I’ve already started seeing a lot of redundant communities being made here that have already existed on other Lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml is at risk of centralization and overload, so now is a great time to raise awareness of other instances.
For science topics, mander.xyz has a lot of good ones set up, and !solarpunk@slrpnk.net on slrpnk.net has been great!
edit: for new users - you can type ! to begin autofilling a community, even for ones on other instances, like I did for the solarpunk community above. It may take a few seconds for the autofill results to show up if you have a slow connection like me.
How does one follow a community from another instance. for instance, beehaw’s gaming community I would like to follow, but when i am there, it makes be create a separate account.
In addition to what @Barbarian@lemmy.ml mentioned about changing the filter and searching, you can link it from your own instance like so:
https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming@beehaw.org
You can also grab the URL to any community or post on another instance, return to your own instance, and paste the URL into the search bar. If you’re the first person to ever search for that server it might not find anything at first, but it’ll fetch the data and probably work in a couple minutes.
I think you may be able to use relative links, eg:
gaming@beehaw.org
^ That one is done with
[gaming@beehaw.org](/c/gaming@beehaw.org)I don’t think
!gaming@beehaw.orgworks alone though?Go to Communities at the top, change the filter from “Local” to “All” and search for “Gaming”.
If you’re the first one who wants to register to a community from this server (not the case here) it’s slightly more complex.