This is a bit of a "Meta community". Lemmy users are still new and confused (though enthusiastic). Finding good threads that "sample" what Lemmy is about and what it can do will be a good thing, at least in the short term, to help this community figure out the hows and why's of Lemmy and its federation model.
Use this to search for a community in order to subscribe. You can omit the bang ('!'), but then you will only find the community if another lemming of your home instance has already discovered it. To discover it, you have to bang it.
In short, searching for [email protected] is like searching for [email protected] with added functionality and no downsides (as far as I'm aware of, still learning).
This is very important for lemmings on small instances. Lemmings on big instances often don't need to use the bang, because someone else from their home instance has likely already discovered.
Note how when you click on the full address (1) of a community hosted in another instance, you are not logged in anymore? Option 3 solves this problem, it is a link relative to your current position. It allows you to visit the community and subscribe to it because you remain logged in. If you get a 404 error, bang it first using #2.
The 2nd link is "supposed" to be how Lemmy links work, but the software isn't there yet. I'm hoping that over the long term, the frontend / backend interprets [email protected] correctly.
The 3rd link is a hack which seems to work across the Lemmyverse. I'm not sure what the long-term support is, or if its "proper behavior" to use that link. But it works today.
The 4th link is for kbin.social, because those crazy people managed to start Federating with Lemmy.
undefined> Use this to search for a community in order to subscribe. You can omit the bang (‘!’), but then you will only find the community if another lemming of your home instance has already discovered it. To discover it, you have to bang it.
In short, searching for [email protected] is like searching for [email protected] with added functionality and no downsides (as far as I’m aware of, still learning).
This is very important for lemmings on small instances. Lemmings on big instances often don’t need to use the bang, because someone else from their home instance has likely already discovered.
I feel like I'm in the 1990s trying to set up everything through a VCR