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?

  • @Xer0@lemmy.ml
    3•1 year ago

    Absolutely agreed. There was a link to some other lemmy instance so I clicked it, but obviously I can’t actually sub to it without creating an account on that instance. I don’t get it.

    • baernhelm
      6•1 year ago

      You can sub to it, but it’s complicated. (Instead of accessing that community via it’s remote host instance, you currently have to access it via your own home instance (for example by searching for it there). Maybe this could be made easier if lemmy would automatically replace links to other instances with the equivalent internal links.

      • @Limeade@beehaw.org
        3•1 year ago

        Maybe this could be made easier if lemmy would automatically replace links to other instances with the equivalent internal links.

        I like this idea. A default behavior of loading Lemmy links within your current server would make it much simpler to interact with and subscribe to any linked community. Perhaps the top of the page could have a link to view the page on its original server for people who do want to see the originating server for themselves.

    • @Garrathian@beehaw.org
      2•1 year ago

      You can (potentially), you just have to find it on your instance’s community tab (it will display the communities hosted in your lemmy.ml as well as external ones it’s “federated” to), you can’t directly go to that instance’s site and subscribe though. If it’s a community from an instance not federated your outta luck though

      • @Kaldo@beehaw.org
        2•1 year ago

        That only shows the communities that someone from your instance already subscribed to, no? At least that’s what I assumed because the user subscription counts were different if I’d look at a community from my instance, or from its local instance.