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 [email protected] . 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?
I’ve been going to homeinstance.tld/c/[email protected] and subscribing that way.
I swear there has to be a better way though…
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.
Literally came to the direct Lemmy community here to search for how to follow remote communities and this was near the top already. I like the straight up asking without concern for people shitting on you for not knowing attitude here. As a long term tech guy it’s nice to see people asking direct questions without people throwing sneers back and derisively acting like you’re an idiot for not knowing something.
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.
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.
In my experience there are many good and positive casual users on reddit as well as toxic and obnoxious techies. Knowing how to navigate an obtuse UI is not a mark of good character.
You also have to create a new account for each instance. At very least I feel as though some centralized account orchestration needs to happen.
This is not true. You can subscribe to a community on beehaw.org even if your account is on lemmy.ml. That’s what this post is about, that the process for doing that is unintuitive.
