Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Two likely possibilities with further detail about each below:
The link you clicked took you to the community on the host instance rather than the copy on your local instance, or
The community is on an instance that’s defederated with your home instance.
When you view and interact with communities and content hosted on another server, you’re technically interacting with a copy of that community/content that’s hosted on your home server and kept in sync with the main copy. So if I want to subscribe to /c/technology hosted on lemmy.world even though my home instance is sh.itjust.works, I need to visit the copy on shitjustworks at sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected]
If I went to lemmy.world/c/technology, I couldn’t interact because I don’t have an account on the lemmy.world site.
As I said above, communities and content are copied between Lemmy instances and kept in sync across the copies. But sometimes an instance will ‘defederate’ with another, ie cutting the direct connection between them that lets them copy and sync content. In that case, there’s no local copy for me to subscribe to or interact with.
The incorrect link is far more likely to be the issue than defederation, so whenever you run into that issue check the link and make sure it’s the copy on your instance.