Lemmy Support

Okay, I figured it out.

Due to limitations in Lemmy UI, you can't subscribe to a community unless someone at your instance has searched for the community first. To make this shortcut work, I just force you to search for the community before subscribing to it. You will still have to manually click on the community in the search results and click on subscribe on the following page.

It is possible to automate that manual part, but it would require trying to guess how long it takes your instance to connect to the remote instance, and I didn't want to do that. It's better just to click the links yourself.

To use the shortcut, you need to invoke it while the remote community is open in Safari. For example, if you are trying to subscribe to !bbs@lemmy.sdf.org, you would first need to navigate to https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/bbs and then initiate the shortcut.

Also, before you use the shortcut, change the first item from https://lemmy.ninja/ to the URL of your home instance. Don't forget the trailing slash. That way it will execute the community search on your instance instead of lemmy.ninja.

Here's a picture of the whole workflow. I'm working on a way to share the shortcut itself. When I've figured that out, I'll come back and leave you a link so you can download it.

Edit: I should point out this is tested on Lemmy 0.18.0. I know that the earlier versions had a different search URL, so it certainly won't work on earlier versions. 0.18.1 and later will probably work, but I haven't tested it on those versions.