Just joined Lemmy today. From what I understand, there are different Lemmy instances that host different communities. I supposed that to interact in a community hosted in a certain instance, I would need to create an account for that instance. Ended up creating 10 different accounts.
Instances talk to all the other instances through federation. You only need one account on one instance- from there you can then go to communities on other instances by linking !community@instance.tld (e.g !memes@sopuli.xyz) and/or looking them up in the Communities tab and interact with those communities from your home instance.
For the most part as highlighted above, yes only one account/instance and you can engage with anything that instance federates with.
However there are already cases where large instances have defederated from others, in which case you will not be able to engage if your local has been defederated from a community you want to access.
For this reason it is a good idea to have multiple, but use one as a primary.
I’ve also found it useful to have multiple to compartmentalize the subjects I subscribe to on each and limit what I see when I am in different “modes”.
Makes it easier to see was is active in communities local to that specific instance too.
I was on beehaw before and didn’t like that losing access to lemmy.world so found lemmy.one. It’s good to diversify.
Is this actually working for anyone on lemmy.one right now? I have been unable to subscribe to any community/magazine/etc… that’s not already federated to lemmy.one for almost a week now.
I’ve tried searching by URL. I’ve tried searching by !name@server.
Nothing works, it just sits there. I’ve hit search multiple times. I’ve tried to be patient and just come back later and try again. I get there’s growing pains, and I’m guessing this server is getting overloaded. If that’s the case, the admin posting in Meta “hey we’re aware of the problems” would be nice.
I’m not aware of the problems, so I can’t make such a post. Looking at this now and searching by URL for magazines on kbin and communities on lemmy instances both seem to work as expected, so I can’t reproduce what you’re seeing.
I am aware of issues with lemmy.ml, searching for communities that are hosted on that server will often fail the first few times, and subscribing to communities that are hosted on that server often shows that subscriptions are “pending,” so if that’s where you are searching for communities I can see why it’d be an issue. Federation is a two-way street, so if lemmy.one can’t fetch remote data then it won’t work, but I’ve seen many other reports of people subscribing to remote communities just fine, so I don’t think there’s any issues we’re seeing on our end.
Thank you very much! I actually found the documentation for Lemmy. It explained and answered all my questions (for the moment). Feeling kinda stupid for posting this; makes me want to delete it 😅.
No need to delete! Someone may appear with the same question and search the instance, and find your post instead of getting lost and giving up hope.