It’s easy to discover communities on my instance via the dedicated page in the hamburger menu. But let’s say I want to follow a community on another instance, such as !lemmy@lemmy.ml . I might have found its name mentioned in a post or comment. When I click on the provided link, I’m thrown on that instances web page, from which I of course can’t subscribe.

So what I instead have to do is to copy the description of the link and paste it in my instance’s search bar. Which isn’t easy, since it’s a link, so there isn’t even a straightforward way to select the link text without clicking the link. This seems very unintuitive and makes the process of joining a whole bunch of communities tedious. Is there a better way?

  • BarbarianEnglish
    15·
    2 years ago

    Currently, the easiest way to find communities on remote servers to subscribe to is the community browser. I’m not sure how this problem could be solved technically in future, but yeah, discoverability is hard atm.

    • 7eter@feddit.deEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      okay so this post just got me interested and i tried to connect to a community i found on the community browser. However i can’t seem to connect to that community through the normal lemmy-ui. Is this due to slow federation. Or am i doing something wrong?

      edit: okay just found out that that exact instance was blocked by mine :D

      I falsely assumed the community browser would only show allowed instances.

      • jarfilEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Another thing I think is missing, is the ability to follow communities from instances that aren’t federated together. I wonder if you’d have to start your own instance and read-only federate with them, but it would be nice to have a single interface to do it.