What's the best way to find instances and communities?

KirbyQK@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 55 points –

So, yes, I am a reddit refugee. I have played around a bit in lemmy with liftoff & lemmy.world and so far it's great.

What I'm really curious to know is what is the best way to to find active communities & join them?

If I wanted to find the most active Warhammer40k community, where would I start?

If it is on a different instance, can I still (in theory) fully interact (view, upvote, comment, post) with that community by subscribing to it from my lemmy.world account in liftoff?

If they have in some way federated/blocked lemmy.world, could I create an account directly on that instance, log into it in liftoff as an alt and swap between my accounts to have full access?

If it is 'shadow'banned/blocked/defederated/whatever, how would I tell?

Thank you in advance, I've really enjoyed trying to be active here so far and everyone has been super nice

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Hello fellow Redditugee, I found Lemmy Explorer https://lemmyverse.net/communities to be very handy. I like the layout and the search/sort capability. The process I followed to subscribe to communities was to:

  • In Lemmy Explorer, click on the community@instance name (eg !maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world), which automagically copies it to the clipboard.
  • Then in my home instance (aussie.zone) I clicked on the search icon (magnifying glass) and pasted the details into the search box.
  • I then click Next (not search).
  • The search will initially show "No Result" while it searched the Fediverse, but then the community will show up (I'm using dark mode so it shows up in green as a link).
  • I click on the link to open the community from my home instance and click on the subscribe button. Initially the community may be set to "Subscribe Pending" - I guess it needs to be reviewed. I've also managed to subscribe to Kbin magazines from Lemmy using this process. Note: this is on PC using Firefox

You can also just enter your instance at the top right of that website and every link will directly be rewritten to send you to the communities from your instance