An example:

Say you wanted to add “ShowerThoughts” from lemmy.world.

  1. Go to https://lemmy.world/c/showerthoughts
  2. In the right column, Look for the blurb that says something like “You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !showerthoughts@lemmy.world”
  3. At the bottom of that blurb, you see where it says “!showerthoughts@lemmy.world”? You copy that.
  4. Then you go to the search page on this site(from the search button in the upper right of this page), and you search for what you just copied. You may need to search for it 2-3 times for it to come up.
  5. One of the results will be that community. Click the link, and then click join in the right column.

From that point forward, you should see posts from that community in your feed on this site.

    • SpaceJim@colony.red
      1·
      1 year ago

      So your instance is talk.macworld.net. My instance is colony.red. Shower thoughts’ instance is lemmy.world. The instance is where the profile and posts live, but the posts can be displayed in any feed on any site (I am reading and replying to this on my own site.) Following an account pulls the posts from a user on an instance into your feed on your own instance/site. Since I follow you already I see your posts on my server, and I am reading and typing this response on colony.red.

      To follow this shower thoughts account from lemmy.world I paste showerthoughts@lemmy.world into the search bar on my colony.red site/instance. (The leading ! is a thing that seems to be required or not depending what your instance is running, mine does not want it.) Sometimes search is winky and it takes one or two tries, I dunno why.

      • uki@talk.macstack.netEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        well, I can see your message, so… thanks? I never clicked anything that said “follow” or “join”, but if I’m seeing this I guess it worked This fediverse thing is weird and complicated to me. If everything is supposed to be connected, it should be easier.

    • obvs@talk.macstack.netOPMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      “Your instance” means the domain of the site you’re using.

      So if you’re using macstack.net and you’re searching for the sitediscussion section, you’d enter sitediscussion in the search box, but if you’re on another Lemmy site and you wanted to subscribe to the sitediscussion site on talk.macstack.net you’d go into their search box and search for !sitediscussion@talk.macstack.net