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?

  • anji
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    101 year ago

    Mastodon for all its sophistication has exactly the same limitations though. Linking to a post is a full URL which takes me to a remote instance where I can no longer interact. And boosted posts are missing replies if they have not been previously pushed to my instance. I realize there’s some problems with a fetch model (extra server load) but it would be so nice if I could browse the entirety of Fedi from the comfort of my own instance without having to paste URLs in search bars.

    • @Krusty@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      You’re right, but Mastodon already has lifted some of those problems (because they had funding and energies).

      Also if you need it, I know of this extension that’s being developed that could the exact problem you’re referring to: FediFetcher. It’s still being developed but I think it’s going to be very useful

      Edit: I also heard about this one, it looks cool: Simplified Federation