What's the best way to find instances and communities?

So, yes, I am a reddit refugee. I have played around a bit in lemmy with liftoff & lemmy.world and so far it's great.

What I'm really curious to know is what is the best way to to find active communities & join them?

If I wanted to find the most active Warhammer40k community, where would I start?

If it is on a different instance, can I still (in theory) fully interact (view, upvote, comment, post) with that community by subscribing to it from my lemmy.world account in liftoff?

If they have in some way federated/blocked lemmy.world, could I create an account directly on that instance, log into it in liftoff as an alt and swap between my accounts to have full access?

If it is 'shadow'banned/blocked/defederated/whatever, how would I tell?

Thank you in advance, I've really enjoyed trying to be active here so far and everyone has been super nice

11 comments

Hello fellow Redditugee, I found Lemmy Explorer https://lemmyverse.net/communities to be very handy. I like the layout and the search/sort capability. The process I followed to subscribe to communities was to:
In Lemmy Explorer, click on the community@instance name (eg !maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world), which automagically copies it to the clipboard.
Then in my home instance (aussie.zone) I clicked on the search icon (magnifying glass) and pasted the details into the search box.
I then click Next (not search).
The search will initially show "No Result" while it searched the Fediverse, but then the community will show up (I'm using dark mode so it shows up in green as a link).
I click on the link to open the community from my home instance and click on the subscribe button. Initially the community may be set to "Subscribe Pending" - I guess it needs to be reviewed. I've also managed to subscribe to Kbin magazines from Lemmy using this process. Note: this is on PC using Firefox
- You can also just enter your instance at the top right of that website and every link will directly be rewritten to send you to the communities from your instance

https://federation-checker.vercel.app allows you to check the instances they blocked and were blocked by.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities is probably the best tool communities. Just set your home instance at the top
and then just search for what you are interested it.

Use This Tool!

Sort by all > new/top day/hot/ active, subscribe to anything that interests you.
If I'm looking for something specific i type the community into the search and up they pop. Sub to all of them, or most active.
Eventually you'll have a well curated feed for yourself.
If it doesn't exist, create it. (:

Liftoff has a built in search tool. Just search for the community you might be interested in (it matches both title and description), select "communities", and change the sorting to you liking (top (all time) sorts by subscriber count)

Everyone suggesting browser links but I hope we will get an app that has some proper navigation of all the instances and its communities.

11 comments