How do I open something in my instance

Normally, any internal links that you come across while browsing should resolve automatically to open the correct page on your instance. Most apps and frontends are using little tricks behind the scenes to make this happen.

However, if that isn't working or if you find a link on some website (such as this one), you may need to find it manually in your instance.

Search using the link

You can often just copy and paste the link into the search bar.

If there are too many results, you can filter further to narrow it down. For example, selecting Communities will only show communities in the results.

Search by community shorthand

Every community is identified with two parts:

• the name of the community
• the instance that it is from

For example, !canada@lemmy.ca is the community canada on the instance lemmy.ca.

You can use this notation with an exclamation mark to search for the community. For example, if you are looking for the woodworking community from lemmy.ca, you can paste the following into the search bar: !woodworking@lemmy.ca

Manually resolve the community

If you are using a web browser, you can use the method above to manually type in the correct URL.

If you have an account on lemmy.ca, and you want to open the science_memes community from mander.xyz, you would type in lemmy.ca/c/science_memes@mander.xyz.

When you are looking for a community that is on the same instance that you have an account with, the @instance part is optional. For example, the following links will take you to the same place:

• lemmy.ca/c/canada
• lemmy.ca/c/canada@lemmy.ca