You can think of Lemmy and federation like email. You can receive and read yahoo mail on your gmail account, but you obviously can’t login to yahoo with your gmail account. Lemmy works the same way more or less except these "emails” (posts and comments and upvotes etc… ) aren’t private but public. You can see and interact with lemmy.ca’s posts from here on lemmy.ml by clicking on "all” as opposed to ”local” on the front-page. That’s where the posts from lemmy.ca get ”pulled” to lemmy.ml, and if you comment the comment gets sent to lemmy.ca.
Lets say you like this community, and want to subscribe to it: https://lemmy.ca/c/canada
From this instance, go to the search bar and type
!canada@lemmy.caClick subscribe.
Now you see and can interact with everything that gets posted to that community. No need to make 2 accounts.
I don’t know if this has been discussed already, my apologies if it has, but I feel that specific search syntax for communities discovery isn’t very noob friendly. I don’t know if most people would know they have to do it in that email format, let alone they should add an exclamation point before it. Maybe either a small syntax notice should be added next to the search bar or maybe just have additional syntax in the form of ”community@instance.tld” and ”instance.tld/c/community” do the job as well? I’m aware this would return regular results as well (preferably below the community), but no harm in that as far as I can tell. If the search would add unnecessary load on the infrastructure just add a small prompt below the community ”Did you mean to search for ”instance.tld/c/community” in the content (posts and comments)? Click here." Certainly far more intuitive for new users. Just my 2 cents.
You can also enter the community url in the search box, and it will work. Same for post, comment and user URLs.
Oh, I see, the ”https://” part is necessary, I tried it without before and it didn’t work.
Right, it has to be the full URL.
Makes sense. I guess I was subconsciously going off of how linking to just r/subreddit works on reddit. The URL version is sufficiently noob friendly tho, I think.
We could also add support for that, feel free to open an issue.
