Right now the only way to subscribe to communities is through the desktop website. It would make using the app, as well as the platform far more intuitive if we could click on a link (with whatever format is acceptable) that doesn’t just open the community in the in-app browser, but actually took you to the community from your instance from where you could subscribe to it.
Not sure how feasible this is within the fediverse, but just thought it’s a major thing that’s holding back people from becoming power users of the app and the platform.
Also wanted to say thanks to the devs for their incredible effort and kudos for how far they’ve come from when I started testing the app.
Onwards and upwards!
this is currently… a complicated problem to solve.
unfortunately, with the current LemmyAPI implementation, there is a delay with communities between instances getting registered. so, let’s say you’re on lemmy.ml and you see one of those New Community posts from lemmy.world. well, those links, despite using the correct format to link to your local version of the community, typically results in a 404 page-- even in the web version. There’s a workaround to get your home base instance to register it and then it will e searchable for everyone in your instance, but it doesn’t always work, and programming it into the app is tricky and unreliable.
so what do?
even on the web version of lemmy, this is a tricky problem to solve, and we can only hope the hard-working lemmy devs resolve this issue in the upcoming update to the Lemmyapi at the end of the month. Until then, we’re working on a community search and subscribe function (including favorites) that works similarly to the one on the website (and looks similar to the subreddit browser in Apollo in the left-swipe view). this should (hopefully) be in the next Mlem update!
But but. You can subscribe trough the mlem app… its how I subscribed to most communities. Just type the community in the search above. Click it and then use the three dots.
Now that for some reason mlem doesnt show me if people reply to my comments and i though i was just making bad content while i had 20 notifications. that is pretty essential feature that seems missing/broken
Agreed. Love Mlem, and am looking forward to this. As sharing communities gets easier, I’ll be excited to see more things like communities on one instance linking to communities on another server that have similar subject matter.