How to Follow Lemmy Users
Reddit users flocking to Lemmy are looking for features they’re familiar with. One of those is following other users’ activity. On Reddit, by subscribing to another user, their posts and comments appear in your feed, alongside subscribed community posts. This article looks at how to do the same with Lemmy.
Finding Users
The first step is to find the user within Lemmy. There are two ways to do this.
Browsing Lemmy
If you’re scrolling through Lemmy and see a post, it’s easy enough to just click the OP’s username to see their other activity. This works whether the user is on the same instance as you, or if they’re cross-posting from another instance.
Using the Search
But if you’re trying to search for a user who’s name you remember, one who advertised off-platform, or someone on another instance, you’ll have to use the search function.
To find users
head over to the search,
and search for
their handle.
You can do this by changing what’s being searched
from All to Users,
and user the search box.
Alternatively,
type the name into the Creator sub menu.
For example,
If they’re on the same instance as you,
you can just type their name.
We searched for the word bot,
which show’s all users on the instance with the word bot in the name,
as well as any users on other instances,
which have already been federated.
However if they’re on a different instance,
they might not be federated to your home instance,
and won’t appear.
Therefore,
you need to type the whole address,
such as
@<user>@<instance>
For example,
our instance is lemmy.world.
I can search for my friend
@tcbot@feddit.nl
who is on the instance feddit.nl
like in the picture below:
Following Users
Unfortunately, not all instances allow following users.
For instance,
on lemmy.world,
the biggest instance,
you can’t currently follow specific users on Lemmy.
You can, however,
use the instructions above
to search for specific users,
to see what they’re up to.
This way you can
save, vote, and comment
on that user’s posts.
Additionally,
there’s always the good ole bookmark button in your browser.
Lemmy instance are constantly making developments and improvements,
so this may be a feature that is added in the future.