When I go search for communities I pretty much never get results even if I know certain communities exist. I think the search is only searching the titles maybe? Needs to search the description at least and have fairly loose matching results. Otherwise it’ll come to a point where you have to slog through lists and lists and lists.
Copy/pasting from another comment I made, hopefully helpful. Written for my instance, but the idea still applies:
In the “All” feed and in the community search, you will see every community that at least one person on this instance has subscribed to.
If you want to subscribe to a community that is not from a blocked instance that nobody has subscribed to yet, you need to follow these steps:
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Get the full URL of the community (for example, https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/retrocomputing). You can search for communities in the community browser or in lemmy.directory.
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Open the “Communities” page at the top of the website
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Paste the full URL into the search, switch all search settings to “All”
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Wait 5-10 seconds for our instance to pull in the community from that site
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Click the federated link it gives you (https://sh.itjust.works/c/retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org, for example) and subscribe.
That community will now always have the latest posts, comments and vote totals pulled in as soon as the other instance publishes them
EDIT: Should probably mention that as soon as Kbin sorts our their technical difficulties, then you can use this exact approach to pull in Kbin magazines (https://kbin.social/m/cs, for example)
yeah see that’s not working for me at all on lemmy.one. I can search now on that feddit but can’t figure out how to subscribe because search just returns nothing no matter what I put in
Make sure you have all of the search settings on “All”. It doesn’t work if the search is set to “Communities”.
ah yes that did it thank you
Search cannot be set to anything else but All. It springs back to All as soon as I select something else. I think it reloads the page.
EDIT: Should probably mention that as soon as Kbin sorts our their technical difficulties, then you can use this exact approach to pull in Kbin magazines (https://kbin.social/m/cs, for example)
Is that why I can’t do the same thing from Kbin to a lemmy community?
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Indeed. If you’re looking for communities currently, maybe this will help:
https://browse.feddit.de/Ah perfect, thank you.
I go here https://browse.feddit.de/ I have no idea if its better or anything about it but someone else made a post about this and had this link in there and said it should be everywhere. As far as I can tell its a good way to find communities, I’ve found a bunch in there.
Change the search on top left to all and everything else to all
Definitely does. A lot of communities don’t use the topic names in their community name (e.g. if it’s something very long), but will have it on their description. Those are nearly impossible to find through any means but word of mouth.
https://browse.feddit.de/ has the same issue.
Yep the process is a lil painful currently.