The way Lemmy works right now is you search a community in your instance for it to then get shown, so you need to first discover that community from elsewhere. With that in mind, what are some growing communities that you discovered that could get some more love?
Good question! You can copy the text !cats@midwest.social, then click the magnifying glass at top right and search for the community.
It should then come up in your search results, where you can visit from your own instance, and click to subscribe.
Mastodon suffers from similar annoyances. I feel like this system could be improved, it’s pretty confusing for beginners. I support frontends rewriting links, I suppose (though I suppose there is the tricky issue of deciding what links point to the fedi. Maybe “!cats@midwest.social” should not be a link…)
I agree, the copy->search user experience for exploring the fediverse is pretty terrible. For Lemmy at least, maybe any community ! links should automatically try to resolve on your instance? I also wouldn’t mind an extra little popup on hover, letting you choose to follow the link through to the original instance or have it search/open on your home.
It doesn’t even work on mobile for me. I save posts for later to join on my desktop. Lol