this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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[solved] Subscribing to a community on a different instance is so annoying! (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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So far for me the process is very convoluted:

  1. I go to https://browse.feddit.de/ and find the community.
  2. Then I need to copy it's name.
  3. Then I need to go to my particular instance (lemm.ee)
  4. Then I type manually in my browser address bar lemm.ee/c/
  5. Then I go back to https://browse.feddit.de/ and copy the address of the original instance of the community.
  6. Then I go back and add the original instance address to already typed thing in step 4 like this lemm.ee/c/@
  7. Then I can finally subscribe!

Oh my God! Please, tell me there's a better way of doing this!

EDIT: There is a better way! Solution is to ... use the search function in your instances home page and select community (if it exists already) and search. This way I don't need to go to browse.feddit.de anymore. And links will take me straight the the communities "reflection" in my own instance, where I can subscribe.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Wait, you can force your instance to start federation with another instance!? Did I understande you correctly?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not exactly force. It's by design. Instances don't federate with each other unless a user of one wants to communicate with the other (via subscription, or commenting, or whatever).

But instances can block each other and if that happens, there's no way you can access from your instance.

What usually happens is that big instances (like lemmy.ml), just by the mere fact that they are big, are probably already federating with your instance anyway so you may not have encountered this situation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, that's very illuminating. So how is browse.feddit.de different? Or is it different? Can there be communities on some instances that don't show up even in browse.feddit.de?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I believe browser.feddit.de is not a Lemmy instance per sé (feddit.de is a Lemmy instance) but scrapes basic data from them (communities, subscribers, posts). As I don't know anything about it's back-end I cannot tell exactly how it works.

What I know it's that there is a set of instances it knows (i don't know how it gets them, probably a list?), and those are the ones it searches for communities. You can even choose for it not to show you communities from some instances by unselecting those instances in the up-left menu.

So my guess is that if an instance is not known by browser.feddit.de their communities will not be shown there. Those are probably private instances that may not be connected to the fediverse anyway.