Lemmy Support

Hey! So, lemme explain:

You can only see communities and easily subscribe if at least 1 person in your instance has done it already.

If you're the first one from your instance to do so, what you need to do is copy the full URL (https://sh.itjust.works/c/shadowrun, for example), go to the communities list at the top of the site, hit search to get the options up, change from "Communities" to "All", then wait for your instance to pull in the content (maybe 5-10 seconds or so)

Finally, click through to the Community and click subscribe. Now that community is pulled onto your server for yourself and everyone else in your server.

Can provide images and additional clarification if needed. I know it's a little janky and unintuitive, but a Lemmy server can't just pull in all communities from all servers all the time, they'd explode. There needs to be at least 1 person who wants to see that community (subscribed) for the server to know to do that.

I always have to copy-paste the URL of the community on its home instance, or the [email protected] form, into the search box on my instance, with no spaces before or after it, and then mash the search button for like 30 seconds until it federates over and appears as a search result.

You're not being dumb, that sounds like how it ought to work to me!

What worked for me was to log in to my home instance, search for the whole URL for the community, and then, after getting no results from the search, change the type of the search to All. Sometimes I would change it to Communities and then to All. Eventually after a couple tries the link should show up in the results. Click it to browse to the community and then you can subscribe. It's a bit cumbersome but it worked for me.

I was literally just looking into this as well!

Like I'm signed up to beehaw, but say if I go to sh.itjust.works I can view communities, but subscribe asks to login

On your home instance, search for the community you want to sub. Eg: search for http://lemmy.ml/c/test - it will initially say nothing found but after about 10 seconds you should be able to find it in the All Communities list on your home instance. Click on the name of the community to view it, or click subscribe.