YSK how to subscribe to kbin magazines from lemmy

morelikepinniped@lemmy.world to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 114 points –

Why YSK: making the most of the fediverse means aggregating content from as many places as possible, but it's not an intuitive process right now, especially for those using apps like Jerboa or Mlem.

I have been seeing some comments from people struggling to subscribe to kbin magazines from Lemmy so here's a step-by-step of how I've been doing it:

  1. Note the name of the kbin magazine you want to subscribe to (example: kbin.social/m/books)
  2. Log into your Lemmy instance from a browser
  3. The Lemmy instance you are registered with will be the first part of the URL and the kbin community will be the second part. Example: I'm registered with lemmy.world so to register with the kbin Books magazine I would type https://lemmy.world/c/books@kbin.social
  4. From there, just hit subscribe and it will start showing up anywhere you're logged into your Lemmy instance (I use Jerboa).

Hopefully this helps spread the word!

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I've been trying to get this to work for someone (I'm on kbin, they're on lemmy) but I just get a 404 error. The magazine is kbin.social/m/LucidDreaming, so following your guide I should try https://lemmy.world/c/LucidDreaming@kbin.social, correct? Any idea what's going wrong?

Hello again, I see there are still issues with your community, unfortunately. Hopefully someone here can help!

Have them go to search, make sure everything is searching all, and have them put https://kbin.social/m/LucidDreaming as the search query.

There’s a solid chance they won’t be able to see anything posted prior to when they subscribe, but at least that will make the community federate with that person’s Lemmy instance.

They really need to fix that. It shouldn't require a subscription to federate. That just means that an /all view is wrong and from this thread, we can see it's a major UX stumbling block

“All” picks up any communities your instance knows about, whether you personally are subscribed or not. My understanding is that once one person from your instance subscribes to something it starts federating, but unless someone does that it stays separate.

While I agree being able to search for communities needs a little help if it’s a brand new community outside of your home instance to make it less confusing, it makes sense from the standpoint of having to tell the community to talk to an external instance by having someone from the external instance subscribe.

This stuff should be automated and let the back end automation handle this stuff for less technically inclined folks.

Really? in the browser I've had reasonable luck just searching the magazine Uri directly in my Lemmy instance.

No need to get the lemmy.world version.

Honestly. I find I almost never get success searching for random kbin and Lemmy communities/magazines in Jerboa - Bowser is king of Lemmy search.

Wow you posted this right as I was looking for how to do it, lol. Thanks!

Could you please add a “Why YSK:”? It’s rule #2. It's also helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. Thank you. :)

Comment to save this since I don't know how to save posts on kbin (or if it's even possible yet?)

This was not working for me and I finally figured out why. I was using the search under "Communities" and not the general search in the upper right. It is counter-intuitive that the communities search won't find unfederated communities while the general search will, but that is how it works.

That you all for this post. It did ultimately get me where I needed to be.

They show up fine in the communities search for me. https://i.imgur.com/iHO4wIP.png

I was using the search box above the "List of Communities" and getting no results. When I switched to clicking on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the regular page it worked. I don't know why.

That's the box I used too. I looked into it a bit further and I think possibly the issue is the community/magazine you were searching for had not been subscribed to before by a user on your home instance. In that case the instance has no index for that community/magazine and you need to manually point it toward the instance it's on. But once this is done the community info is cached in the search for any user on that instance looking for that community later on. I guess once the ecosystem is mature then provided you're on a relatively populated instance and the community you're searching for isn't too niche, you could just go to the community search first and it'd work most of the time.

I didn't even know that you can connect both platforms. Gonna try it later, thank you.

I'm not having much luck finding smaller kbin magazines on lemmy. Hope things improve a bit

Probably the magazine has to be federated first - and so it has to be searched from the instance. I'll provide example using magazine AskKbin and assuming you're using browser version of Lemmy. The local adress for magazine is https://kbin.social/m/AskKbin
Go to your Lemmy and press search button. Search for the magazine using the local adress of the magazine (https://kbin.social/m/AskKbin). Once searched, it should start federating and you can subscribe to it. You should be able to easily subscribe to the magazine as well - as it is going to appear as community in search results. Similiarly you would initialte federation with communities from other instances of lemmy, if they aren't federated yet

Anyone know how to do this the other way around? Subscribing to lemmy communities from kbin?

edit: it seems to work the same way. you just have to search for the community in kbin first or otherwise it will show a 404.

i did this with a couple magazines and they're sitting as 'subscribe pending'. how long does that usually take?

Yeah, I have some of them like that too

Thanks, so kbin is a fediverse server that is NOT lemmy, right? Can we see it if we search communities?