I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?

I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!

  • TurboTurbo@feddit.nlEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I have been going over the same thing in the last two days.

    What worked for me was the following:

    1. Use a computer (not a phone). That was at least easier in my experience.

    2. Find your community of interest via: https://browse.feddit.de/

    3. Make note of the instance (the server, e.g., lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, beehaw.org, etc.) as well as the community name (‘sub reddits’). For example, let’s use ‘technology’ at ‘beehive.org’

    4. Go to your Lemmy server and log in. Note that your server/instance does NOT have to be the beehaw.org server, even though we want to add a community from this server. Now go to the search bar and paste the following:

    !technology@beehaw.org

    Note that the exclamation mark is part of the search query, as it indicates the community.

    The annoying part is that it takes some time before the search result may show up (but definitely less than a minute in my experience).

    Once the search result shows up, you can follow the link, which will open the community page where you will have a ‘subscribe’ button on the top right of the page.

    • lastrogue@lemmy.einval.netEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I have also found that sometimes you can browse to a remote community to get the federated subscribe option. I’m at lemmy.einval.org, but I can go to another community by browsing like this:

      https://lemmy.einval.org/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

      This doesn’t always work, and seems to require performing that search you mentioned first to make it work consistently. Then it can be browsed to directly.

      I hope this is improved on in the future.

    • Springtime@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thank you for this explanation! I’ve been searching for an answer how to subscribe to communities that are not on your home instance.

    • Tanglebrook@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thank you! This helped a lot. I think I’m finally getting my head wrapped around this thing.

      So that community browser, is that like…every community in the fediverse? If not, how are they discovered by this directory, and is this directory just some random dude’s scraper? How would we find these communities without it?

      Thanks again!