I really want Lemmy to work but I'm having a difficult time tracking different communities across different instances. It feels like I'm doing something wrong. I typically just land on the lemmy.world front page and scroll through there, and I see some interesting stuff, but I'd like to learn how to curate it a bit more
Try this: go into your user settings, change Type from Local to Subscribed and Sort type from Active to Hot (or New if you prefer that).
Then click on Communities on the top bar, switch the list from Local to All, and find communities you're interested in, you can also search for specific names.
Avoid names ending in @beehaw.org if you see them, they defederated us so we can't interact with them anymore.
When you find something you like, click on the community name to go to their page, on the right you'll find the Subscribe button.
After you subscribed to enough communities, close lemmy and open it again, see if it's better that way (it is for me).
Important note is that Hot is current broken in Lemmy leading to older posts getting boosted to the top in error. It's currently being worked on for the next release.
I had a feeling it was broken. Both active and hot keep showing posts from 2-4 days ago. I'm still looking for an option to hide read posts but i found something that kind of works.
You can change your settings to not show read posts in your feed. Only problem is you gotta open the comments or upvote em. But it helps.
And right now New is definitely the way to go.
I would recommend to Lemmy to add something like top by hour or 12 hours as well, or something similar to the rising sorting with reddit. That might help things become less stale.
Apparently some idiots from here think it's fun coordinating a troll-attack on them and they don't have enough mod power to deal with it, so they removed their connections with us and sh.itjust.works.
I keep seeing people mention clicking on Communities, but I don't see that. Am I missing something?
My top bar has "All, Subscribed, Moderated, Favorites, and then a bunch of magazine suggestions. I don't see Communities anywhere.
Edit: Just noticed that this is a Lemmy threaed, is it because I am looking at it via kbin and the communities tab is only in Lemmy? This fediverse thing will take some getting used to.
Yeah, I'm not sure why this thread is showing (to me) as being on kbin.social, but I assume it's actually on a Lemmy instance since OP asked about the Lemmy UI.
On Kbin you can click on the burger menu and then "magazines", or just go to /magazines
You gotta subscribe more, it helps you and others on your instance. I do 2 things- sort by new/all and subscribe to anything interesting, but that's only what others on your instance already subscribed to. The other thing is to use a search tool to find specific interests across instances, I came across this - https://lemmyverse.net/communities