Oh noes, that short community list 😱 – but hey, some have been shown to the instance already! 🎊
An instance needs to learn the network either organically from interactions or by getting pointed to nice places of the fediverse.

Finding a community

You might have seen the instancelist already. You can view their communities and subscribe to them from tchncs. Also check out browse.feddit.de for finding all teh nice communities across instances.

Syntax

The syntax for a community is !community.
The syntax for a remote community is !community@server.xyz
The searchbox also understands full links like https://lemmy.ml/c/unixporn

Show this server a community:

Note: make sure you are searching the fediverse. Do not filter for local, which might be your default!

  1. Go to the search and look up a remote community that you either found on the network or simply guessed.
  2. The server will now try to subscribe to it in the background
  3. After a while the ui will refresh and show the community as a search result. This might take a few seconds. (otherwise see below).
  4. If you want to make sure, just search again after a few seconds or check the community-list and you should find what you were looking for.

If it’s stuck at pending

There currently are many discussions around this. Right not it seems like it still works, even tho it says pending.

  • alfredb
    7·
    1 year ago

    Is it possible to import a subscribtion list from another instance, similar to Mastodon?

    • Adda@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Not as of now. You can create an issue for it on Lemmy’s GitHub repository.

      • alfredbEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Thanks, it’s what I expected. Not a (real) issue.

        • Adda@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Not sure if you are familiar with GitHub. It is not an issue in the sense of a problem, but it is a reasonable feature one could request using the issues interface on GitHub. However, I see that such issue already exists. As expected, though, it is way down in the developer’s backlog. If enough people show interest in the feature in the linked issue, its priority can change.