We are happy to see that many of you are exploring Lemmy after Reddit announced changes to its API policy. I maintain this project alongside @dessalines@lemmy.ml.
Lemmy is similar to Reddit in many ways, but there is also a major difference: Its not only a single website, but consists of many different websites which are interconnected through federation. This is achieved with the ActivityPub protocol which is also used by Mastodon. It means that you can sign up on any Lemmy instance to interact with users and communities on other instances. The project website has a list of instances which all have their own rules and administrators. We recommend that you sign up on one of them, to avoid overt centralization on lemmy.ml.
Another difference compared to Reddit is that Lemmy is open source, and not funded by any company. For this reason it relies on volunteer work to make the project better, whether it's programming, design, documentation, translating, reporting issues or others. See the contributing guide to get started. You can also donate to support development.
We also recommend that you read the documentation. It explains how Lemmy works and how to setup your own Lemmy instance. Running an instance gives you full control over the rules and moderation, and prevents us developers from having any influence. Especially large communities that want to use Lemmy should host their own instance, because existing Lemmy instances would easily be overwhelmed by a large number of new users.
Enjoy your time here! If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or in the Matrix chat.
you could post to !entertainment@beehaw.org for example :)
Give it a week and more general communities will work fine
I notice the link you posted. You use !entertainment@beehaw.org but the URI is different, looks like a traditional webpage link: https://beehaw.org/c/entertainment. When I click on it in Jerboa, it opens the browser and it looks like beehaw.org is down (hug of death?).
What software currently recognizes !entertainment@beehaw.org ? I guess Jerboa doesn't handle this type of link yet or is jumping to another instance beyond the scope of federation of an app like Jerboa?
It's linked to https://beehaw.org/c/entertainment, like you said. I don't think there is a way to link in a way where every server links it to their local view of that community.