Is there any way to search for communities across all Lemmy instances?
This is my first day in the Fediverse, and I'm building out my sub list in Lemmy right now. I noticed that searching for Communities only looks within the instance that I'm logged into. Is there any easy way to search across all available Lemmy servers for Communities?
You are viewing a single comment
So, that works in a funny way, and this is one of the quirks that belong to the current state of the fediverse. I see you are on lemmy.world, so you should not be impacted that much by it, but still... Let me explain.
You can easily search for all communities in lemmy.world (your "home" instance) by switching the toggle in your search screen. By default, you can't search for communities on other instances, UNLESS someone on lemmy.world has already done so (or, I'm not sure about this one, is subscribed to that community). If you do so, lemmy.world will federate with that community and keep it "in the loop".
If you should stumble on a community that you want to subscribe to, but it is not yet federated by lemmy.world, you can just use
!communityname@instancename.ltdto search for it. The search takes some time, or you need to try a second time. If you subscribe, that community will be federated with your home server.Not that big of a deal for instances like lemmy.world as I said, but a bigger thing for small instances (like my own).
This is so good!
How do I find and interact with things inside the fediverse but outside of lemmy? Like mastodon for example. Do I need to make a mastodon account or is there a way for me to see and interact with it using my lemm.ee account?
If lemm.ee allows federation, you can basically do it from within the lemm.ee instance. You should be able to discover and communicate as for a lemmy post.
However, I'm not a Mastodon user, so I have not tried it.
What I do know is that you can't surf to a mastodon server (eg. https://mastodon-belgium.be/home), and log in with your lemm.ee account. You need to get lemm.ee to federate with the specific mastodon server. So not sure how to do that for Mastodon. For kbin you can do the same things as community's, but they are called differently on kbin.
No expert, YMMV.