So you signed up on one of many Lemmy instances, and now you want to start joining communities you are interested in.

There are a few ways to do so…

Using the Communities page:

The most obvious one… Communities link at the top of the page.
Once you are on the Communities page, you will see 3 tabs:

  • Subscribed - obvious enough
  • Local - communities that are made on your instance
  • All - a bit misleading because these are not actually all communities, but rather all communities that have been fetched by your instance so far.

Browsing the front page:

More specifically, browsing the front page with the filter set to All (Subscribed | Local | All)
If you are on a fairly popular instance, you will most likely run into posts from all kinds of new communities as other people from your instance fetch them.

Using the community browsers:

These websites index communities across all instances, and you can use them to search for remote communities.

In order to subscribe to or even see remote communities (communities hosted on other instances), they have to be fetched by your instance.

How to fetch them:

  • Copy the link to the community you want to fetch.
  • Go to the Communities page on your instance and set the filter to All.
  • Paste the link in the search field and click the Search button.
  • When the text saying “No results” under the Search button disappears, that means that the community has been successfully fetched by your instance (it can take a bit longer to fetch it, especially if the instance is overloaded).
  • That’s it! Now you can delete the URL from the search field and find the community by its name.

Browsing the communities that promote new communities:

There are a few different communities that you can use to find new and interesting ones.
Some of them:

Browsing Kbin magazines (communities):

Process of subscribing to Kbin magazines is the same as subscribing to remote Lemmy communities.
If you go to https://kbin.social/magazines (or any other kbin instance and add /magazines at the end), you can browse and search for magazines.
To subscribe to one of them, follow the “How to fetch them” instruction from above.

  • ottk3
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have trouble to find communities from other instance using the Jerboa Android app. Neither the URL nor the shortlink syntax seem to work.

    But I can subscribe them via the web browser.

    • WistfulOPM
      3·
      1 year ago

      It doesn’t seem to be possible with Jerboa currently. You have to use the web browser for now.
      There is a post on Jerboa community talking about this issue.