Can I just rant a little to you all?
I’ve tried numerous times to help people from reddit set up an account and get started on Kbin (and lemmy), but 4 out of 5 times people can’t seem to grasp the concept of registering an account and starting to use this platform. Even breaking it down into 2 steps, with direct links… They get angry, and then ragequit their attempt in a huff saying how it’s too fucking complicated and it will never take off because it’s so hard.
Ok, I get that the fediverse is complicated if you think deeply about all the interconnectivity and federation etc, but there is no reason you even have to think about any of it to create an account and get started. Like, at all.
It reminds me so much of my 70/y old mother-in-law not immediately knowing how to work a tv remote and shoving it at me after 1.5 seconds saying “here, I can’t figure this out”. When in reality all she had to do was press the fucking big red button…
I’m just so frustrated with people’s complete lack of ability to help themselves.
So, please explain me, how can I search for subreddits(magazines , communities) that can be on different servers?
Depending on how your settings are right now, you might already see communities/magazines from other places. How do you know? By the name, for example world@lemmy.world is a news community on lemmy.word. If you want to find an specific one just search it on the search bar.
This was the most confusing part for me. I found this site and it was useful in finding replacements: https://sub.rehab/. On your instance if you just copy the entire URL into the search bar it will show and you can subscribe to it from there.
Also in your instance go to Communities at the top and click All. There is a list there you can subscribe to although it’s more limited.
You’re likely already seeing and interacting with them, but it’s not obvious most of the time. I recommend installing the Kbin enhancement script in your browser. It has an option to always show what instance communities and users originate from. Makes the site much easier to navigate IMO.
I tried…is it just a desktop thing?
It’s a userscript. They’re primarily designed for desktop, but I believe they can work on mobile. Either way, you need a browser extension like Tampermonkey installed to make use of them.
I tried to get tampermonkey, but I couldn’t find it in the app store or in Safari extensions. I’m using an iPhone 13.
It supports Safari on desktop, but I don’t know if that translates to the mobile version. Firefox mobile is supposed to have extension parity with the desktop version, so it should theoretically work there.
Tampermonkey isn’t the only userscript manager though, it’s just what I use, and I’m running Firefox on a Linux desktop. There might be one out there better suited to your platform and browser.
If the concept of federation is confusing or daunting why would having it be more visible help? Genuine question.
Sign up, browse stuff, comment on stuff, curate your feed by subbing, all the other details are just noise.
Caveat: Unless you’re on a small instance that isn’t aware of the communities you might want. But let’s face it, if the concept of federation is confusing you you probably didn’t join some micro instance hosted by your mate Joe.
Because otherwise you end up with multiple copies of communities all sharing the same name with no clear distinction. It also adds context to any comments that are discussing things like site bugs, or are using conventions common to other platforms like Mastodon that translate strangely to Kbin.
Also it’s just kinda cool seeing what servers other people are from.
Thing is. That’s no different to anything your average reddit migrator would have done? This sub about topic slow? boring? full of trolls? Search for another. Oh look, there’s this other one with the similar name, it’s got more people on it, I’ll sub to that too.
The literal only difference is that now the alternatives can have the same name*
*assuming you ignore the @instance.domain bit at the end.
Go to the magazines page, search for something like “gaming”
The ones that end with an @ followed by a URL are on different servers. Have fun.
So, I searched for “philosophy”. It shows some magazines on other servers, but it does not show, for example, philosophy@lemmy.world. And I know it exists with more threads than here on kbin.social and comparable amount of subscribers. If I search on lemmy.world, then it does find philosophy@kbin.social, but shows just one subscriber.
Yeah. That is sadly #JustFederationThings.
In your case if you copy the full handle of the magazine from those results and use the actual search functionality kbin with go off and find it and then it will show up in those first results.