I’m going down the same rabbit hole and have struggled trying to figure out the fediverse. The other comments on your post explain things well. From my experience, I had to research which instance was federated and populated with what fits my interests, then sign up for it. Jerboa doesn’t do well with it’s search function yet, and I almost exclusively use the app to browse (I did so with Sync for Reddit ((3rd party app)) too and never used the browser unless I was looking up specific questions), but I did find out that when using a web browser to login to my instance they have a community browser that lists every and all communities locally and federated where you just hit Subscribe to. Once I subscribed to everything that peaked my interests I went back to my app (Jerboa for Lemmy) and sorted by Subscribed and New (or hot). I now have an experience very similar to that of using Sync for Reddit.

To answer your questions about seeing the exact same communities (instead of a singular subreddit) to subscribe to, it’s just because each community is hosted on separate instances. Some of those instances are federated with yours (ie lemmy.world) but for users who are signed up on that particular instance may not have the same federations your instance has so they created their own version of the community.

Another comment on this post explains it well using minecraft as an example. (Idk how to cross-post or @ another user yet)

What is up with you man? First the asklemmy now here. I hope all is well?

Find the Lemmy user “mizu”. They’ve been posting things about needing to hold in their poo for several days and it’s become a huge meme on Lemmy. Still not sure they are serious or if it’s performance art

Same thing as everyone else. I find that clicking twice to get it to say pending then leaving it be works. I’m subscribed to the sublemmy even though it says pending, so I ignore it knowing I’m good. The fediverse is still really buggy, especially since they weren’t quite ready for the massive migration from reddit. (am refugee myself)

Yeah, Jerboa updated and now I can’t even open the app. I’m thinking it may also be because the server version for my main instance (lemmy.world) is too low. I did see somewhere that they hope to get things fixed and updated in a week or so. They want to get the captcha back I believe

This is why I have 4 different apps to surf Lemmy. When one app is acting up I just switch to another. For example I was just barely scrolling in Jerboa but getting a bunch of network errors so I switched to Connect which is where I’m posting this comment. I’m totally down with being patient with Lemmy for the time being. Anything to get away from R*****

I haven’t. I’ll have to check it out while I wait for Sync

I’ve had that happen a few time now too. I did it earlier today, the because of lag couldn’t delete the second comment. Thanks for the tip!

Actually you may not be too far off. Noticed recently that users don’t have access to their Android>OBB or Data folders anymore through the normal files app. I know there is a workaround but I haven’t been able to get it to work. This may not affect downloading/installing apk’s from other sources, but if you have to manually install the OBB/Data you cannot do that.