Finding awesome communities and subscribing to them is likely one of the first things you want to do in Lemmy. It can also be a bit confusing.
This guide will walk you through how it works and hopefully improve your experience.
The beautiful thing about the Fediverse is you can interact with all federated content from the comfort of your home Lemmy instance.
Since the best communities may not natively reside on the server you're on, the easiest way to discover them is by using one of these awesome 3rd party explorers:
Once you've found an interesting community, click on the community Lemmy link to copy it:
On your home Lemmy instance, click on Search (the magnifying glass) on the top-right of your screen:
Paste the link into the search box and click the Search button:
Wait! It can take Lemmy a bit of time to find the community. If nothing shows up after 10-20 seconds, try clicking Search again.
Click on the search result to open the community inside of your Lemmy instance:
The community page wil open up and you can now click the Subscribe button on the right-hand side:
Sometimes nothing seems to happen after you hit Subscribe. This is a known Lemmy bug at the moment. Refresh the page 10 seconds later and it should show you as joined:
The only difference is the link you copied is the actual URL for the community page, rather than its Lemmy community link (https://lemmy.world/c/world in this example).
Using your browser
Copy the community URL from your browser's address bar: