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?

    • _ed@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Good question! You can copy the text !cats@midwest.social, then click the magnifying glass at top right and search for the community.

      It should then come up in your search results, where you can visit from your own instance, and click to subscribe.

      • timmytbt@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        thanks, I got there in the end!

        when I searched for that text/link I’m saw posts that referenced !cats@midwest.social (hyperlinks), and when I was first trying it was going to the front page and asking me to login or create an account - fail

        but one of the posts that came up in the search had a different link … hovering over it showed https://sh.itjust.works/c/cats@midwest.social when I clicked on that one I could see cats@midwest.social … I could also see that I was still logged in as me, and there was an option to subscribe

        hopefully that helps others in this brave new world … long live Lemmy and so long Reddit!

      • Evan@lemmy.mlM
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        1 year ago

        Mastodon suffers from similar annoyances. I feel like this system could be improved, it’s pretty confusing for beginners. I support frontends rewriting links, I suppose (though I suppose there is the tricky issue of deciding what links point to the fedi. Maybe “!cats@midwest.social” should not be a link…)

        • preston@possumpat.io
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          1 year ago

          I agree, the copy->search user experience for exploring the fediverse is pretty terrible. For Lemmy at least, maybe any community ! links should automatically try to resolve on your instance? I also wouldn’t mind an extra little popup on hover, letting you choose to follow the link through to the original instance or have it search/open on your home.

        • Mac@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It doesn’t even work on mobile for me. I save posts for later to join on my desktop. Lol