However servers are not isolated. You can use one single account to participate in communities on any server.
That is how I'm able to write this comment from a completely different server.
You have three different timelines:
Subscribed (communities you're subscribed to, whether on your account's server (local) or on other servers (remote).
Local (only posts on local communities)
All (all posts from communities your server knows to exist)
Tip: switch your default ordering from "Active" to "Hot". I feel it gives better results.
The only tricky part to getting started, especially at a very new instance like ttrpg.network is community discovery. Your server won't know what communities exist out there unless a user searches for them.
You can do this by going to https://lemmyverse.net/communities and following any communities you like!
To do so go to the search page (magnifying glass) and copy/past or type the name of a remote community. For example say you want to subscribe to !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world. Simply copy paste that in the search box (including the exclamation mark). It might take a couple of seconds or require a refresh, but your server (ttrpg.network) will discover this new community and make it available to all other users on your server. You can also click on it and in the sidebar click on the "subscribe" button to join it like you'd join a subreddit.
Not sure if you're an admin or a mod here, but even if you're not, you can help out this instance a lot with this userscript.
(If you're not a mod, admin or know about userscripts, feel free to ignore this. This is to automate your server fetching remote communities and making them available to all users)
In the upper right click on the "home" button and write ttrgp.network as your home instance.
Now open every community you think your users will enjoy in a separate tab. I do control+click, click, click, click... and maybe open 50 or so.
What will happen is the following:
You will likely get a 404 not found error on the new tab you opened because your server doesn't know about that community yet
The script automatically redirects you from that 404 page to the search page
Your server will immediately fetch the remote community and make it discoverable
In the future it's likely that the whole discovery process will be automated. The lemmy software itself was not prepared for such an explosive growth and is lacking some features, but right now we have to roll with the punches because it's the best non-proprietary alternative out there (together with Kbin, which also interoperates with lemmy). Any other alternatives either isolate (eg. a simple forum) or are also owned and run by some for-profit company where you run the risk of digg/reddit stuff happening ago.
Right now this instance is owned by the moderators of your reddit community and you know no one can come in and ruin stuff, even if it takes some time to rebuild the community.
Tip: switch your default ordering from “Active” to “Hot”. I feel it gives better results.
Edit: Also worth mentioning. If you see a remote community you really don't like but don't want to block the remote instance entirely, an instance admin can simply click on the "remove" button of the remote community. Generally speaking it's probably best to give your users access to all or most remote content which could include NSFW, but if you really don't want to have a certain remote community appear on your list of remote communities, you can remove it (not purge, just remove) and it won't show up anywhere.
So if I wanted to join the furry memes community on your server, how would I go about doing that? I tried to log in using the same credentials I set up here, but it just spins forever.
You don't need to login on our server. You access those communities from ttrpg.network
Go to the search option in your instance while being logged in and type in !memes@yiffit.net including the exclamation mark. It might take a couple of seconds, then click on the result and subscribe to the community and you'll see its posts in your feed.
This explanation is extremely helpful, thank you! I had read the getting started guide and had a general understanding of how things worked, but this helped clear up some things that I was still a little unsure about (including how I could actually get here with my account being recognized so that I could respond). Much appreciated!