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Can someone explain to me how to use the Feidverse?

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.

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  • Imagine if instead of just reddit.com there was also reddit.org and reddit.co.uk and reddit.nl and reddit.social and (etc etc) all on a different server from each other and each with its own set of users and subreddits. But each user and each subreddit could be viewed and joined by any user from any server - that's Lemmy.

    So you're on the piefed.social server (but on the fediverse servers are called 'instances') and I'm on the lemmy.blahaj.zone instance but we can both see, subscribe to and post to a community (the Lemmy name for subreddits) on an instance neither of us are members of - the asklemmy community on the lemmy.world instance.

    Take a look at your screen (or app if you're on mobile) and you'll see 'Local', 'Subscribed' and 'All'. If you select 'Local' you will see a list of posts from Communities that are on your home instance (which is piefed.social in your case). If you selected 'Subscribed' you'd see posts from all the Communities you chose to join/subscribe to across all instances. If you choose 'All' you'll see posts from the entirety of Lemmy whether you subscribed to them or not. Whichever view you choose can be sorted by things like 'new', 'active', 'hot' etc.

    To find Communities you're interested in joining, use the Search function, type in a keyword and select 'Communities'.

  • I'm not sure how common this knowledge is, but the default Lemmy web-interface sucks. There are web portals that improve it considerably. Some of them may be available direct on your instance. If not, I use https://alexandrite.app/ for my frontend.

    There are others, at least one of which looks like old.reddit, but I'm not sure the address of them. I would trigger Cunningham's Law, but I don't want to add confusion.

  • Use the search function. It had more options, but you can search for communities in servers with which your instance is federated

    The biggest issue you will encounter is parallel evolution. If you search for "linux" communities, you'll find a dozen of them, all named "linux", each on a different server. The naïve, easy way to choose is to look for the communities with the highest member count - but this is not always the best way to find the one you want to join. !linux@pentakoala.net will be full of people who bitch constantly about software that uses licenses other than GPLv3 and get downright nasty about people using MIT. Totally hypothetical, but you get my point - you have to peek into the communities and read some posts to differentiate their tone.

    Browse "All" occasionally. Sort by "New." Yeah, you'll get a lot of furry porn, and a fair amount of OnlyFans fishing posts, but you'll also find !superbowl@lemmy.world!

  • Idk how piefed is but on lemm.ee I'm able to search for communities across all instances lemm.ee is federated with. I found most of mine by just searching either the names from Reddit or something more generic about the topic.

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