Barbarian

Communities are only pulled onto your instance the first time somebody subscribes to it. If nobody on lemmy.ca has subscribed yet, do this

Go to Communities at the top, change the filter from "Local" to "All" and search for "Gaming".

If you're the first one who wants to register to a community from this server (not the case here) it's slightly more complex.

1. Technically yes, but it's not even vaguely in the same ballpark. If I've understood the devs talking about the optimization issues (I could be wrong! Just my limited understanding) the big performance hit is in the local feed. That means being on another instance takes a gigantic amount of the load off, even if you're still accessing the same community.

2. If lemmy.ml is down, so are all the communities hosted there. All communities not on lemmy.ml would still be up.

I actually stumbled across a much better link while helping someone else. This'll be more useful for you

All the UI is doing is automatically making it a markdown link. You can do it yourself just by doing [!test_community@sopuli.xyz](https://sopuli.xyz/c/test_community)

They've written this handy guide

Mostly correct. The only slight correction is that they can delete posts and block users from their own communities. So hypothetically, if User@serverone.lm posts starts being super rude on a community in servertwo.lm, then the admins of servertwo.lm can delete posts in their instance and/or block the user from participating there. That does not stop User@serverone.lm from participating in their own instance or any other.

The defederation thing is very much a last resort. If EVERYONE in serverone.lm is causing problems, and the admins of serverone.lm refuse to do anything, then the admins of servertwo.lm might decide it's not worth the hassle to ban individuals and ban the whole instance.

More power to ya. I like the ruleset here, but that's the glorious thing about Lemmy: don't like the rules of your instance? Go to one that works better for you.

That would go against the concept in a pretty big way. The entire idea of federation is that each instance owner has control over their own instance, and people should (once they get a handle on how things work) move to an instance where they like the rules and admins.

If users of an instance start brigading around the fediverse and being assholes, and the admins of that instance refuse to take action, other instances can choose to block that instance as a whole (defederation) as a last resort. A user getting dropped into an instance like that, full of assholes and isolated from the rest of the network, would be way worse than just some initial confusion.

Also, should mention that the devs have been very vocal that they want to design the system in such a way that they can't control it, but each admin & user has full autonomy rather than centralised control.

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.

Currently, the easiest way to find communities on remote servers to subscribe to is the community browser. I'm not sure how this problem could be solved technically in future, but yeah, discoverability is hard atm.

I think this might be what you're looking for.