Support / questions about Lemmy.
I'm not fully sure what you mean by "without referring to a particular instance of that community on a particular Lemmy instance". Are you trying to link to a community that will always open on the readers local instance? If so, then the way to do it is like this: [!pics@lemmy.ml](/c/pics@lemmy.ml). Results in: !pics@lemmy.ml.
Caveat: this link will only work on instances which have previously had at least one subscriber to the linked community.
This links appears to only show posts in /c/pics for lemmy.ml but not all posts in all /c/pics for the entire fediverse
Maybe lemmy.ml is the only instance that contains /c/pics posts ?
Aha, I see where the confusion is. The thing is, the name of a community includes it's home instance. So [!some_community@lemmy.ml](/c/some_community@lemmy.ml) is a completely different community than [!some_community@lemmy.world](/c/some_community@lemmy.world), for example. These communities have different mods, potentially different rules, etc.
You should think of it in the same way as e-mail addresses: "alice@yahoo.com" and "alice@gmail.com" might have the same name up to the "@" symbol, but most likely they are two completely different people!
As a user, you can of course subscribe to many of these if they all seem alive and interesting, and you can see a combined feed for all your subscribed communities in the "subscribed" section of your front page. Potentially in the future there could also be some kind of grouping functionality, where you can yourself group together related communities for a single feed.
How can I refer to the "of all /c/pics on all instances"
I'm not interested in hunting down /c/pics on 70 instances. I just want to subscribe to all of them.
If it's not possible , then that creates the danger of one instance becoming "the centralized biggest /c/instance of the home fediverse".
Such concentration of power , is basically the same as going back to Reddit.
Ooh, I see what you're talking about. There is no centralized "pics" page. Each instance has they're own rules and communities/magazines. You can subscribe to them, that way you can view and crosspost if you'd like. Just sub the main ones to your instance (Lemmy, kbin, beehaw, shitjustworks), then browse all and sub to others that pop up selling along the way.
Think of it like a huge house (your instance). You can go into each room (community/magazine) and view things easily. But your house can't view info from other houses until you tell them you want to come over. Once you're in (subscribed), you can view their stuff from your house too.
Oh no, so I will have to subscribe to hundreds of different /c/pics to see everything? That's going to create just "one big /c/pics" on a single instance. This is a big big big problem. I hope there's a way around this or else Lemmy is dooned
There aren't hundreds and there aren't a lot of subs to find the exist elsewhere since it's still developing and the fediverse boom/exodus of Reddit. There are what lots of communities for specific pics, such as cats, nature, etc.
You can't really have it be decentralized and expect all to be in one place. :P