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?
This is exactly why I think many comments on Reddit miss the point when they state that “Lemmy will fail because it’s way too complicated for mass adoption”. Maybe not every Reddit participant has to join Lemmy. Maybe it’s good that there is a (small!) hurdle to overcome, that does not exclude or discriminate against anyone, but simply requires a tiny bit of effort.
Or, you know, discriminates against anyone who can’t be bothered to read a short few paragraphs about how something works and follow basic instructions. I’m pretty OK with that particular type of discrimination!