- On desktop browser you can see list of your subscribed communities on the front page of the instance, below the sidebar (you can collapse the sidebar). On mobile you can expand the Subscribed list. You can also click your name in upper right corner and choose profile. Your communities are on the side (desktop) or bottom (mobile).
- You can search for communities either by their name, using the !community@instance syntax (for example, [email protected]) or by the community’s URL (for example, https://lemmy.ml/c/memmy). That last option usually works, when the other two might fail. If the community is not yet federated with your instance, you can wait a few seconds/moments, and the instance might pop-up in to the search results. Or search again later.
As far as I know Lemmy stores only text locally and images and such will be linked to the external instance. Text doesn’t use much disk space, so that shouldn’t be a big a problem. Sometimes when you browse Lemmy, you notice posts that have broken links to images. It’s because the other instance is down, but you can still see the text portion of the posts on your home instance.