Literally came to the direct Lemmy community here to search for how to follow remote communities and this was near the top already. I like the straight up asking without concern for people shitting on you for not knowing attitude here. As a long term tech guy it’s nice to see people asking direct questions without people throwing sneers back and derisively acting like you’re an idiot for not knowing something.

Two things that would definitely massively improve first-time-user-experience are

1. Better community discoverability / joinability.

• Maybe having the Lemmy instances advertise the communities they know about? Allow communities to opt-out of this discovery process? It’s could be kind of like /channels list on IRC.
• Maybe add a “subscribe” quick-button next to links that lead to known (by the instance) communities? That way the friction-to-subscribe is way lower

2. A way for an instance to “pre-subscribe” users to certain communities by default - maybe even as part of a “user setup wizard” wherein the instance owner can curate a list of communities, and the user that’s signing up can one-click-subscribe to all, or choose which ones to subscribe to, as part of the post-registration journey.

Totally food for thought there, and possibly low-hanging fruit to improve UX massively. The initial experience is painful on a small instance that doesn’t have many known communities yet.

All of this is true, but I wanted to relate a similar phenomenon that I observed some 30 years ago that might be of interest, or at least entertaining, to everyone here.

In my formative years, I spent a lot of time reading Usenet, which, briefly, is a text-only forum not dissimilar to bulletin boards or subreddits or Lemmy communities.

I frequented one group in particular called alt.sysadmin.recovery. Most Usenet groups began with alt. by archaic convention, and the rest of the name is simply descriptive or categorical. There were groups like alt.hobbies.baking and so on. Again, not dissimilar from (and likely inspiration for) these modern web-based communities.

This group was for system administrators (or “sysadmins”) to generally gripe with one another about the difficulties of their jobs, dealing with users on their systems or networks, and similar. One of the rules of the group was that no advice was ever to be requested, nor given. It was strictly for sysadmins to vent. The key point here is that everyone in the group was in some technical role.

What was unique about alt.sysadmin.recovery was that you couldn’t post to it. At least, it seemed that you couldn’t, because the group was set to be moderated, but had no moderators. If you posted a message to a moderated group, the message would be emailed to all of the moderators on record, who would either delete or ignore them, or apply their stamp of approval for the message to be posted in the group. alt.sysadmin.recovery had no moderator emails configured.

The trick is a little bit technical. Usenet posts are quite similar to emails: they have some “header” fields (like the title of the post, its author, and so forth) and a body. Most of the headers are not displayed directly (which is also true for email), such as what Usenet software sent the message, and so on.

When a moderator approved a message in a Usenet group, their client would append an Approved: header line with some value, like their name, or the date, or something. As long as the Approved: header was there and had any value at all, the message would be distributed to the group.

So the trick was to simply append that header when you posted the message. Since there were no moderators anyway, nobody could ever accuse you of bypassing the system. Bypassing the moderation system was, in fact, the entire point. You had to know enough about how moderation worked in Usenet to post a message to the group.

One of the lasting results was that alt.sysadmin.recovery was never overrun by bots and spam, even as the rest of Usenet became an absolute cesspool through the '80s.

Which brings me back to my point. A few hoops to jump through and a few initial challenges to adoption can go a long way as a filter for who can show up and interact. Of course we would want Lemmy to be welcoming to anyone who will make the community better, brighter, more fun, and more useful… But we can take our time cracking open the floodgates. Maybe that’s for the best.

Would second this. I’m a tech savvy person as I work in IT and even I’m having to think about what I’m doing just to subscribe to different communities, then there’s multiple of the same communities on different instances etc it is quite tedious as you say.

Really struggling to see how this gets mainstream adoption as your average user isn’t going to have much joy… From my brief interaction with the fediverse I think it’s going to become the Linux of social media I.e. for Geeks and Hobbyists rather than your every day user.

Currently, the easiest way to find communities on remote servers to subscribe to is the community browser. I’m not sure how this problem could be solved technically in future, but yeah, discoverability is hard atm.

I can’t even find the community I’m looking for from lemmy.world . I search for [email protected] and it says no results

I think you can hold alt to select link text without accidentally clicking the link, or at least part of it.

I’ve been going to homeinstance.tld/c/[email protected] and subscribing that way.

I swear there has to be a better way though…

This could be something about it, give it a 👍 if you have Github

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048

Weird. I absolutely expected [email protected] to take me to myinstance.tld/c/[email protected]. Surprised that it’s a direct link.

Also, SwiftKey keeps automatically shifts punctuation to be attached to the preceding word, so exclamation tags are driving me bonkers. Just as an aside.

The link issue indeed sucks, but can’t you just search the name throught “Communities -> Search”? “Lemmy” is somewhat unfortunate as typing that into search returns all communities from lemmy.ml, but the link is there.

At the simplest I feel a chrome extension or similar would be straightforward. A more native flow doing some sort of faux login/modal that could subscribe on the primary host would be better.