I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, for example, is the “Gaming” community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org and will I need to join both?
That’s right. !Gaming@lemmy.ml is different from !Gaming@beehaw.org
Note that you can use your same account to subscribe to both of them, as one may be more active than the other. Feel free to pick one or both it doesn’t really matter. Different websites/servers have slightly different rules and different culture, so the posts and comments will be slightly different community to community.
How can I search for communities across servers that are particularly active on a given topic?
well that’s confusing
Its different from centralized services, and better. Rather than there being a single universal gaming community, people can make their own, with their own rules. If one gaming community has bad mods, or one server has bad admins, you can move to a different one.
wait, what about if you have two communities where mods and admins are fine. Are there any options to federate those communities?
all this time I was under impression that communities already federate
There is not a single, god community. Any instance can make /c/startrek, and people can subscribe to both.
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The only “universal community search” tool that we know of so far, is https://browse.feddit.de/ .
But I’d be very open to adding this type of functionality into lemmy’s apps, and this UI too.
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Just pick the one with most activity.
Also be aware that Beehaw doesn’t federate with Lemmy.world, the biggest instance in the Lemmyverse.
O wait, the whole federation allows federation of just users and not communities?
So all this time I have been looking at posts just on the main instance and not posts across all instances?
fugggggggg so now I have to go search for communities of same name on all other instances as well and subscribe to them? ok, fine. How do I do this? there should really be something that automates this processSo, the way that I figured it, you could have the !something@someserver concept, which I call groups (lemmy calls them communities), and the collision of those (say, !something with no server), would be called “regions” because they’d be several competing communities trying to use a shared resource. Moderation of a region would be a nightmare.
You could probably make a reddit-esque “multireddit” style view that represents the “regions” concept - just know that you are posting to a particular community with particular mods, in the end.
You can have multis, and you can subscribe to multiples at once.
I have about twenty different gaming subs on all different servers subscribed, so I’ll see any one of them in my feed.
Does it matter which one posted what I’m looking at?
Not really.
So that’s how you do it. Nice so you can also combine closely-related topics. I do think as a new user (like myself) it’s a bit daunting that I can’t just subscribe to 1 of each topic but potentially have to go seek out the multiple versions of it on different servers, let alone keep up in case new servers come around.
Maybe there could be a centralized list of multis you can subscribe to and these would be maintained for you, or something like that.
