Since it was answered, quick summary:

Communitys have connected instances. If the instance you’re looking for is not yet listed there, you can discover it. Only communities listed as blocked will never pop up in your feed or searches.

Original question:

This probably got asked already, but I couldn’t find exactly the answer I was looking for while searching.

On all the lemmy sites there’s a link to “linked instances” which, presumably, lists all instances that your instance has knowledge of. Does that mean that instances which aren’t listed won’t be accesible? Or does it mean that no user has yet tried to access the instances which aren’t listed.

The way I see it, only blocked instances are inaccessible. Am I correct in that assumption?

Thanks a bunch 🤠

Edit: I’m asking because I’ll want to join some super specific local communities eventually and I’m worried this might be a problem.

  •  Prof. Sweetlove   ( @prof@beehaw.org ) OP
    1•1 year ago

    From the link I shared above:

    When you found a community that you want to follow, enter its URL (e.g. https://feddit.de/c/main) or the identifier (e.g. !main@feddit.de) into the search field of your own Lemmy instance. Lemmy will then fetch the community from its original instance, and allow you to interact with it. The same method also works to fetch users, posts or comments from other instances.

    I’ve noticed that the initial search will fail, but if you’ve entered it correctly you will find the community with its short name. In the above example you’d be able to find the community “Main” from feddit.de just by typing in “Main” in the search after successfully fetching it.