Welcome! Read this if you're new to Lemmy

Hello! I'm glad you made it here.

As you may have already gathered, Lemmy is an open-source news aggregator that works similarly to Reddit and other sites, with the key difference that it utilizes federation. Instead of a single entity controlling the entire system centrally, there are several distinct nodes that are networked with each other using the ActivityPub protocol. This means that you're able to sign up on one server, then visit and contribute to communities on other servers.

All this happens without having to leave the site you create your account on. For example, I am able to visit /c/lotrmemes, hosted on midwest.social, as if it was part of this instance.

You might have noticed that the front page is somewhat bare-bones at the moment. This is because the 'local' tab only shows communities hosted on this instance. However, if you click the 'all' tab you will see communities on other federated instances that you'll be able to contribute to. When you subscribe to one of them, they will show up on the local feed as well.

Therefore it is not necessary to use the larger Lemmy instances for the full experience, in fact the creators of Lemmy discourage doing so. To distribute the load, it makes sense to create an account on smaller instances, like this one.