Imagine a bunch of cities run by different mayors. They all run their own cities but people can freely travel between them, go to the restaurants, visit friends, and more. If one mayor goes insane the other mayors can ban citizens from visiting their city. But there's only so much power one mayor has since they're under the state government.
Congrats, you now understand federalism. Idk how Lemmy works either.
Imagine you have a mutated horse. It has many heads. You can only see one. You can pick which one you see. But whichever head you see will tell you what the others are like, what they're doing and saying, etc. So you ride your horse, it looks like a normal horse, but secretly it has many heads, but to ride it you have to talk to the head that knows you. You could introduce yourself to the other heads but maybe they won't be as nice as the head that you know. When the horse runs, it sees with all of its heads and talks to you in a language that reflects it's thousands of perspectives.
I've been trying to figure out Jerboa for the third day. The newsfeed doesn't update. Then all of a sudden some strange instances start dropping, then everything freezes to a standstill. Stupid app.
it's not really necessary to fully understand the concepts behind lemmy, it's just like reddit when it comes to usage, but not everything is visible right away, sometimes you need to look up and subscribe to a community for it to be synced with this instance here and it'll show up. There is also https://browse.feddit.de/ to discover communities. Oh and if you clink on a link that points to another instance like lemmy.ml or lemmy.blahaj.zone it'll basically log you off, so don't do that, just use links that look like !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, for example. All that is left is to enjoy the experience :)
Exactly, "similar." I'm subscribed to about ten communities, and they're not in my feed. But there are others, and they hang in the newsfeed all the time. When I try to open some of them, they don't open, and there is no indication that they are private feeds anywhere.blahaj for example.
Are you sure you have "subscribed" selected at the top of the feed? Also you should probably use "hot" instead of "active" for sorting if you don't like seeing old posts. There is also an option to hide posts that you've already seen in settings.
The way lemmy does it by default rn isn't ideal though, because it lends you to another instance which means you are basically logged off... it's better to link it like [!196@lemmy.world](/c/196@lemmy.world)
I have no idea why lemmy devs chose for it to be this way, unfortunately I cannot do anything about it myself, but there is a very popular issue in the lemmy repo that calls for a change on that front https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048 so hopefully we'll see it implemented soon.
Oh right, I actually saw another similar link elsewhere and clicked it, but both of them send me "logged out" to their own instance anyway. Is it not currently implemented fully or something?
the way you need to link is [some text here](/c/communityname@instance.tld), example: [/c/196@lemmy.world](/c/196@lemmy.world) which looks like this: /c/196@lemmy.world. It sends you to your own instance's version.