For those who might not know. Here is the way to search for and subscribe to federated magazines.
It took me a while to figure this out today and hopefully will help someone along the way.
I saw a post about Lemmy Explorer, a website that lets you find new to you magazines across the federated servers. Great! I thought just what I need to find topics that interest me. So I found some magazines I wanted to subscribe to on kbin and first clicked magazines to search for them but none showed up. "Huh" Next I tried the convenient copy function on Lemmy Explorer and pasted the copied text both under magazines in the search bar and into the search on the front page of kbin. Neither worked for me.
The fix is pretty simple. When you copy from Lemmy Explorer the text copies like this example "[email protected]" all you need to do is remove the "!" at the start making it "[email protected]" or "[email protected]". Paste the text with the "!" removed into the search bar on the front page of kbin and you will see the magazine pop up. From there you can subscribe to that magazine.
This is without a doubt well known to legacy users of kbin but as a new user I was struggling to figure it out.
is federation fully functional yet? I know I was trying to access some magazines on other instances but they weren't coming up (even when properly using the name). but I haven't checked it today.
I am not sure if it is fully functional but the magazines on beehaw and lemmy .world that I have just subscribed to today are showing up in my kbin feed.
yeah there's a handful of beehaw and lemmy world magazines that are on here already, presumably before the federation went down. so all the posts in them are like 6 days old lol. there's been a trickle of posts in and out it seems with particular instances, but it's a gamble whether it happens.
Interesting. I can't get that one to work either. Magazines are case sensitive so could that be the issue? Either in the magazine name or the instance?
not sure "fully" is the right word (some testing with fedia seems that fedia and kbin.social aren't exactly sharing) but lemmy.world people and beehaw people seem to be posting and interacting fine.
I think the federation is working now, but the sync is behind. It seems like newer communities out there have just not been added yet, where some others from those same instances will show up.
Same formatting advice applies when searching for Lemmy communities via Mastodon btw, for any folks that may be using a mix of Kbin/Mastodon.
Search for [community]@[instance] to find them, albeit personally I'd not recommend following communities via Mastodon, as their formatting differences are enough that they don't display as clearly there. Instead I'd recommend copying the post/comment urls and commenting/replying with your Mastodon account, should that be what you want to do.