Correct! You sign up here but it lets you post on any site that runs Lemmy (or a software that support’s Lemmy’s protocol like mbin and PieFed) and is connected to here.

If you are coming from Reddit, the communities are like subreddits except that they might be here or they might be hosted elsewhere, but you interact with them without leaving the site you signed up with (lemmy.ca in your case). The way you do it is instead of going to https://lemmy.world/c/news (the News community on lemmy.world, you go to https://lemmy.ca/c/[email protected]. Community mentions (the equivalent to r/something) are in this form: [email protected]. Remember you are subject to the rules of the community you post to in addition to the server (just like a Reddit user would have agreed to Reddit’s terms and follow subreddit rules).

It is otherwise pretty seamless, the main thing is you have three feed groups: Subscribed, Local and All.

Subscribed works like you’d expect: you go to communities you like and subscribe to them, then that feed shows only posts from those communities.

Local shows only posts from communities hosted where you signed up. On Lemmy.ca that means Canadian city and Province communities, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and a bunch of others. You will still see posts and comments that people from outside lemmy.ca publish to these communities.

All shows you that plus stuff from every other community from servers we are connected to, which tend to be bigger and more populated. Sometimes a big news story from [email protected] makes it to near the top of All. You can block annoying users, communities or entire servers to clean up any of the feeds above.

Thanks for joining Lemmy, hope you have a good time.