Hi there!

So, you decided to put some of your eggs in a different basket, started looking beyond Reddit and joined a Lemmy instance. Great! Thank you for choosing Rammy, by the way. But.. Now what?

Instances

You can think of an instance as the server on which your stuff is hosted. Other instances host other people's stuff. Thanks to federation, however, it doesn't really matter what instance you are on. You can view and interact with content on any other instance, as long as they are federated. This instance is federated with most others at this point.

Communities

You're probably familiar with Reddit's Subreddits. Lemmy has a similar construct, called Communities. These communities reside on an instance. That doesn't mean you can't view, subscribe to and contribute to communities on other instances, though! Once again trough the power of Federation, you can search for any community on federated servers.

As of right now communities can be hard to find, but the good folks over at feddit.de made a community browser to help you find communities you might be interested in. Found one? Fantastic! If it's not in the list of communities over here at Rammy, you can add it yourself. Just click on the search icon in the top-right, and search for !{community}@{instance}. For example, if you are interested in the Gaming community over at the Beehaw.org instance, search for: [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]).

Lemmy is still a bit rough around the edges, and subscribing can be a bit wonky. If your subscribe status is stuck on 'Subscribe Pending', try to un- and resubscribe. If that doesn't work, the only thing to do is wait. Some instances (lemmy.ml is a prime example) are having issues, and there is not much to do from our end. Just resubscribe from time to time. Also note that some content will only appear after at least one user from this instance has subscribed to a community; if you see posts but no comments and upvotes, you should try to subscribe to the community in question.