There’s a whole instance scraping Reddit right now. lemmit.online
Their local communities on that instance can then be subscribed to for that type of content.
Course right now memes are mostly medieval gentry and pics are John Oliver, but that bot on that instance is doing what you’re asking about.
Edit: I don’t know how well it’s working for all types of content but text based ones seem to work okay.
“All” picks up any communities your instance knows about, whether you personally are subscribed or not. My understanding is that once one person from your instance subscribes to something it starts federating, but unless someone does that it stays separate.
While I agree being able to search for communities needs a little help if it’s a brand new community outside of your home instance to make it less confusing, it makes sense from the standpoint of having to tell the community to talk to an external instance by having someone from the external instance subscribe.
Have them go to search, make sure everything is searching all, and have them put https://kbin.social/m/LucidDreaming as the search query.
There’s a solid chance they won’t be able to see anything posted prior to when they subscribe, but at least that will make the community federate with that person’s Lemmy instance.
I have a couple pending subscription but they still show up in my subscribed list and I can interact with them fine so at least for me it’s just a visual bug.
I’m so glad the app I’m using right now added NSFW blur recently. As long as the person posted marked it correctly, I’m no longer getting surprise porn all over the place.
Now, if only the people posting would always remember to mark things NSFW…
Yeah, they can definitely have their rules and it’s on everyone who steps over there to follow them for sure. They can run their instance and communities however they want, that’s the beauty of this whole system. It’s just unfortunate that they blocked a couple general population instances without specifically contrary rules and beliefs because a couple people were being jerks (if that’s what’s been happening).
I read that there were some people with accounts at lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works that went into their communities and were rude, inflammatory, and not following their rules so I think it’s more of a ‘punishing the many for the actions of the few’ situation. Maybe they were getting overrun, maybe there were a ton of rule breakers, or maybe they just didn’t want to deal with the huge surge of users. Hard to say.
I haven’t been in their communities so I don’t know if maybe they have much more strict rules that people weren’t following or what. Or maybe people were bringing a vibe they weren’t fond of - they may have that insular community feel and maybe too many people moved into their neighborhood that threw off their block parties, I don’t know. I personally don’t feel the loss because I’m not in their communities but I do feel kinda sad that someone federated with both might see people commenting the exact same thing but they can’t see each other so they can’t just interact with each other.
I definitely found out about Lemmy and Kbin through Reddit. I was familiar with Mastodon before all of this stuff started going on but Lemmy came onto my radar this month. I think someone in r/apolloapp asked Christian if he was going to port Apollo to be a Lemmy client was when it came into my radar, but it may have been shortly before that.
The thing that took me the most time to wrap my head around was joining kbin magazines from a lemmy instance (or joining communities that my instance didn’t know about yet). Yeah it’s not always as easy as just clicking a subreddit and subscribing but once I figured it out, it’s not so bad.
I don’t mind that it’s a lot smaller, it’s still pretty active and I’m enjoying it. It might not be for everybody, but it’s fun for me.
I’m also using iOS and there are some really great apps in the works right now so even my mobile experience is pretty good - not exactly as easy as Reddit was with the way it was all centralized, but it’s coming along.
There are a couple in beta. Mlem (I think the TestFlight is full on this one) and Memmy are actively being tested right now, and I’ve seen Lemon mentioned in alpha and Artemis (formerly kmoon) is a Lemmy and Kbin cross platform app announced and they’re going to do a private beta starting next week.
Lots of very talented people are working on some great things.
Magazines (kbin) and Communities (Lemmy) are the naming conventions for the group type of posts offered - like subreddits. Magazines and Communities are effectively the same thing, just different naming conventions from their different backbone software running on the instance.
Instances are the full server in which the communities and users are held. Like sh.itjust.works is an instance - it’s the page where you can log into in order to then interact with anything both housed within your instance as well as the greater fediverse (barring any defederated instances, as you mentioned).
Currently, if you tap on the community name it brings up the community page which tells you what instance it’s on.
I do like the idea of having the community’s instance somewhere in the feed (maybe only if it’s not native to your home instance?), though.