Suuuuper new to Lemmy, so apologies in advamce if this is a particularly stupid question. DDG has been no help.

I’m a member of midwest.social. I’d like to subscribe, and post to, a community (sub?) on another server. I know the other server is federated with midwest.social, because I can see other subs, and I know the sub on the foreign server (in this case, lemmy.ml), which I found with DDG.

So why can’t I find the sub in Jerboa? I’ve searched by name, by name including server, by every combination of reference I can think of. !, #, @.

It’s a technical sub, and I can’t imagine it’s been intentionally blocked. So I’m thinking that maybe Lemmy is whitelist-based? Do admins have to explicitly include subs from other instances? Or is there some magic that I’ve somehow missed about how to get to a federated sub that maybe nobody has yet accessed on the instance I’ve joined?

I found an old (1y) discussion about how to make Lemmy more accessible to new users. Someone offhand referenced this topic (accessing federated subs) needing more clarity, but with no explanation. A pointer to a how-to would be handy; maybe answers will help some future user when they find this post through whichever fad search engine privacy wonks are using in a couple of years.

  • if you see a community for the first time, it will take a while to load the last 20 posts on that community. after that, every time an update is done on the remote community, it will be pushed to yours.

    idk if at least one person need to subscribe to it, or just opening it is sufficient.