From what I understand you don't need an account on all instances. So let's say you have an account on lemmy.ml, you can search for "community@beehaw.org" and subscribe to it.
alternatively, to view a remote community from your lemmy instance you just append the domain to the end of the URL to indicate its on that specific remote instance: e.g. if your home instance is lemmy.ml, visit https://lemmy.ml/c/futurama@lemmy.world to see the remote "futurama" community from your instance. If you remove "@lemmy.world" you'll see your local futurama community, which isn't very active.
No, you only need one account on one server and you'll be able to see posts and comments everywhere else.
Yes, although a few specific servers are blocked by other specific servers, and very small servers may not show many communities elsewhere until their users actually subscribe. But yes, beehaw.org and others work just fine.
You can see a list of all communities here. Also Lemmy federates with Mastodon, not just Lemmy instances among themselves, in case you're also using that.
Thank you so much and also it will take me a while to get used to this (@-@ ٥). I am not familiar with mastodon but how do you use it along with lemmy?
Is there any benefit to joining an Instance closer to your location (e.g. An Australian hosted instance vs one in Europe). I notice posts seem to be slow to load (could just be the jerboa app). I joined lemmy.world just because it was one recommended, but I'm not really close to it.
Is there any benefit to joining an Instance closer to your location (e.g. An Australian hosted instance vs one in Europe)
There is! Lemmy instances are generally going to be hosted from one geographic location, unlike a major corporate website like reddit that is likely to be hosted from multiple servers around the world. The closer the lemmy server is to you, the snappier and more responsive your experience will tend to be.
But there are other and larger factors, too. For one thing, if an instance is overloaded with more users than it can really handle, then that will more than outweigh the benefit of geographical proximity.
As things level out, though, and the increased traffic that lemmy instances are experiencing right now reaches a stable level, instance hosts should be able to adapt and overloading should become less of an issue. In the end I think you are likely to have the smoothest experience if you joined an instance whose server is located closer to you.
Use browse.feddit.de to globally search across instances for communities that haven't been connected to your instance yet. Then copy the full url and search for it in your instance to add it
Look for communities in all instances, beehaw.org is nice. If you speak languages other than english, there might be little communities in your languages. I know feddit.de is pretty big if you speak german for example
It depends of your browser. For firefox and for chrome
You can sub and comment on other instances without registering on each one. However, there is a bit of a fragmented experience when viewing context from your inbox.
Another new user here, I have a question. I just saw somewhere that the content of my "all" tab will depend on which instance my account is from, is that true? I assumed the content of "all" would be the same for everyone since it is from all instances?
You will see the same content unless your instance doesn't federate with another one (due to not knowing it exists or having it blocked).
If you're on one of the larger servers you will pretty much see the same stuff except for maybe lemmygrad which is blocked in beehaw and sopuli but not on lemmy.ml
At least one person on your instance also has to be subscribed to a community for it to show up in All (you'll only notice this on brand new instances, you'll have to subscribe to everything you might want to see)