I joined discuss.online but is that the same as lemmy?

yes that's a part of Lemmy, that's all you need

I don’t understand the fediverse at all. The instances are confusing.

It's kinda like email. Think of it like you're on Gmail, I'm on Yahoo Mail, and the pottery community is on MSN. We can all talk to each other because we do like @mangobanana@gmail.com (in reality you're at discuss.online) and @die4ever@yahoo.com (I'm at retrolemmy.com). Usernames start with an @ like Twitter, community names start with an !

So when you do a "Local" search you only see stuff from "Gmail" like yourself, but usually you want to search "All" not "Local".

For viewing posts on my feed I prefer "Subscribed", this can be set as your default in your settings page.

have you tried an app on your phone? they can be a bit simpler to use than the website https://join-lemmy.org/apps

here's another community that might help !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca

Discuss.Online is one of the BEST instances! It has super-high uptime, meaning the admin team is very highly technically proficient. I left other instances due to very long delays causing problems, but I rarely to never experience such things with Discuss.Online.

In case it helps, Lemmy is the name of the software that is being run, which implements the ActivityPub Protocol that makes the Threadiverse (the threaded conversion style subset of the Fediverse, different from the microblog style of Mastodon) happen. Then Discuss.Online (DO) is the name of the "instance" (a server machine, running Linux as the OS). Our primary admin is I believe m_f, since jgrim the owner stepped back a bit to take care of his newborn child.

DO will share content with everyone else on the Threadiverse - not only other instances running Lemmy software but also PieFed, mBin, nodeBB, soon flarum may be added, and more. That's the beauty of federation: you aren't limited to just your instance, or even just Lemmy, you will access all of it, at once. I am not sure how your apps/clients handle things but I know that some of them hide the instance names - you can turn them on if you prefer to see them? It helped me get a better feel for the place - e.g. Lemmy.World holds about half of all users on the Threadiverse, and perhaps 90% of the most active communities (but people are trying to change that, to mix things up so that it's not all in one place like that!!).

I guess you already know that a "community" is like a "subreddit", which we denote like c/pottery rather than r/pottery, and then add the instance name. That said, the absolute best way to refer to it is with the exclamation point !, then community name, the at symbol @, then the instance name. This will make a link that anyone from any app can follow to navigate directly to the community. Like this: !pottery@lemmy.world.

DO would be happy to host a potty community here! See in the sidebar text:

A general purpose instance for discovery, fun, & sharing. It's a welcoming place for all.

Welcome to discuss.online!

Home for interesting conversation, discovery, and fun. Everyone is welcome!

Guidelines

discuss.online aims to enrich the lives of everyone it touches. Please be kind as you use it.

That said, the other community mentioned, the one on Lemmy.world (LW) seems to be struggling mightily, with only a single person posting to it and zero active moderators (the single mod there hasn't posted or commented anything in the past 3 years). So you might talk to the single person that is posting, Arcanepotato@crazypeople.online (if I had put an at @ symbol in front of their name, it would have tagged them, sending them a notification and making it into a link), and see if they want to collaborate with you, either here on DO or over there on LW. Either way you might make a friend of mutual interest!:-D And/or just start posting in that community and see what happens:-). Others occasionally do that I see, it's just far more rare. If you did make a community here, expect to have to do similarly: people won't know right away and you'd be the only one posting for a LONG time, perhaps a year or more. The Threadiverse just does not have a large userbase to support communities, especially outside of tech or politics.