Since I joined joined Lemmy, I signed up for two instances (Lemmy.World and Lemmy.Zip) because I didn’t entirely understand the fediverse and also because it seemed useful to be on multiple instances, since Lemmy.World sometimes has outages.
Anyhow, coming from Reddit I started to look for communities I care about and I tried to join them. It’s been two months now and there are some communities where I clicked on “join” and I still appear as “pending”. Of course, they need to chose to approve me, but I’m wondering what I must do to prove worthy.
Moreover, I learned about communities I might want to join and I cannot find them from the two instances I signed up for. More precisely, I wanted to join some communities on feddit.it and I cannot find them from the search bar in Jerboa, while I can see them from Connect for Lemmy but I can only browse them as guest. Is that because they’re not federated with the two communities I signed up for?
I suppose in that case I need to try to make an account directly in such instances
Thank you for any insight you might have!
UPDATE: regarding the first question, as several people pointed out below, I still appear as pending, but these communities now appear as those I am subscribed to in my apps (this is some sort of standard glitch in Lemmy and it’s OK).
Regarding the second question, I’ve been to feddit.it on my browser and looked for communities I like and then I searched for them in apps with a better search function, such as Liftoff.
While I know everyone is going gangbusters about Sync for Lemmy, I still haven’t found an app I like the best, but found each app is doing something slightly better than others, so I need to get more used to the fact that (at least for now), I need to access Lemmy through multiple apps (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
Thank you everyone for your help!
If the communities are on instances with Lemmy 0.17.x and older, the join function doesn’t work properly. You have already joined (and will see updates in your feed) and can interact with it.
Joining really doesn’t mean “ask for approval”, it means “subscribing to their feed”. There are no private communities and commenting restrictions.
Another issue could be that the instance was offline while you tried to subscribe, which leads to a missing ping back, but again you are subscribed regardless.
Joining communities sucks in many apps. Sync does a great job here; but if indeed the instances are not federated with the ones you are using in the first place, that will lead to issues.
One of the reasons why I created a backup account with infosec.pub, which is federated with just about anyone.
This is good to know on many levels. I don’t know of many instances (mainly learned their names when migrating from Reddit), so I just signed up for these two.
How do I find out if an instance is on an older version of Lemmy (like 0.17)?
If you open the instance in your browser, the version is displayed in the footer on the very bottom. Alternatively you can also go to https://lemmy.world/instances, and they show the version number of every instance in the second column.
Gotcha, thanks! It looks like lots of instances are updated now.
I managed to find the “missing” communities using a different app (Liftoff in my case)
I’m not sure how fast Lemmy is growing, but it seems to be evolving at a faster pace (and most instances are keeping up to date)