I do find a few things annoying about the federation system, like opening links directly to lemmy.world on my desktop an having to surgically recreate the link on my instance if I want to interact with it at all.
You can copy paste the URL into you instance's search box.
I joined discuss.online but is that the same as lemmy?
yes that's a part of Lemmy, that's all you need
I don’t understand the fediverse at all. The instances are confusing.
It's kinda like email. Think of it like you're on Gmail, I'm on Yahoo Mail, and the pottery community is on MSN. We can all talk to each other because we do like @mangobanana@gmail.com (in reality you're at discuss.online) and @die4ever@yahoo.com (I'm at retrolemmy.com). Usernames start with an @ like Twitter, community names start with an !
So when you do a "Local" search you only see stuff from "Gmail" like yourself, but usually you want to search "All" not "Local".
For viewing posts on my feed I prefer "Subscribed", this can be set as your default in your settings page.
have you tried an app on your phone? they can be a bit simpler to use than the website https://join-lemmy.org/apps
Mastodon has a decent usercount, but I really wish they would at least put a minimal effort into working with the Threadiverse better. It would be a huge improvement if they just made it so following a group/community didn't put all of the comments on your main feed. Also rendering the contents of Threadiverse posts instead of just giving you the title and link to it.
we at least need to make sure we don't shrink, which can sneak up on you and be difficult to stop, better to maintain some growth
Also we need a stream of new users to replace leaving users (there will always be churn), especially when an instance goes down many users won't signup again
The !communityname@instancename format works better, it's more universal to other platforms/apps. !pigeon@mander.xyz and !stick@sh.itjust.works
You can copy paste the URL into you instance's search box.
But I do think we also need this feature https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2318