I just made a Piefed.social account today. I’m very familiar with reddit, but after the API changes and all the bullshit that’s been happening with the site lately I want something different. How do I see which communities I’m a part of, the equivalent of subreddits I guess? Where do I go to find new ones? Do I need to be in a singe instance to participate? I’d really like to find the Lemmy equivalent of my favorite subreddits from reddit, but I simply don’t know how to do that.
This is mostly correct, but another point to consider (once OP becomes more familiar with the basics) is the concept of defederation. Basically, not all instances permit interactions with each other. Many smaller instances have defederated from lemmy.world, for example. That means that users on those instances can not directly interact with communities hosted on lemmy.world, although you could still encounter users from that instance in a post on a community in a different instance that is federated with both.
If the instance you are currently on has defederated from another one that you would like to browse, you will need to create a new user account on that instance (or one that hasn’t defederated from it).
Why?
I can’t speak for any specific instance, but I believe many of the smaller ones that defederated lemmy.world were concerned that a large user base with looser sign-up requirements would disrupt the community they wanted to build.
Huh. Thanks for answering. But this kind of breaks the intentions of a federated construct, doesn’t it?
In the worst case, I’d just block people from that instance, but not defederate it. That way my users could still interact with their community but their users couldn’t disrupt my instance.