As Lemmy starts maturing, there starts being so many communities out there that it's pretty hard to keep track. I've been browsing for about a month now, here's a list of popular communities I've subscribed to that others would find interesting!
Not many of these were noticeable while browsing communities so you may have missed some of these. I've roughly ranked these based on which I'd spend the most time on in each category.
Also note that I would add Kbin communities as well, but federation between Lemmy and Kbin is still not working well, so right now this post is for Lemmy communities only!
I still don't understand how to subscribe to groups that aren't on my instance. I sometimes was able to get it to work on my PC but it's impossible on mobile. This platform needs a lot of work.
Now whichever one is applicable to you (and if you're on other instances, sub in the url where appropriate.
Let's say I on kbin wanna see your gaming community. If I did kbin.social/m/gaming, I would get mine. The url though can act like how an email address does, by adding a domain to the end of it. So if I did kbin.social/m/gaming@lemmy.world, I'll see your gaming community. Same if you do lemmy.world/c/gaming you see yours, but lemmy.world/c/gaming@kbin.social you should see ours.
This was helpful, and I understand it now, thanks! It's just SO clunky though to have to use a different URL to get to the same place depending on what instance you're a member of. I don't understand what the benefit of all this added complication is. I feel like good programming should make it so that when I type !community@whatever.yay, whatever instance I'm in should just automatically link me to their version of the URL. Like kbin should know that that needs to go to kbin.social/m/community@whatever.yay without me having to change anything.
And in the meantime... we're going to have different communities for each instance because of how confusing this all is. Who decided that !memes@lemmy.ml was going to be the default memes community? Won't there be other communities that pop up at !memes@kbin.social and !memes@lemmy.world etc? It seems like chaos to me. How do I know which one is the right one?
I picked kbin too. It seems like the most complete platform, and is more easy to navigate than lemmy... but that's kind of a low bar. I'm still very lost.
On PC, if you are browsing any magazine (local or not) you can clearly see the subscribe(and block) button on the right. I usually go to the magazine of interest when I read interesting post.
On mobile you can click the menu button in the upper left corner to get to the thread and magazine info of your current page to follow that thread or subscribe to the magazine it was posted to. It's quicker than scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page.
I can just go to the search tab and look for the magazine (e.g. Search for retro gaming) and find an the other instances.
I think s fair number of people forget to switch the search to magazines before looking (or are actually subscribing to other instances but don't notice it)
You're on a kbin instance, and it is the main one so most of them are probably already there. If any of them is not, just click the search button at the top of the screen and enter the name you see above without the ! and without the space before the @. e.g. "technology@lemmy.world", your instance will then look it up and subscribe you to it if found.
It might take a while for threads to begin to appear if it wasn't already there though.
And the communities in the list aren’t clickable. Pretty low hanging fruit for reducing friction. (Like, the platform should automatically link them, not that OP should have.)
I 100% agree. I should just be able to click a link to go to a community, and then there should be a simple way to subscribe when I get there. Like... that functionality may not be "basic" to program, but it is a basic necessity for ease of use and growth...
Fyi this is exactly how it works on Lemmy's side, and tbh it's usually how links work when they get pulled through to Kbin too, but something about this post has given Kbin an issue and it's stripped out the clickable links which is why it's super confusing for you lot over there!
The user you're responding to is on Kbin, which is stripping the links out of this post for some reason. They literally can't click through, that's why people are confused.