Right? Like where do people think we dug up the stuff from in the first place?
Copy the address [!aww@lemmy.ml](/c/aww@lemmy.ml) into the search bar on your home instance. When you search that triggers your instance to federate that community and now will know about it. Then when you have the search result back you can click the community and subscribe to it
Alright: next question: how do I add someone as a moderator?
edit: nevermind, figured it out
You can even set up your own private instance for just you and your friends! It’s not super easy, but it’s also not as hard as you might think. And then you get to be the super-admin who sets the rules
A good analogy I'm seeing thrown around is email: everyone has their own email provider - gmail, yahoo, outlook, or a corporate email server, etc - but all of those can send and receive emails from every other one. I have gmail, but I can email you at yahoo, and recieve emails from my friend on hotmail. If gmail starts being shitty and corporate or making decisions I don't like, I can switch to a different provider, and crucially, gmail doesn't get to decide how the rest of the email universe behaves.
Lemmy instances are like the email providers, and "sending emails" is like interacting with communites on any instance. If my Lemmy instance starts serving ads or something I can just leave it, and still have access to all the other communites on every other instance.
Do you have the setting “hide read posts” set? I found that that setting is a bit overzealous and would hide stuff which logically shouldn’t be