that it is from. For example, [email protected] is the community canada on the instance lemmy.ca.

For example, if you are looking for the canada community from lemmy.ca, you can paste the following into the search bar: [email protected]

Manually resolve the community

Similar to the example above, you can manually type in the URL based on the usual format. If you want to open the canada community from lemmy.ca on lemmy.ca, you would type in lemmy.ca/c/canada (note that lemmy.ca/c/[email protected] will also work, but it is unnecessary on when it is on the same instance).

If you want to open this community on some other instance, such as lemmy.world, you would type in https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected].