So far I’m finding that subscribing to communities doesn’t seem to be the same experience as actually being a participant on that Lemmy instance that we’re Federated with. Notably, the upvotes don’t seem to sync properly to our instance which makes communities feel dead when they have hundreds or thousands of users on other instances. Also, it feels like a lot of the posts and/or comments from other instances don’t actually show up when I subscribe to those communities from our instance.
Can anybody else share their experience? Is this just an issue with our particular instance? Or a bug with synchronization across instances? Or does it just take a long time for things to catch up?
Also, the sorting is horrible. Sorting by “Active” sometimes shows me posts from over a year ago, and sorting by “Hot” seems to have similar issues. The only way of seeing newer content at the moment seems to be sorting by “New”.
Hopefully a lot of these issues are resolved over time but right now it definitely feels a bit rough around the edges.
Can you describe what your current process is? The easiest way I’ve found so far is when you’re browsing other instances, go to their communities list and find ones that you’re interested in and click on them which will give you a string of text that you can copy and paste back into our WetShaving instance search. The string is something like: !<community>@<instance>
You take this string and go back to our instance, click on the search at the top right, then without changing any of the dropdowns just paste it into the search field and wait. It might take a little while for it to show up and when it does, click on it and then click the subscribe button and that should be it.
That worked, thanks so much! I think one problem I may have had was not realizing that the search result doesn’t come up immediately, that you need to give it a moment.