This is definitely a cool but very niche feature that I and nerds like me would use, but the vast majority of normal* folk never would. So for that reason it’s probably not going to be any kind of priority to add. But hey, in the meantime, we’ve always got footnotes!

* “normal” by Lemming standards, anyway

Hey, bit late to this discussion (found it while searching for something) but since you seemed interested in a casual user’s pov:

I’m a member of quite a few Lemmy communities that are really small, and I’m very active on Mastodon. So having those small communities in a list feed on Mastodon is really handy since I don’t miss anything and can just jump in with a reply on stuff without switching over to Lemmy.

I also post a lot of the same type of stuff to both platforms and sometimes it makes sense to keep that separate, but sometimes with niche interests it’s nice to be able to cross-post and get both groups of people chatting together in the comments.

Of course this is a moot point because federation between my Masto instance and Lemmy is currently broken, but it was really great before and I miss it a ton.

Oh, yesssss.

So excited for this to roll out, I’m sure it’ll need further tweaks as we go but it’s encouraging to hear positive reports from the start!

Seems like the specific issue is this:

• If the community is on your local instance, it doesn’t show the instance in the dropdown. If it’s a remote instance, it does.

• However instead of using the actual unique URL of the community, it uses the display name. So in this case lemmy.ml/c/ireland and lemmy.ml/c/ireland_on_lemmy both have their display name set to just “Ireland”.

I think differentiating between local and remote communities is actually pretty useful but obviously the second thing is a problem when you’ve got competing communities on one server. Which I guess is a thing that people are doing.

Maybe instead of:

• Ireland
• Ireland

it should be showing

• Ireland (/c/ireland)
• Ireland (/c/ireland_on_lemmy)

which not only fixes this problem but also means you can see how to get to a community to go check it out before posting there (this comes up sometimes in the process of crossposting) and it’ll stop, say, a mod giving their community an unrelated name to confuse people into posting something inappropriate or whatever.

There should probably also be a character limit on the display name because that UK one is obnoxiously taking up all of the horizontal space and leaving no room for its actual identifier.

!battletech@lemmy.world and !satisfactory@lemmy.world by the looks of it, for anyone passing by who has an interest in either 😉

I was saying the other day there’s been a noticeable uptick in activity in some of my favourite arts & crafts type communities over the last couple of weeks. Probably just a temporary blip, and our numbers are still quite precarious, but it’s encouraging nevertheless.

For me the level of interesting content is just about spot on now, but obviously it depends on your interests.

I do have one suggestion though. Whenever you feel the urge to comment about how “hobby” communities are too dead, be more specific. Which hobbies? Which communities? Every time you mention one, the chances that someone who didn’t even know it existed sees that comment and finds the community increase.

Look I’ll start. I wish there were more crocheters around to liven up !crochet@lemmy.ca a bit.

Word of mouth is how niche communities grow.

(p.s. also spend some time blocking the news communities if you’re not into that stuff, it makes a massive difference)

So normally the answer to this question is that you need to search using the ! syntax, then potentially wait a little bit (if you’re the first user from your home instance to ever search that community) and then the “no results” will update and it’ll work.

HOWEVER this seems to be a new problem with lemmy.ml specifically. This morning I’ve tried and failed to search for multiple lemmy.ml communities from both lemm.ee and lemmy.world. Both repeatedly return no results, and they’re also not silently working behind the scenes as visiting what should be the local URL still 404s.

So there’s a new problem, and so far I’ve only seen it with communities hosted on lemmy.ml. Could this be an issue with v0.18? Anyone else care to test this behaviour and report back?

To clarify for OP, this is an issue with searching for Kbin magazines from Lemmy in general, you need to search the URL not the ! address we generally use for Lemmy communities.

So unsubscribe from these places that you don’t find interesting, and sub to things you’re interested in instead. Literally that simple.

• Search on lemmyverse.net etc
• If you’re into any kind of crafting, check out my latest posts because I’ve made a megalist of creative communities to help people navigate
• If you’re into anything gamedev related, check out the pinned post at !gamedev@lemmy.blahaj.zone (Lemmy / Kbin) for another megalist of interesting stuff