That’s kind of a bummer. On Mastodon I can follow people from other instances, why can’t I subscribe or even see communities on other instances?
That’s kind of a bummer. On Mastodon I can follow people from other instances, why can’t I subscribe or even see communities on other instances?
You can. It’s not exactly the smoothest UI for it, but you need to open the community on your instance and then click follow. E.g. you’re on lemmy.world so you want this URL: https://lemmy.world/c/nfl@lemmy.ml
You can then click sidebar and follow just like you can with a community on your own instance.
The main potential problem would be if your instance has banned the other one for some reason or they’ve got issues with their federation.
Edit: and that actually might be the case. I’m not actually able to follow nfl@lemmy.ml either. Get a 404.
I should have updated this! I was able to figure it out - because I’m a
lemmy.worlduser, you are correct: https://lemmy.world/c/nfl@lemmy.ml is the url I’d want to visit in order to subscribeGlad you got it sorted. I’ve managed to confuse myself though in trying to subscribe to nfl@lemmy.ml. It should work and I can go to here and subscribe fine: https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
But this gives me a 404: https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/nfl@lemmy.ml
…wtf??
what am I not understanding now??
Can you visit, https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/simpsonsshitposting@sh.itjust.works ?
Nope! Something odd is happening. Need to be back at my computer to properly dig into it.
I think I’ve got it worked out now: those URLs don’t just magically work and load needed content on demand, Lemmy needs to decide to create them.
The first time that that community is “seen” by the instance, e.g. because I searched for it, Lemmy populates some stuff behind the scenes and then the URL starts working. By just doing manual URL gluing rather than the “proper” search system, I was bypassing the process.
I’m seeing this more than some people might because discuss.techncs.de is pretty new, so there’s lots of communities that no-one on my instance has ever visited/followed.