I’m sure this has been asked and answered before but I can’t find it.

How do I subscribe to a community from another instance? I read you just search communities with the url of the community you want to join, but that didn’t work for me. Even with variations in formatting: !community@instance, for example.

Perhaps there should be a sticky somewhere that explains the slight complexities of the fediverse since it’s clearly a bit foreign to most users. I’ve been on lemmy for over a year and I’m constantly discovering functionality I was unaware of thanks to all the new lemons coming in and asking questions.

  • TiffyBelle@feddit.ukEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    It’s a little hit-or-miss at the moment, and unreliable.

    How I do it is:

    1. Search the community using its full name, e.g. !lemmy@lemmy.ml
    2. It’ll show up no result if the community hasn’t been “encountered” by your instance before. If it has, it’ll just show up here and you can subscribe to it.
    3. Search the name again, only this time just the first part, e.g. lemmy
    4. The !lemmy@lemmy.ml instance should show up.

    Basically the first time you search, your instance will go and download/cache the community for future users. For some reason though, the search seems to lag behind a little in showing it.