Can I just rant a little to you all?
I’ve tried numerous times to help people from reddit set up an account and get started on Kbin (and lemmy), but 4 out of 5 times people can’t seem to grasp the concept of registering an account and starting to use this platform. Even breaking it down into 2 steps, with direct links… They get angry, and then ragequit their attempt in a huff saying how it’s too fucking complicated and it will never take off because it’s so hard.
Ok, I get that the fediverse is complicated if you think deeply about all the interconnectivity and federation etc, but there is no reason you even have to think about any of it to create an account and get started. Like, at all.
It reminds me so much of my 70/y old mother-in-law not immediately knowing how to work a tv remote and shoving it at me after 1.5 seconds saying “here, I can’t figure this out”. When in reality all she had to do was press the fucking big red button…
I’m just so frustrated with people’s complete lack of ability to help themselves.
It must be a different experience on lemmy. On kbin I only need to click on a post and the magazine/community is listed in the sidebar - I only need to click the subscribe button.
so i just found i have been doing that unnecessarily complicatedly.
That’s only if your instance has discovered it already.
If nobody else on your instance has ever looked for it then you will have to do what they described.
Test it now. Go to browse.feddit.de and find some obscure community that doesn’t show up if you search just the name in Kbin. Now take the full URL and search it. It should get “discovered”. EDIT: Actually it’s even less intuitive on KBin. You can’t just search the URL. You have to format it as such: [email protected]. On lemmy you can do either [email protected] or https://instance.com/c/community. This is more convenient to just copy/paste.
This is an issue that’s worse for smaller instances. Larger instances like kbin.social are likely to have already discovered the vast majority of anything worth subscribing to.