How does subscribing to communities from other instances work?

3 years ago by HairHeel to c/meta

Not sure if this is the best place to post, but I'm trying to figure Lemmy out. Suppose I want to subscribe to !news@beehaw.org using this account.... how do I do that?

When I go to the "communities" tab and search for "news"... doesn't show up there. I can search for "technology" and find results for !technology@beehaw.org. I can go to a URL on this domain for that community; but plopping the word "news" instead of "technology" in that URL gives me a 404.

Do the admins of this instance have to whitelist specific other communities before people here can subscribe to them? Have they done that with "technology" but not "news"? (I understand if that's the case. Probably want to keep programmers.dev on topic. Just trying to figure out how lemmy works)

dan 1 point 3 years ago

I think things are still a little buggy in this area.

Earlier today I tried to access https://programming.dev/c/kgatlw@lemmy.ml but it was a 404, I searched for "kgatlw" but no results, searched again for !kgatlw@lemmy.ml and it worked, I could subscribe and no longer get the 404.

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erlingur 1 point 3 years ago

What's also the etiquette if you create a community that already exists on another instance? For instance, I would be very interested in a Ruby community. But that already exists on lemmy.ml. Would it be a bad idea to create a new one rather than subscribing and participating in that other one?

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snowe 1 point 3 years ago

I think that's really probably up to the community, but I like that this instance is aimed at programmers, where Lemmy.ml is kind of a generic one. I think it should probably be made here, even if the other one is more popular. it's probably good to stay distributed anyway.

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erlingur 1 point 3 years ago

Yeah, I agree. This is a killer domain also! Can't believe it was available.

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snowe 1 point 3 years ago

haha no idea how it was available. pretty penny though. I will go ahead and make a Ruby community as well.

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erlingur 1 point 3 years ago

Awesome, thanks! :)

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a_statistician 1 point 3 years ago

Probably want to keep programmers.dev on topic

Wouldn't this just mean that you would have to have an account for multiple different servers? Isn't that besides the point of federation?

I'm definitely a reddit refugee, but have enjoyed Mastodon, so I like the concept of the fediverse. I'd like to avoid my early Mastodon mistakes of trying to join multiple servers so that I could connect with the different communities I used Twitter to keep track of.

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snowe 0 points 3 years ago

I'm not sure what people want to do, but it makes sense to keep the Local communities on topic, and then people can subscribe to whatever they want from the fediverse. I'm really hesitant around porn though, as you can probably understand. If I can get other admins to assist me and we can build something out to stop CSAM then I'd be willing to allow it.

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a_statistician 0 points 3 years ago

That makes total sense to me, but I'm finding that I can't e.g. subscribe to e.g. news/politics from the lemmy.ml server, or gardening on the midwest.social server. Not sure what's required to enable that, or if I'm just doing something wrong?

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snowe 0 points 3 years ago

You need to copy the url of the community that you want to subscribe to, then paste it into the search. If you wait a few seconds, it should show up and then you can subscribe. If that's not working then I'm going to have to ask in the Lemmy matrix chat because I'm just as new to this as all of you lol

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a_statistician 0 points 3 years ago

It seems to sometimes fail and sometimes work, like there's a bit more lag in the search when it reaches out to another server. I think I've managed to get the hang of it but it was a bit tricky at first.

Now I just have to find some sort of RES-like way to maximize screen real estate usage and I'll be set! Thanks for setting this community up!

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u_tamtam 0 points 3 years ago

Wouldn’t this just mean that you would have to have an account for multiple different servers?

I don't think so, you should be able to subscribe to anything from https://programming.dev/...

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a_statistician 0 points 3 years ago

There are quite a few communities on other servers that don't show up on the listing. I'm not sure if it's just an issue where things aren't syncing well because of server load? I remember similar issues with mastodon during some of the exodus spikes from the birdsite.

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snowe 0 points 3 years ago

You have to copy and paste the community url you want for it to find it. Idk why it works that way. Probably to reduce load.

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coha 0 points 3 years ago

It's not working for me unless I switch the dropdown from Communities to All. Maybe a bug?

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