If you're navigating to another community on their instance, you won't be logged in. When you're seeing that, check the URL. If you're on lemmy.ml, you're still on your instance; if not, you've navigated to that instance.

There's multiple ways to structure links, some of which will take you to that community via your instance, some not.

Could it be phishing? Sure. But far more likely, you're just on another instance where you don't have an account (or at least an active login).

Third party apps present a username and password field to log into a Lemmy instance. They can easily just steal your credentials. There are standard auth flows to solve this problem. The fact that Lemmy devs have willfully ignored this issue for years, and that they aren't warning users not to trust third party apps, lead me to believe they don't really care about security, which is the biggest red flag. There's finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it'll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.

-Posted from a third-party app; yea, i gave them my password blindly.

A big one I see that if you join any instance it's someone else computer. Not different from Meta/Reddit. But the probability that among all the instance there is one imposter who wants to steal your credential is non zero.
As usual don't use the same password everywhere

• Use a mail forwarding service to generate disposable e-mails used to sign up, if you accidentally give it to someone else it doesn't expose any other accounts and can be easily replaced by a new one.
• Use a password manager to ensure a strong and unique password.
• Use a JavaScript blocker so you only allow the required JavaScript to make the website work and prevent automatic downloads.

I've been doing these in general recently and it's good privacy a security practice. Also slowly replacing my main e-mail address in different service accounts with disposable forwarding e-mail addresses.

Edit: Other than that read a bit more about Lemmy and fediverse workings, verify what instance you're viewing and navigate to the desired community via your instance as others have mentioned.

Honestly, I think the #1 problem to be concerned about right now is that there a lot of people self-hosting for the very first time, that maybe don't really have much experience with hosting or moderation. It's tough! There can be a lot of drama, random software failures, lost data, and disappointments that can happen. An instance can go under at random, at any time.

It sounds bad. In practice, the day-to-day can be fairly smooth sailing. A lot of people just kind of need the experience, need to make sure they're not the one person moderating thousands of people on a serer. Making sure that moderation is a community effort, that the server has backups, and that there are channels for donations to support the instance - those things go a long way towards long-term stability.

You're likely no longer logged in because you visited another instance. For example, if I'm browsing from lemmy.ml but click on a link to !baking@kbin.social, now I'm kbin and not Lemmy.

What you can do from your instance is go to your browser, paste the magazine or community url into the search bar, then subscribe from their sidebar.

There seems to be a fair bit of admins who just run the Lemmy Ansible installer expecting to magically have an instance, and having no idea what they're getting themselves into.

I wonder how many small Lemmy instances exist right now that have SSH password auth (or god forbid root login of any kind) enabled.

The email requirement seems like a cybersecurity problem - usernames aren't really associated with real people so this just leads to a lot of accounts having mailinator as the password reset email.