& I’m doing pretty good! The wefwef app has done a great job of recreating the Apollo experience and has made it a lot easier to not want to go and download the Reddit app. The more active it gets here, the easier it’ll be. How are you guys doing so far? Have you found an App for Lemmy that you prefer the most yet?

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[–] mke_geek@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm having the hardest time using Lemmy. I got Jerboa and subscribed to 3 communities. However I see other communities online and Jerboa can't seem to find them. How can I force Jerboa to locate a community?

People keep saying Lemmy is easy to use but it doesn't seem to be so far even though I'm really trying to stay away from Reddit. That's one thing that Reddit has an advantage in, it's very easy to use.

[–] gigachad@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy is still in a very early stage and development is accelerating super fast in the last weeks. I read somebody say Reddit was also very hard to use 15 years ago. However I can absolutely understand the frustration that can come with Lemmy and all the young apps.

I'm no expert but I see two possible solutions for your problem.

One could be that your instance does not know the community yet. All communities that are local on your instance should be found by Jerboa. The most other big ones too, because other users of your instance have already joined one of them (only after 1 person subscribed, the community is known for everyone). If you are looking for niche communities, you may have to search with the whole link, so search for https://feddit.de/c/ich_iel instead of ich_iel and wait for 10 seconds.

The other one could be to to set standard links for jerboa. You can do this on Android in the app settings of Jerboa, I don't know how the option is called in English but it should be easy to find. Same place where you delete storage and cache, handle permissions etc. If you press on "add links" you can select all the different instances (feddit.de, Lemmy.world etc.). Maybe you can open the community you want to locate by opening the link to it with Jerboa.

That's only some ideas. You can also consider trying out other apps such as Connect for Lemmy or Liftoff. It seems Slide and Boost will also be developed if I'm correct. It needs some time until everything is round, but so far most of us are amazed what has already been done!

[–] mke_geek@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the suggestions. However they didn't work.

What's odd is that the instance I joined does seem to know about the other instance as I can see one community on the other instance. Could the community on the other instance be "hiding" themselves somehow?

Here's the one I'm trying to join: https://midwest.social/c/milwaukee

Edit: I finally got it to work! I went to the web interface for my instance and kept searching for it and then it finally found it. Once the web interface found it, then Jerboa found it.

[–] gigachad@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Great, then my theory was correct. Yes the instance was known, but not the community.

[–] Calidro@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you recommend a resource that would explain these differences and more Lemmy lingo? I'm still quite overwhelmed by everything. Thanks!

[–] gigachad@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Most oft the stuff I know I read from some explanation posts in my first days, but I don't habe a link atm. You can always read the Lemmy docs, there is a section "following communities", but that's also a very basic level without too much technical details.

I will send you some resources if I stumble over them again!

[–] Calidro@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks! I think while we all figure this out it's good to just coast along as well. Fake it till you make it, haha!

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

People who say Lemmy is easy to use don't understand that it's difficult to get people with a centralized mindset to understand this whole fediverse thing. I'm going to try and explain a bit of what's going on in the background, not really the step by step that @gigachad@feddit.de went into.

The way it works is that an instance can have communities. Those communities can be subscribed to by any user on any instance (barring federation blacklists/whitelists, but that's a whole other rabbit hole).

Subscribing to a community that nobody on your instance has subscribed to yet will start the process of your instance pulling in all the information. Your instance will essentially have a local copy of that community that you can interact with. It will then periodically synchronize with the instance that hosts the community.

A brand new instance will not pull in anything from any instance. Users have to subscribe to start the process of pulling in communities. In theory (software bugs, network issues, servers being overloaded, etc all play havoc here), interacting with a community on another instance should feel relatively seamless. You post a comment, it gets synced to the home instance, then all other instances pull your comment from the community next time they sync.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask. Only been a Lemmy user for like 2 months, but been following the fediverse for a while now.