Hi, I just discovered SDF whilst looking for a Lemmy instance. Things look really interesting here. Hopefully will learn a lot.
Quick question re: mastodon SDF instance. Should I be able to log in with my Lemmy credentials or do I have to register a new account? Maybe a stupid question, but thought i should ask!
I think on Lemmy the default is everything is federated, so unless lemmy.sdf.org has specifically blocked the instance, you can subscribe to its communities. You can check the Instances page to see any instances we’re blocking (none at the moment). Don’t worry if the instance isn’t in the list, once you subscribe to a community on it, the instance will be added to the list.
To subscribe to a community, you need to search for it from the lemmy.sdf.org instance. For example, if you wanted to subscribe to the Rust community on programming.dev, search for
!rust@programming.devon the search page. You will probably have to search multiple times and wait up to 10s for the community result to “pop” in, and sometimes it’ll say no results before the community shows up.Thanks for that.
Such a coincidence, I just found that instances page and was trying to search for rust@programming.dev in the search! I head you had to search for the community from your instance and subscribe from there.
Thats interesting that ALL insrances are automatically federated.
If nobody on an instance is subscribed to any communities on another instance, they don’t actively talk to each other. This means that if you’re the first to subscribe to a community, you may not be able to see stuff from before you subscribed from your local instance. Once you subscribe, your local instance will start copying stuff from the other instance to its local database.
I’ll be interested to learn more about all this, in particular how all these instances will scale up as the user base grows.