Edit: YOOOOOOOO YOU CAN EDIT TITLES HERE
Anyway, you have to first search for the community in the format !whatever@where.ever. It doesn’t show up the first time but if you mash Enter for a while it will…
Also, this FAQ linked by @Wistful@discuss.technics.de is pretty helpful and covers some of the pitfalls of being the first (or only!) person in an instance to subscribe to a community: https://lemm.ee/post/37715
Edit 2: Found https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3055 requesting better support for discovering federated communities. Please consider upvoting that issue if you have a github account and think it would be helpful!
I made myself a lemmy: https://tortoisewrath.com
You may notice I am not writing to you from said lemmy… because https://tortoisewrath.com/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world is a 404. In fact, though it appears to have federated itself with a bunch of other servers, it only appears to be able to see two communities. These were among the first few communities I tried to access (technology@beehaw.org didn’t work but those two did) - since adding those two, I haven’t been able to see any others, even on lemmy.ml where the first two were.
Is this normal? Do I just need to be more patient and it’ll figure it out on its own, or is there some switch I need to flip to make it do the thing?
(Apologies if this is obvious to those who understand the fediverse but I have no idea what I’m doing)
I’d also like to know how it works. I switched to sh.itjust.works because it’s a lot faster than lemmy.world, but trying to migrate my subscriptions, lemmy.ca doesn’t show up, nor does lemmygrad.ml.
Things in the fediverse can be pretty fractured. Many instances block lemmygrad. Kbin has not been federating right because it is buggy, a newish feature for it, and/or under insane load. About 2 hours ago beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
Similar things happened during the mastodon boom. Lots of federation/blocking drama between various instances. A lot of drama about “free speech” instances and NSFW in particular, IIRC. A lot of the GNU Social side of the fediverse leaned heavily into the “free speech” aspect, which was jarring for some new users/servers admins to mastodon.
Honestly, your best option is to selfhost or find a small instance with some sort of non-open admission policy. Even that can make things hard as some instances can have a restrictive federation policy (only federating to explicitly allowed instances), though I don’t think that is a very popular at the moment. If spammers start spinning up their own servers instead of making accounts on open servers that may start happening.
Oh interesting. I could selfhost and then have access to any of the instances? Would I be able to access an instance that’s defederated? Seems like Beehaw has a ton of activity and now it’s defederating. It’s almost sus bc if I was trying to discredit the fediverse and Lemmy in general, I would get as many people on my instance as possible and then cut it off completely.
Doesn’t lemmy.world block lemmygrad?
According to the lemmy.world Instances page, lemmygrad.ml is linked, not blocked. I know it’s blocked on a number of other instances.
That’s where I discovered the lemmygrad link so I don’t think so