I’m really enjoying the fediverse so far, but there’s one thing which seems a bit inconvenient, and I’m wondering if I’m just doing it wrong.
I’d like to have a way to browse all local communities for another instance. This seems useful for instances that are specific to a certain niche, for example ttrpg.network for tabletop gaming. Of course I can subscribe from lemmy.world, but that requires me to first know about the communities, and the best way to do that seems to be to go to ttrpg.network directly and browse local there, especially because new communities are created all the time, so I can’t just look through the communities once and be done with it.
I’ve created a separate account on there and switching between them is very seamless on Jerboa so that’s the way I’m doing it for now, but it kind of seems to defeat the point of the fediverse. If I could easily synchronize my subscriptions between accounts on different instances, it would make it a lot more convenient as well.
I’m new to this, so is there just something I’m missing? Or will it be solved in the future? In theory the concept of having instances tightly focused on certain topics seems like a great idea, but having to switch between accounts to browse all communities specific to that topic seems less convenient than it could be.
I’m new too but this is how I understand it. When looking at communities click on the ALL tab not local… That shows all communities that, that instance knows about (which includes communities on other servers like ttrpg.network) If you do it on a large server like lemmy.world then your pretty much searching the whole fediverse
I’m aware of this, but I’d love a way to only browse specific other instances as if local. That way you could narrow your browsing to a topic if an instance is specifically for that topic. For example if there was an instance just for gaming, another just for sports etc. you could switch between different topics and narrow your browsing to only show communities for that instance’s topic, depending what you’re in the mood for and to discover new communities.
It seems like instances focused on certain topics are a logical way for the fediverse to work.
As @meanmon13 says here, you can put the feed on an “all” modus so that you can view all the content from communities that have been federated with the lemmy.world instance. If you can’t find a community that you want to subscribe to, then you can first check if the instance the community is on is blocked by lemmy.world here. If it’s not blocked, then you can simply just search for it like this: “!{community name}@{instance}”. {insatance} is without “https://“ so it could be for example “lemmy.world”. If you wanted to find the fediverse community on another instance then the search term would look something like this: “[email protected]”. I hope this was helpful. Oh and to search for a community, you can go here.
The way I’ve been going about it is keep two tabs open. One with my home instance on its search page, the second browsing the communities on another instance. If I find one I’d like to sub to it’s easy to copy and paste between tabs. Everything posted to that community from there on will show up in my subs on my home instance for browsing and interacting with.
That’s been my solution, although that still doesn’t allow me to browse all communities for a specific topic on my home instance. But I’m sure we’ll have some sort of multi-community function soon.
