I’ve noticed a minor issue when trying to subscribe to a Lemmy community. On the Lemmy instance, the link format for a Community starts with an exclamation mark (“!”), instead of the “@” used here and across other services like Mastodon.
Copy/pasting the community to the search bar doesn’t work until I manually change the “!” to an “@”. Subscribing to things on other instances is already somewhat confusing for new users, this makes it even worse.
Suggestion: if the “!” doesn’t work, automatically try “@” behind the scenes.
As a side note, Lemmy instances have a helpful message telling you exactly how to subscribe to something from a different service or instance. I’d suggest putting a similar message in the Magazine sidebar along with the Magazine username reference.
I think it would be really nice to write this somewhere, because the possibilities of this federation are not straightforward, especially for newbies, and already confusing for many. I also thought, after I discovered kbin, that it was an instance of Lemmy, but it is actually its own platform. That’s why every additional piece of information is helpful.
Yeah, there’s plenty that’s confusing. I also see that I can follow mastodon and calckey users from kbin, but they don’t seem to actually show up in my feeds.
Oh wow, thanks for figuring it out! We’ve been talking about it in: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/3836/Search-for-remote-magazines-communities-not-always-works but nobody pointed out to replace the ! with a @.
