Ah, I see. Yeah, I thought I was misreading it, thanks for the clarification.

I have felt a similar thing with friends drifting apart, although in my case I think it has more to do with age and being busy than corona.

> but I often wish for more connection with other people

The fact that that’s not ok in your relationship sounds pretty bizarre to me. I am in a monogamous relationship, and I have both male and female friends. My gf also has both male and female friends. When she wants to go have some personal time with her friends, I’m supportive of that.

I’m likely reading too much into this, so I’ll apologize in advance, but not being ok with your significant other spending quality time with people they care about seems jealous and insecure to me.

EDIT: My reading comprehension is apparently trash tier.

1 guy made a community. He put some shitty posts there that were massively downvoted. He was banned and his community deleted. It’s hardly “The_Donald” joining.

That’s actually not how it works. Images are hosted by the instance the community is on. Other instances embed those images as links in the page. The image is downloaded from the original instance by the browser.

Right now, there is no import/export. It’s a known useful feature, but the devs have no time to work on it (I’ve been following all the optimization work they’ve been doing on github, I don’t know if they sleep). You’ll have to start over atm, sorry.

Nope. You can subscribe/post/comment on any community on any instance. There is one small seam though: if you’re the first person to subscribe from your instance, you need to put in the full URL of the community (https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming, for example) to pull it into your instance.

After that, everybody on the same instance as you will see it when searching for communities just like it was local.

EDIT: Oh, forgot to mention: make sure the search is set to “All”, not “Communities” when you do this.

You can disable the creation of new communities. If I understand what you want to do correctly (host users but not content), just make an instance, disable community creation, and put a stickied post linking the community finder and explaining that you should add using the full URL of the community

Having understood the fediverse on a theoretical level but not ever actually stepping into it, it’s really amazing to see the interconnectedness of it in real time :)