This post attempts to collect useful information for new users. Click on the sections below to expand them.

A r-sauna account gives you access to follow and contribute to discussion groups for a wide variety on topics on other servers - see the Federation section below if you’re interested in that.

Please leave comments on how to improve this guide below.

Generic Lemmy resources
Using r-sauna.fi

signing up

To create a new user click the “Sign Up” link on the top right. We’re trying to stay in open registration mode for now, but if this gets abused we’ll have to start approving applications. For open application mode you’ll have to fill this form - you’ll be able to log in directly after signing up:

While this form will be shown when we manually approve new accounts:

You’ll have to wait for approval by us, which typically should not take long. Unfortunately currently there are no approval notifications, so try logging in now and then.

subscribing to communities

Click on “communities” in the top bar. It should now a list of communities, as well as their subscription status - which can be toggled by clicking on it:

creating a post

You can either create a new post by selecting “Create Post” from the top, and selecting the community in the drop down in the form shown, or by opening a community and clicking on the “Create a post” button. This will show you the same form, just with the community pre-selected.

creating a community

To keep local groups on this instance around Sauna, Steam baths and similar topics only admins can generate groups. If you’d like to create (and moderate) a group fitting this theme please write a short proposal in meta

Federation: Using r-sauna communities on other Lemmy instances

TBD

Federation: Using other communities on this instance

For discovering other communities you can either use the search icon in the top bar, or check if they already exists here by selecting “All” in the list of communities:

Here you see two communities hosted on lemmy.ml being available. You can use the search function to search for other communities - which will take you to the same form as the search icon in the top bar:

Currently new communities don’t tend to show up with search type “Community” - which is preselected when coming via the Community list. After changing it to all it shows up:

Now you can just follow the link and subscribe:

To get an overview of which communities exist the community browser is useful:

You can paste the link (https://beehaw.org/c/technology) into the search function - or transform it to Lemmy link syntax (!technology@beehaw.org).

Note that this search query connects to the instance hosting this community - so on overloaded instances this can be slow, or take several attempts to show a result.