The way Lemmy works right now is you search a community in your instance for it to then get shown, so you need to first discover that community from elsewhere. With that in mind, what are some growing communities that you discovered that could get some more love?
If the communities haven’t synced to your instance yet, then you can prompt the instance to sync them by copying and pasting them into your instance’s search page. Unfortunately lemmy doesn’t do this automatically when you visit the URL, at least not yet.
Once the communities are synced, then you should be able to just click the links to visit them and subscribe from there.
I get no results? I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong, sorry
Hm, that’s surprising. I didn’t expect mobile Chrome to work like that when copying links. Try copying and pasting the link text instead, e.g.
!news@lemmy.pineapplemachine.com? But be aware that it can take a moment for the sync to happen and anything to show up, as well.