I’ve introduced two of my friends (not into tech) to Lemmy. Since they’re not into tech this is their first web forum.
I’ve explained the federation thru the usual email metaphore and that’s ok, but to lookup for communities is not quite there on client side.
Let me explain.
He wanted to see all the communities on an instance because that instance is in his native language but he’s registered on another instance. So to see all those communities you must go on instance.domain/communities, copy the name of the community you are interessed in and paste it inside the app/web client to look it up.
And to see all the communities all over the fediverse you must use lemmyverse.net which is a cool site, but still you got to copy paste back and forth to the app.
This could be implementend inside app itself by listing all communities and add ability to filter by things like instance.
Obviously open to discussion about the issue itself and how that could be improved.
Feel free to tag apps/clients devs to ear their opinion too.
Instance agnostic post and comment links need to be implemented as well, and would address the underlying challenge in “opening a post in another instance”.
Edit: For now, Lemmy Universal Link Switcher is a great browser script which mostly simulates the functionality of instance agnostic post and comment links. It would be great if the equivalent functionality could be integrated natively into Lemmy though.
Clients can work around it by making a search on the home instance that filters by community id and submitter id. Something like this.
Lemmy Universal Link Switcher also pretty good. It would be great if such functionality could be integrated natively into Lemmy though.