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?

  • BrokenToshy@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    Would second this. I’m a tech savvy person as I work in IT and even I’m having to think about what I’m doing just to subscribe to different communities, then there’s multiple of the same communities on different instances etc it is quite tedious as you say.

    Really struggling to see how this gets mainstream adoption as your average user isn’t going to have much joy… From my brief interaction with the fediverse I think it’s going to become the Linux of social media I.e. for Geeks and Hobbyists rather than your every day user.

    • Leigh@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Think about everything you hate about Reddit—the kids, the trolls, the spam—and be thankful Lemmy requires a little more effort.

      This is the way Reddit used to be when it first came out.

    • luxyr42@lemmy.dormedas.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      As I understand it, there is a way to format links that will open the community on your current instance. I’ve seen people say that, anyway, but don’t know what that link format is.

    • Barbarian@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      If you’re the first person to subscribe to a community from your server, what you need to do is go to the community search, switch from “Communities” to “All”, then paste in the full URL (https://lemmy.ml/c/worldbuilding)

      I know it’s not great, but keep in mind that Lemmy just increased their userbase by 12-fold overnight and it’s a 2-man dev team. This isn’t some glossy corporate product, and there will be teething issues.

      • netburnr@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I always enjoy watching small teams completely run circles around giant companies. Y’all are doing great, we all thank you.

    • anji@lemmy.anji.nl
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Having remote links load on my local instance so I could interact with them would be awesome. Even better if my instance would fetch a remove posts & comments so it would really look like one unified platform without missing remote information.