It would be real sweet if you could paste in an instance into the community search, and see what communities they have set up and join straight from the https://lemmy.world/communities community browser UI.
I just found out about https://feddit.uk/ earlier, and being a Brit wanted to join a bunch of the communities and had to use their feddit.uk community browser and then paste the link in one by one into lemmy.world search, and the open up the community in lemmy.world and then press subscribe.
Or even being able to subscribe an instance could be decent, but no doubt a lot more work and resource usage constantly federating new communities across etc.
tl;dr the Fediverse is not great at UX of the cross-instance stuff, yet.
There’s a browser extension to make cross-instance user following simpler on Mastodon (Graze); that means you can just click to follow a user from your home instance, on any Mastodon instance. I think the same concept could be modified to apply to subscribing to Lemmy communities between instances.
I think this is more of a general Lemmy issue than something specific to Lemmy.world, but I agree with your point that this should be easier!
Great shout! I also found this userscript although it is a little ugly atm (no hate to the dev!) and just redirects the whole page to your defined instance so you won’t be able see the other community browser ui and subscribe as you described. https://sh.itjust.works/comment/60204
I found that extension you mentioned and unfortunately can’t find a repo for it to start having a little look myself. I’ve messaged the dev on it to see if he’s interested in lemmy or open sourcing etc. EDIT - I found this version that’s open source and has a higher rating than the other one https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/mastodon-simplified-federation/
I also found this that someone is devving for kbin that was based on mastodon code previously, seems it could be suitable for lemmy, or with some small changes. https://github.com/driccio98/kbin-link
Okay so I just forked one to make it suitable for lemmy, I’ve submitted it to firefox and chrome to be included in their extension stores but in the meantime you can build it and load it manually.
Here’s the repo if anyone is interested. Once it’s uploaded onto either store I’ll put a note out in this post and also probably make a new post to give people a heads up :)
Here is a little javascript that helps with adding remote subs to yours. It has it quirks, (namely always have to refresh the community page once before the button shows up) but it stops you from having to manually type a community into your instance. Also, the search page of your home instance seems more reliable with this method.
It’s basic but it has allowed me to add a communities a bit easier. I would like to expand on it.
Yeah I made an account on feddit.uk too, but I made this one first and it’s taking a long time to build up subscriptions at the moment. Once it becomes easier to find and subscribe to communities I’ll start building up my feddit.uk one too.
I use the jerboa app as I’m a phone user, and overall it’s really good except for the community visibility and some other small issues. I’m constantly switching between the app and my browser to go through that process if I only see a link to a new community rather than a post I can just click through on. I’m sure in time these things will be addressed tho
