I’ve noticed a minor issue when trying to subscribe to a Lemmy community. On the Lemmy instance, the link format for a Community starts with an exclamation mark (“!”), instead of the “@” used here and across other services like Mastodon.
Copy/pasting the community to the search bar doesn’t work until I manually change the “!” to an “@”. Subscribing to things on other instances is already somewhat confusing for new users, this makes it even worse.
Suggestion: if the “!” doesn’t work, automatically try “@” behind the scenes.
As a side note, Lemmy instances have a helpful message telling you exactly how to subscribe to something from a different service or instance. I’d suggest putting a similar message in the Magazine sidebar along with the Magazine username reference.
I think it would be really nice to write this somewhere, because the possibilities of this federation are not straightforward, especially for newbies, and already confusing for many. I also thought, after I discovered kbin, that it was an instance of Lemmy, but it is actually its own platform. That’s why every additional piece of information is helpful.
Yeah, there’s plenty that’s confusing. I also see that I can follow mastodon and calckey users from kbin, but they don’t seem to actually show up in my feeds.