I’ve read that it should be possible, but my experience seems to show that that is incorrect, that you need a login for every instance where you wish to make a post or comment. Could someone who knows clarify this?
If you need a login for every instance of Lemmy to participate in non-local communities, then that will, I think, be the #1 issue with Lemmy adoption, and the main reason folks bounce off.
My mind boggles as to why someone would downvote this question. Why not just help, ffs?
I run a self-hosted instance, so I have some experience with what you’re asking. You do not need to sign into every instance to post or comment. Basically, you need to first find the desired community using the search function in your own instance. Once you’ve found it, you can view, post, or comment through your own instance. This is what Federation enables.
For example, let’s say I want to view posts or comment in a community over at lemmy.ml using my own instance. Let’s say the community is called c/asklemmy. As long as federation is enabled on both instances (which is the responsibility of the instance administrators), you can use the search function, within your own instance, to find the community and interact with it at your leisure.
When searching for a community on another instance, remember to specify that the community is on another instance. So, for asklemmy over at lemmy.ml, you would search for !asklemmy@lemmy.ml. The format is !(community name)@(instance domain). You can even copy and paste the URL of the community’s page into the search bar, and it will work just fine.
There’s documentation available at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/federation_getting_started.html that explains all of this in more detail. Anyway, I hope this has been helpful, and welcome to Lemmy! (It’s so much better than Reddit).
P.S. If you’re looking for an iOS client for Lemmy, Memmy is really good.
You do not need a separate account for every instance. It wouldn’t be federation if every server was a silo.
I am able to see other communities, but not comment on posts in them without a login for that instance, in my experience. Is that supposed to be the case?
Try to use https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-link-switcher
It would make it easier to just always go to your instance!
I’ve been able to post on multiple communities in multiple instances with a single account in one instance. I wonder if you’re running into the issue where some major instances have defederated from each other. Which instances have you tried to post to from your lemmy.ml account?
You have to find the same community in your home instance, instead of going to that instance directly.
I agree this is confusing, especially if you come there from a link. There’s no easy “go to this community on my instance” link right now, though there are user scripts to make this easier.
What you can do is copy a link to a community or post and paste it in the search on your home instance. That’ll hopefully show that post and allow you to subscribe.
If on desktop, you need to interact with content from inside your own instance. For example for you, your own instance is lemmy.ml you visit this website and then subscribe to communities either on your server or another server(important: without leaving the tab of your instance in the browser! Otherwise it will say you need to log in). You find communities either on the All tab or in the communities search at the top of the website.
In the future all this will become easier like it did for Mastodon but for now we have these growing pains.
