to start: after some consideration, we've altered our entry question a little bit so that entry is not guaranteed. during the daytime you can basically expect waits of 30 minutes or less when it comes to approval/disapproval, but overnight it'll be anywhere from 6-12 hours. just FYI
if you'd like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that over here
our sidebar should give you most of the information you're looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts:
for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the comments of this post.
as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate on OpenCollective, which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations.
a few other questions occasionally pop up like "why do we have the set of communities we do?" and "why can't people make their own?" (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can see the following post and the discussions here. we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also discussion here.
downvotes are disabled on this instance and that's a thing we're not liable to change. if you'd like elaboration for why that is, see this comment. this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you'll understand why we're doing it even if you don't necessarily agree with it.
if you're interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see the comment here.
feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i'll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.
An easy way to think about federation is similar to email
When you set up an account on a centralised service, your username is simply "duskyheaps" as you only go to the one site.
With federation, you have a collection of servers and you create an account on one instance and so you become "duskyheap@beehaw.org".
You could create an account on lemmy.ml and that would be "duskyheaps@lemmy.ml".
Once you account for this, you'll find it easier to find people or communities on other servers. Off the top of my head and this maybe incorrect but it would be something like "beehaw.org/community@instance.org" (I'll come back and edit this to correct it)
edit 2: Before anyone gets confused by this comment, here is some solution. The examples here are how a web browser displays the URL in the address field. For a link to work in the federation, the browser must be made to assume we want to link to another webpage within the same domain (that is, the server we are logged on to). This is done by omitting the domain from a HTML referance. Of course. It's W3C standard. See this post which clarified it: https://lemmy.ml/post/1168136.
... unfortunately, links to federated posts and comments are still broken because posts synced to other instances get a different ID than the original.
end edit 2
original comment:
"beehaw.org/c/community@instance.org" -- example: beehaw.org/c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
or lemmy-specific syntax that will bring up a list of communities known to your instance as you type, and choosing from there will make it a link: "!community@instance.org" -- example: !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
... unfortunately, this dosnt work for lnks
edit: seems that i just uncovered a ~~bug~~ systemic inconvenience, because the link that is generated leads you directly to that instance's webserver ... which we don't want if this is posted on our home instance (because the link should actually enable us to post on that remote instance). otoh, if we are viewing this from a third instance, then a link "instance2.org/c/community@instance.org" would likely not work at all. (right?)
check: beehaw.org/sopuli.xyz/c/lemmy@lemmy.ml -- nope!
check: /c/lemmy@lemmy.ml -- yep!