Step 6 will return you a 404 - comunity non existent if your instance is not federating with the instance of the community you're looking for.
I do:
Step 1.
Copy the URL
In my instance, I use the search fuction. I search for the URL. The community is one result.
enter the result, the instance has begun federating.
subscribe.
I am just waiting on r/askhistorians. Whatever they do next I will follow.
edit: i should clarify that if they decide to stay on reddit, then probably my reddit user will become an askhistorians lurker.
It works well and it feels nice to get a community active.
There are some hiccups in the instances because of the hug of death we're giving which I'd expect they recover in a few days. In the meantime, i'll just keep finding more comunities to subscribe with the comunity browser. I just wish there was something similar for kbin communities (magazines I believe they're called) so I could subscribe to them too.
in the search tool of your instance enter [email protected] and it will find it and start federating it.
That's true and I added it later by an edit in my original post which appears not to have synchronized to Beehaw yet. I wholeheartedly agree with the final paragraph of that post.
(Some) Lemmy devs seem to have political ideologies that are within the "tankie" settings. That's mostly it. Some people express they feel uncomfortable about it. Such devs hold an instance separate from the flagship instance (lemmygrad.ml), which in my opinion is not bad at all, I think it's better they keep them to themselves giving an option to other instances to block it. They're not trying to shove tankies ideas down anyones throats through the softwate or anything. Though this has leaked to the flagship instance sometimes as shown by this post
It will definitely is a hard to find hard to grow. So far federation and different instances might make redundant communities, but I think these will naturally tend to merge/go inactive in time.
This browser of communities https://browse.feddit.de/ is a godsend to find communities I may like. Though it's all centered in Lemmy and I want a similar tool for kbin (or this browser to add kbin instances communities).
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.