Hello world. :) I keep leaving he big boys for the Federated spaces. Sadly, no one I know is doing the same, so I'm a little adrift. Maybe that will change someday. Thanks for having me though. This really does fit the way I like to use a computer better.

Hold up, so if anyone as a member of this instance has subscribed to any community outside of this instance, it becomes searchable from within this instance, while if the community is entirely unknown within this instance, you need to find it 'out there' somewhere and subscribe whereupon you're good (and it can then be found by any member of this instance)? That's my understanding based on this discussion, anyway. :)

So... still wrapping my head around the whole concept of of federated spaces. By way of comparison, if I go to Reddit, and I search for subreddits, it searches all of reddit, and pulls up the relevant information. If I do a search here, am I searching ONLY the Lemmy.ca server, or does that search ALL of the Lemmy fediverse? If not, how does one do that? CAN one do that? Sorry for the newbie questions. I want to make the move from Twitter/Reddit to Mastodon/Lemmy, but I want to get it so I can indoctrinate my over cautious, set-in-their-ways friends. :)

Thank you for your reply! See, that's what I thought, but I tried a few searches that I was sure would pull up a community--things like "fashion" or "volkswagen" or "Beatles" and I come up with no search results. I'd buy that those communities may not exist in a new(er) Canadian-focused server, but across the whole Fediverse of servers? I dunno. I still think there's things about this place that I don't get. Ah well, in time, I'll learn I'm sure. Thank you again for taking the time to reply.

Oh... so you need to search directly on other instances to find communities. Hmm... bit of a shot in the dark there, but I'll give it a try. Thank you for the guidance!