It would be real sweet if you could paste in an instance into the community search, and see what communities they have set up and join straight from the https://lemmy.world/communities community browser UI.
I just found out about https://feddit.uk/ earlier, and being a Brit wanted to join a bunch of the communities and had to use their feddit.uk community browser and then paste the link in one by one into lemmy.world search, and the open up the community in lemmy.world and then press subscribe.
Or even being able to subscribe an instance could be decent, but no doubt a lot more work and resource usage constantly federating new communities across etc.
tl;dr the Fediverse is not great at UX of the cross-instance stuff, yet.
There’s a browser extension to make cross-instance user following simpler on Mastodon (Graze); that means you can just click to follow a user from your home instance, on any Mastodon instance. I think the same concept could be modified to apply to subscribing to Lemmy communities between instances.
I think this is more of a general Lemmy issue than something specific to Lemmy.world, but I agree with your point that this should be easier!
Great shout! I also found this userscript although it is a little ugly atm (no hate to the dev!) and just redirects the whole page to your defined instance so you won’t be able see the other community browser ui and subscribe as you described. https://sh.itjust.works/comment/60204
I found that extension you mentioned and unfortunately can’t find a repo for it to start having a little look myself. I’ve messaged the dev on it to see if he’s interested in lemmy or open sourcing etc. EDIT - I found this version that’s open source and has a higher rating than the other one https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/mastodon-simplified-federation/