In Chapter 1 of Foundations of Lemmy, we introduced the idea behind federation, which is how individual Lemmy instances communicate to form the whole of Lemmy. We also discussed how rules are enforced and how one instance can be home to many communities. If you haven’t read Chapter 1 already and are confused by the concepts mentioned above, it might not hurt to read it before delving into this chapter.

Subscribing to communities is, on the face of things, a fairly simple ordeal. If you can navigate to the community you’re interested in subscribing to, it’s really a matter of pressing the “Subscribe” button at the top of the sidebar. Of course, getting to where you want to go can be a bit more involved than you might imagine.

Oh, and a quick side note in case you encounter this issue. On some instances/communities, the “Subscribe” button may turn yellow and change to “Subscription Pending.” If you can see content from that community in your feed, it’s likely safe to assume that you are subscribed. I’m not sure what exactly causes this, but Lemmy.ml seems more troublesome in this area than other instances.

Subscribing to External Communities

The real hurdle in subscribing to other communities is getting there in the first place. There isn’t a great way to do this inside of Lemmy itself, as the search function is only really useful to find communities you already know the address of (or content from communities that people on your home instance have visited). Lemmy is essentially blind to the existence of communities until you deliberately enter their address into the search field, so using an external tool to search is how most people find new communities to join. The Lemmy Community Browser is the tool most people are currently using, and it works quite well.

The Lemmy Community Browser allows you to search for new communities to join and explore.

Let’s say you wanted to join a community about cats. If we search using the keyword “cats,” we can see several communities that might be of interest. If we wanted to explore them with the hopes of subscribing, we’d need to do so from our home instance. To ensure this works right, you’ll want to choose the option to copy the address of the community. Once you do this, you’ll be able to paste it into your Lemmy instance’s search field later.

This is where the aforementioned copy button is located.

Once you have the link copied, proceed to the search page for your instance. If your account is located on this instance, NormalCity, our search page is located here. If not, it’s simply <domain.com>/search, replacing <domain> with the domain name of your home instance. You can also access it using the magnifying glass icon at the top of the web UI. Once you’re there, paste the URL you’ve copied and click the “Search” button. Wait, what? No results? It may appear so at first, but Lemmy is capable of reaching the community in question. The issue is that it can take a few seconds for the results to appear, so pressing the “Next” button several times will likely eventually lead to the result appearing. It may also appear if you give it some time, although spamming “Next” tends to work best for me.

Here is the search page in question. Paste in the URL you copied and spam “Next” to ensure the result you’re looking for appears.

Once you see the result you’re looking for, click the search result, and you should navigate to the community from your home instance. Now you’re federating with power! As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, simply click the “Subscribe” button, and you’re off to the races. It might take a few seconds to update, but you should see the button change to “Joined” with a green check. If you don’t, you may want to revisit the beginning of this article, where we mention the “Subscribe Pending” message. You can also unsubscribe by navigating to a community and clicking the “Joined” button, which should return to its original “Subscribe” form.

This is what a successful subscription looks like.

Subscribing to Local Communities

Subscribing to local communities is much easier. Navigate to the “Communities” link at the top of the Web UI, which will bring you to a page that displays a list of communities located on your home instance. Click the one you want to join and follow the aforementioned steps to either subscribe or unsubscribe.

That’s about it! If you choose your “Subscribed” sort on your main feed, you should see it populate with posts from communities that you’ve subscribed to.

Next Chapter: Using One Account for Everything, Defederation, and Navigation

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