Just joined Lemmy after observing how much of a mess Reddit is now. Not really sure how all the parts of this service work together, but am looking forward to trying it out.
Thought I'd share my on-boarding process here in the vaguelly general spot. Perhaps others showing up will want to share their impressions of joining up as well.
I'm a long-time user of Mastodon, so already have a good sense of the Fediverse, its philosophy and workings - so I get how this is set up.
Selecting a server/instance on a Fedi service is always a bit of a decision. I tried to avoid the picking the biggest one here (which I did on Masto and still mean to shift away from it). First small server I tried seemed to die during the signup. Was happy to see Lemmy.one was pretty smooth. Some of the profile settings are a bit cryptic - so I'll have to figure out what they mean.
Next I shall survey the communities available and hang out a bit. Do people do hashtags here?
Anyway - Hello World.
Good question, yes, it should be renamed to "default sort type" IMO, because it just sets the default for these sorting settings on the homepage:
It doesn't completely hide non-local posts if you have "local" selected, because as you noted each community has this interface available anyways :)