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.
I highly recommend the Lemmy Universal Link Switcher user script, installed through Violentmonkey. It makes everything so much easier and more enjoyable. It basically rewrites every Lemmy link to a link that’s specific to your home instance. I.e. it allows you to click any Lemmy link, and it will open up on your home instance. This also means that you can just go to some other instance, explore the communities and easily open them on your home instance to subscribe to them. It also works with posts, e.g. if you see a post that you want to comment on, it will redirect you to the same post but on your instance, so you can use your account and interact with it.
Btw lemmyverse.net also has an option to set a home instance, making it easier to subscribe to communities: