I’ve seen this mentioned a few times already: people wondering why certain communities don’t show up in their instance. You need to first search for that community via the magnifying glass icon and type in “!communityname@instance.domain”
Notice the exclamation mark at the beginning. Might take a few seconds. This will teach your instance about the remote community.
Big upvote. I figured out how to follow other communities from clicking the community tab at the top and looking at the URL. But it shouldn’t be this hard. It should be way more seamless.
There’s two things I wish this had:
(This is your suggestion) Lemmy websites and apps should automatically attempt to show external communities within their own website if possible, so that sharing a community from this one will still allow you to join up without further navigating
When seeing a “subscribe” button on another website, instead of it assuming you want to subscribe from the site itself and telling you to log in, it should first check if you’re not logged in, and if you’re not, also give you the option to subscribe to it from another instance if it finds any browser cookies for other Lemmy communities.
With that said, both of these might be against the goals or require the cooperation of an instance, so if we ultimately end up not getting it, well, it’s fine-ish.
Other Lemmy sites having access to a cookie that says you’re logged in could be a privacy risk for the user.