Q: Does Lemmy auto-refresh/live update?
A: Currently, yes, albeit consensus appears to be that this is a bug/unintended for the long term, and is being worked on for the next version. As Lemmy is an open source project, there's no firm ETA on the next version.
Q: How do I find other communities?
A: So, for the instance (e.g. lemmy.world/beehaw.org/lemmy.ml/etc.) you're on, you can click communities at the top of the page and there's a list that typically shows communities of the instance you're on by default (this is what local refers to). For communities from off-instance that your instance has seen before, you may click All and see even more communities.
If it's an altogether new instance or simply unseen by yours yet, you will likely have to copy the url for it and enter it into the search to tell your instance to look for it so that you may view it from in your instance & subscribe. It may take a moment or a few tries for your instance to find it, so give it a moment after searching or try again if it doesn't find it within a few seconds.
Protip: if you try to search from the communities page, it narrows your search to communities, and these narrowed searches don't recognize the ![communityname]@[instance] formatting nor urls.
You'll want to switch the search type to All for either the ! formatting, ensuring you're spelling & formatting the community name correctly, or when copying a community's URL.
Note, if you search via the front page's search bar, it defaults to search type All, so you needn't adjust anything.
Edit: There's now Lemmyverse available for searching for communities across instances so that you may then copy their URLs to search on your instance & tell it to find them.
Q: I've tried subscribing to communities on other instances but nothing happens or they're all stuck pending, what's going on?
A: If your site/instance is more populated and seeing a lot of traffic, and/or the other site/instance is, your subscription may have gone through but not updated to reflect it right away.
Alternatively, if it's stuck pending, it may be that you're basically subscribed already, but if that indicator bothers you, click it again & try resubbing until it shows that you've subscribed/joined.
Q: I'm seeing the same posts each time I come back even though I've set sort to active, where's all the activity?
A: The active sort relates to post score and time of the latest comment (source), and since so many folks are new, they're probably seeing these same posts & continuing to comment on them before exploring other posts. This has had the somewhat unintended effect of making them stick around the top of the active sorting.
For a quick fix, you can switch the sort type each time you visit, but even better, you can go into your account settings and adjust your defaults for this. Tired of the same active posts? Switch your default sort to ~~hot or~~ new or whatever suits your tastes.
(Hot's currently broken, hence the strikethrough.)
Q: I've been trying to post, but the create/submit button just changes to a spinning circle and never completes...Wtf?
A: Good news! This typically doesn't mean your post hasn't gone through, but bad news, you'll probably have to open your instance in a new tab to see that it has gone through.
I'm not sure whether this is related to a bug or server load (maybe a mix of the two), but for the time being it's part of the growing pains of a different site/platform.
What are some other common questions you've been seeing that you have some answers/advice for? Let's try to make this thread a sort of dynamic FAQ to help others out!
Thank You for the FAQ! I am new and I have two questions, if anybody would be willing to answer them that would be lovely.
At the bottom of the page there is a link to Instances. I am assuming that those are federated with lemmy.world, is that correct? If they are, then how can I utilize it? Let's take for example mastodon.social which is listed there, can I somehow subscribe to a person on mastodon so i can get their posts to show up in lemmy.world for me?
You're correct, and as to how you can utilize the list, it's much more relevant to use it to see which instances your chosen instance (or an instance you're considering making an account on) has blocked more than what it's linked to/allowed.
The reason is that many instances are set to openly link to/federate with others, as is the case with lemmy.world, which means that if you find another instance out there with a community you want to post to that it's not linked to yet, you can copy the URL in search here, give it a moment, and lemmy.world should find it (so long as it's not blocked or other issues aren't arising (e.g. Lemmy bugs or network traffic being high)).
That said, you may also use the linked to list to verify that an instance already knows about another one, so that way you shouldn't need to copy a community's URL unless it happens to be very new. There's still some rough edges with this though from what I understand, so a good practice if a community doesn't show after a search or two and giving it a few seconds or a minute is to just copy the URL into search to kick your instance into finding it.
Edit:
Almost forgot, regarding following Mastodon folks, I don't think that's currently supported within Lemmy due to their different formatting, but I honestly haven't tried yet. Given that we can't follow other users on Lemmy currently, I'm leaning towards not being able to for the moment.