Sorry if this isn’t the right community to post to, I’m not sure where to ask this very specific question.

I want to subscribe to certain communities on @literatur.cafe. Nothing nasty, just book related communities.

When I use the search all I can find is the meta-community of that instance.

What can I do to find and subscribe to the communties hosted on that instance?

  • Kayn@dormi.zoneMEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    It’s not intuitive in the web UI of Lemmy, but here’s how you can subscribe to communities on remote instances:

    Say you want to subscribe to the community “libraries” on literature.cafe.

    • Open a new tab and enter the URL “https://dormi.zone/c/libraries@literature.cafe”.
    • The site will load for a while and return an error. This is normal. Wait a few seconds and then refresh the page.
    • Now you should be able to see the community on dormi.zone.

    Be advised that you will not be able to see posts and comments that were made before you subscribed to a remote community.

    • Xakuterie@dormi.zoneOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      So, the community search is actually useless? That is very weird.

      Thanks for the explanation. Looks like you need a Phd to use lemmy :D

      • Kayn@dormi.zoneMEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        It’s just useless the first time you try to find a remote community.

        Lemmy is very much work-in-progress. You might have a better cross-instance experience using one of the mobile apps, like Liftoff.

  • Dystopia@dormi.zoneEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    You can also try using https://lemmyverse.net/communities to search communities.

    If I wanted to go to the beehaw gaming community, I would copy the link with the ! and append it onto the end of my instance url, replacing the ! with /c/ like this:
    Instance: https://dormi.zone
    Community: !gaming@beehaw.org
    Spliced: https://dormi.zone/c/gaming@beehaw.org

    Defederated instances can make things a little annoying, i.e. an account from lemmy.world would not be able to connect to communities from beehaw because they are defederated. You can either try looking for an alternative like “!games@lemmy.world” or create an account on an instance that isn’t defederated with beehaw. If you’re on mobile, most clients I’ve tried support swapping between accounts so it’s not too much of a hassle.