In the context of Lemmy, an instance serves as a collection of communities with various registration processes, rules, identities, and more. Lemmy.world and Beehaw are general-purpose instances that accommodate communities on any topic. Beehaw stands out by removing the downvote button and limiting community creation to moderators exclusively. On the other hand, Yiffit is a specific instance dedicated to queer and furry art.

To engage with communities on an instance, you don’t necessarily need an account. For instance, to interact with lemmy.ml, you can browse the list of communities on that instance without creating an account. If you wish to subscribe to a particular community and view its posts, you can search for the community on the instance where you have an account. For example, if you want to subscribe to the “asklemmy” community in Lemmy.ml instance, simply search for “!asklemmy@lemmy.ml” on your Lemmy instance and subscribe to it. The posts from the subscribed community will then appear in your subscribed tab.