I’ve seen this mentioned a few times already: people wondering why certain communities don’t show up in their instance. You need to first search for that community via the magnifying glass icon and type in “!communityname@instance.domain”

Notice the exclamation mark at the beginning. Might take a few seconds. This will teach your instance about the remote community.

  • bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.comEnglish
    28·
    1 year ago

    I believe the devs have said they’re working on making that work more automatically. Like having it happen as soon as a user clicks a link to it for the first time on your server. And also making links to communities outside your home instance automatically be changed so that it keeps you on your instance where you’re logged in.

    For example right now if someone on BeeHaw.org clicks https://lemmy.ml/c/memes, it’ll take them to lemmy.ml where they’re not logged in. They should add /c/ tags like /r/ on reddit, and when someone on BeeHaw clicks something like /c/memes@lemmy.ml, it should take them to beehaw.org/c/memes@lemmy.ml so they can stay signed in and comment/vote/post. You can do this manually right now by creating a link like so:

    [/c/memes@lemmy.ml](/c/memes@lemmy.ml)

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      Jerboa also needs a lot of improvement with following links. Right now, if I click those links in your comment that are memes@lemmy.ml, my phone assumes they are email addresses and opens my email app.

    • Glue@lemmy.mlEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      100% agree. People keep posting communities but manually having to watch for each one is tedious when you’re trying to add a bunch at once

    • nude@kbin.social
      7·
      1 year ago

      I expect some innovation in this regard in the next few months. Rexit will have a big short term influx to the fediverse that will die down, but hopefully some that hang around are the developer types who are being shafted by reddit.

    • DrQuint@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Big upvote. I figured out how to follow other communities from clicking the community tab at the top and looking at the URL. But it shouldn’t be this hard. It should be way more seamless.

      There’s two things I wish this had:

      • (This is your suggestion) Lemmy websites and apps should automatically attempt to show external communities within their own website if possible, so that sharing a community from this one will still allow you to join up without further navigating

      • When seeing a “subscribe” button on another website, instead of it assuming you want to subscribe from the site itself and telling you to log in, it should first check if you’re not logged in, and if you’re not, ask if you want to subscribe to it from another instance if it finds any browser cookies for other Lemmy communities.

      With that said, both of these might be against the goals or require the cooperation of an instance, so if we ultimately end up not getting it, well, it’s fine-ish.

      • Justin@lemmy.jlh.nameEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Other Lemmy sites having access to a cookie that says who you’re logged in as could be a privacy risk for the user. Maybe a browser extension?

      • Zak8022@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        AFAIK, it does. But the url structure is slightly different. Instead of
        https://kbin.social/c/memes@lemmy.ml
        It would be https://kbin.social/m/memes@lemmy.ml with an “m” instead of a “c”.

        I’m still learning, so someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

          • Zak8022@kbin.social
            1·
            1 year ago

            For real. I feel like I recall a browser extension doing something similar for Mastodon. But I don’t have the coding knowledge to adapt that to this use case.

        • lixus98@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          So I managed to get the extension to an usable state.
          It adds that little kbin icon to the beginning of the url or mention, if you click that icon you will go to the kbin link of that community. It works for all websites so if you are browsing on a lemmy site it should work there too.
          I am currently working on testing it and publishing it to the chrome and firefox stores.