As Lemmy starts maturing, there starts being so many communities out there that it's pretty hard to keep track. I've been browsing for about a month now, here's a list of popular communities I've subscribed to that others would find interesting!
Not many of these were noticeable while browsing communities so you may have missed some of these. I've roughly ranked these based on which I'd spend the most time on in each category.
Also note that I would add Kbin communities as well, but federation between Lemmy and Kbin is still not working well, so right now this post is for Lemmy communities only!
Sadly the r/dota2 community doesnt seem to have migrated that much. Which is a shame because everyone from pro players to valve use it as an official means to communicate.
From the way the mods of that subreddit behaved, it was pretty clear that they didn't care at all about the protests. They made a poll and ignored the like 60% that wanted the protest to continue.
btw the spaces in the links provided by OP effectively break the links if you're not based on the community's home server. Would be really great to get this updated.
I think it's an app issue, not dependent on which instance you're on. I'm on world and clicked through to a couple shit just works links just fine. I'm using Liftoff on Android.
If you're logged in on the website, those links should "just work" and the subscribe button is in the sidebar. Mobile website also works really well although you have to expand the sidebar to see the button.
If you're using one of the many different mobile apps you'll have to let us know which one because they all seem to work completely differently at the moment!
Edit: Just realised you're on Kbin and it looks like Kbin is stripping the link formatting out of the post for some weird reason, that's why you can't click them 🤦♀️
These are links with an "!" at the beginning.
You should be able to copy and paste that into the search bar on your instance to search for it. The "!" will force your instance to search for it in other instances I'd no other users in your community have subscribed. If you click the link from your search results, you'll access the community from your instance and then you'll be able to subscribe in the sidebar.
If for whatever reason the subscribe button is not working, and you click the button to create a post and just return to the previous page. It's a known bug that depends on the version number of the instance.
You're on a kbin instance, and it is the main one so most of them are probably already there. If any of them is not, just click the search button at the top of the screen and enter the name you see above without the ! and without the space before the @. e.g. "[email protected]", your instance will then look it up and subscribe you to it if found.
It might take a while for threads to begin to appear if it wasn't already there though.
These are pretty good, but I decided not to add kbin communities to the post for now. Kbin still has issues with federation so posts and comments coming from there often end up missing on Lemmy and vice-versa. Hopefully things will get fixed soon enough, and when they do I'll check out all the kbin communities I've been missing out on.
Btw I made this userscript (Lemmy post) for anyone who's as annoyed of links not going to their home instance as I was! It rewrites all links on all websites to always point to your home instance.
To save a post, you need to tap the bookmark icon next to the downvote arrow. Comments can also be saved by swiping them to the left until you see the bookmark icon.
To view your saved posts, open the navigation drawer (hamburger menu) on Connect and tap on Saved, which is just below Profile.
Connect is suuuuuper unstable for me at the moment, but I find it way easier to navigate than Jerboa. As someone said, you can use the three dots at the top right to subscribe.
Instances can be super confusing, but as Lemmy grows, it'll be simpler to figure things out 😊. Don't worry, it's a learning curve for all of us!
Definitely a learning curve. At least sort of figured out finally how to join communities. What's sort of confusing for me now is communities with same names but different instances (is that the right word?). Then I have check back to see whether I have joined it or is it a different one. This part is super confusing for me at present because I came across many such instances.
Could that be due to your instance and not the app? Connect has been working well for me with only a few random errors that don't affect much. Yesterday it wasn't loading my lemmy.world account because the instance servers were struggling.
My addition to this would be [email protected], for a good list of apps you can try out. Note that while it says apps, this also covers browser extensions and PC web apps.
...also note I have never linked before, so I have no idea how that is going to turn out.
I still don't understand how to subscribe to groups that aren't on my instance. I sometimes was able to get it to work on my PC but it's impossible on mobile. This platform needs a lot of work.
Super simple so far I hope lol. Same url format, just a C instead of an R on lemmy, and M instead of an R on kbin.
Let's say I on kbin wanna see your gaming community. If I did kbin.social/m/gaming, I would get mine. The url though can act like how an email address does, by adding a domain to the end of it. So if I did kbin.social/m/[email protected], I'll see your gaming community. Same if you do lemmy.world/c/gaming you see yours, but lemmy.world/c/[email protected] you should see ours.
If I got those URL's right that is lol
Both kbin and lemmy instances do also have other ways to get to other instances to sub, but the instructions I provided are based just on the url so it should work for anyone while ya get used to the UI and new platform and whatnot.
This was helpful, and I understand it now, thanks! It's just SO clunky though to have to use a different URL to get to the same place depending on what instance you're a member of. I don't understand what the benefit of all this added complication is. I feel like good programming should make it so that when I type [email protected], whatever instance I'm in should just automatically link me to their version of the URL. Like kbin should know that that needs to go to kbin.social/m/[email protected] without me having to change anything.
And in the meantime... we're going to have different communities for each instance because of how confusing this all is. Who decided that [email protected] was going to be the default memes community? Won't there be other communities that pop up at [email protected] and [email protected] etc? It seems like chaos to me. How do I know which one is the right one?
I picked kbin too. It seems like the most complete platform, and is more easy to navigate than lemmy... but that's kind of a low bar. I'm still very lost.
And the communities in the list aren’t clickable. Pretty low hanging fruit for reducing friction. (Like, the platform should automatically link them, not that OP should have.)
I 100% agree. I should just be able to click a link to go to a community, and then there should be a simple way to subscribe when I get there. Like... that functionality may not be "basic" to program, but it is a basic necessity for ease of use and growth...
I can just go to the search tab and look for the magazine (e.g. Search for retro gaming) and find an the other instances.
I think s fair number of people forget to switch the search to magazines before looking (or are actually subscribing to other instances but don't notice it)
The user you're responding to is on Kbin, which is stripping the links out of this post for some reason. They literally can't click through, that's why people are confused.
whats weird is that you can hover over all username links and get all the useful buttons like follow/block but this isnt extended to communities, have to manually go there (while inside your home instance)
You're on a kbin instance, and it is the main one so most of them are probably already there. If any of them is not, just click the search button at the top of the screen and enter the name you see above without the ! and without the space before the @. e.g. "[email protected]", your instance will then look it up and subscribe you to it if found.
It might take a while for threads to begin to appear if it wasn't already there though.
On lemmy.world there is a communities page that lists all the popular and trending communities on local to lemmy.world and all of the fediverse where you can subscribe to a bunch without leaving the list page.
Nah the pending thing is a known issue. It's essentially a visual bug and you are subscribed and will see those communities in your feed, but the UI doesn't update for whatever reason. Seen some reports that you can fix it by repeatedly unsubbing and trying again, but it shouldn't affect the actual functioning.
(fun fact there is no such thing as "approving" community members even though that's what this totally looks like it is!)
Which is stupid imho. I don't want to sub to 10 different /c/movies or even 2 different /c/nba. Mark my words you're going to see a consolidation here if this takes off and you're going to lose the federation appeal that people want (I couldn't care less just want a Reddit alternative). Already I've unsubbed from communities to simply sub to the biggest one.
Let's also ignore there's an open issue from 2 years ago because no one apparently thought or cared of the scenario that some of us actually like a unified identity online and yet you can't port your account across the fediverse.