If the tools for discovering and subscribing to communities could be improved so it becomes dead easy to subscribe to communities on any instance from any instance, that might not need to happen.

Right now the process of having to search for each community and subscribe is too clunky. And if someone posts a link to another community it often comes up in a format that takes you to the other instance, where you have no account so can't subscribe. We need a way to share links to other communities that incorporates an easy "subscribe" button that talks to your own instance.

It would be nice to have some index or search result page that lists communities on all instances, with a subscribe button next to each.

If these things can be smoothed out, it won't matter too much which instance you have your account on, so that will be less of an obstacle to new users.

[–] soupspoon 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmyverse.net does that really well, I think. At the top you can click the house icon and put in your instance, then whatever community you search for or find by scrolling through the list, you can just click on and subscribe

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, that is good, though there seems to be a bug in version 0.18 which means that when you click through the Subscribe button doesn't show up (just the word "Subscribe" where it should be), so you end up having to search for the community anyway to subscribe. Once that bug is fixed though it will be nice and convenient.

Edit: I found another workaround: If when you first click through to the community the Subscribe button isn't shown (for me it just shows the word "Subscribe" but it's not a button), then change the "Hot/Active/New/etc." dropdown to a different value. This refreshes the page and the Subscribe button appears.