terribleplan

So I am just jumping into it myself (and straight into the deep end with running my own server, lol), so this may not be 100% accurate…

My current understanding is that an instance is where you make your account and log in to. The instance keeps track of all the stuff to show you, including things it gets from other instances.

A “sub” (I think called a “community” in Lemmy parlance) is basically a subreddit, but with the added benefit of being able to subscribe to it from any instance due to the whole “federation” thing. For example, this overall post is on lemmy.ml (in their “asklemmy” community), the comment you replied to is from a user on on the lemmy.world instance, you are a user on the latte.isnot.coffee instance, and I am on the lemmy.nrd.li instance. These instances are all sending messages to each other to keep all of our comments/votes/posts/etc in sync so this can all work (mostly) seamlessly.

The @sopuli.xyz indicates the community was made on that instance. Basically your instance is talking with that instance to keep things in sync. This is what allows me on lemmy.nrd.li to talk to you on lemmy.ml via sopuli.xyz.

When you subscribe to a a community you can see all posts to that community. You can think of it as the post getting sent to whichever instance created the community, which then distributes the post to any instances that have users subscribed to that community. AFAIK there is no way to view all posts from some other instance other than visiting that instance directly.

You should be able to see all of the posts from communities that someone on your instance has subscribed to by switching to “All” in the community selector at the top of your feed (Subscribed / Local / All).

For discovering communities right now I am just going to the top instances listed on https://join-lemmy.org/instances and seeing what communities are active and interesting. The flow to subscribe to them kinda sucks (you have to copy the community name “!asklemmy@lemmy.ml” into the search on your instance, wait for it to do some sort of handshake, and eventually you can then click into and explore that specific community). Apparently there is also a community browser you can use.

I created my own server…

Based on my previous experience running a Mastodon server, 90%+ of people are going to concentrate on already popular servers, especially the “official” one. I suppose I will also close (or be strict about) registration at some point myself, but I have a feeling I am not going to have to worry about it for a long time. My goal now is just to get some friends and acquaintances to join any lemmy instance, bonus points if it is mine.

The whole “build it yourself” strategy with plugins and stuff is why I moved over to Traefik. I think you’ll basically need to follow this doc to build it yourself while still using the apt package for all the niceties like Systemd units and such.

Yeah (assuming the current version of the lemmy UI), if the sidebar says !community@server it is remote, if it only says !community then it is local. For local communities there is basically an implicit @yourserver after the community name.

Same but in a matter of hours. I’m sure my enthusiasm will wear off at some point. Not enough people yet to just lurk, we have to make the content too.

indefinitely != permanently

</pedantry>

I’ve been using Adobe’s Source Code Pro for years (which they don’t even mention as an open source monospace font). This looks pretty good, but I am not a fan of the parenthesis () and braces {} they look almost hand-drawn (or perhaps the arc is to harsh or something, IDK).