It took me a while to figure this out today and hopefully will help someone along the way.

I saw a post about Lemmy Explorer, a website that lets you find new to you magazines across the federated servers. Great! I thought just what I need to find topics that interest me. So I found some magazines I wanted to subscribe to on kbin and first clicked magazines to search for them but none showed up. “Huh” Next I tried the convenient copy function on Lemmy Explorer and pasted the copied text both under magazines in the search bar and into the search on the front page of kbin. Neither worked for me.

The fix is pretty simple. When you copy from Lemmy Explorer the text copies like this example “!linux@lemmy.ml” all you need to do is remove the “!” at the start making it “linux@lemmy.ml” or “technology@beehaw.org”. Paste the text with the “!” removed into the search bar on the front page of kbin and you will see the magazine pop up. From there you can subscribe to that magazine.

This is without a doubt well known to legacy users of kbin but as a new user I was struggling to figure it out.

Lemmy Explorer

      • Rashnet@kbin.socialOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yeah seems like there was a problem earlier today from what I have been reading. I think it’s working right now but I suspect there will be hiccups along the way as the userbase grows faster than the servers can keep up with.

  • isdfoa@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Yeah I am not able to search for communities. I tried adding ! in front (!<name>@<instance>) but that didn’t seem to work

  • Otome-chan@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    is federation fully functional yet? I know I was trying to access some magazines on other instances but they weren’t coming up (even when properly using the name). but I haven’t checked it today.

    • MrsEaves@kbin.social
      4·
      1 year ago

      I’m trying to subscribe to gardening@thegarden.land and can’t seem to get it to show in search results, so it’s not just you.

      • Rashnet@kbin.socialOP
        2·
        1 year ago

        Interesting. I can’t get that one to work either. Magazines are case sensitive so could that be the issue? Either in the magazine name or the instance?

        • MrsEaves@kbin.social
          3·
          1 year ago

          Just gave that a try and no luck, but I appreciate the suggestion! I think Ernest mentioned that he’d set up the bones for federation before heading to bed, so my guess is just that this is something that will be coming soon but maybe doesn’t work quite yet. No big, I’ll just set a reminder to check in a week or two 😁

    • Rashnet@kbin.socialOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      I am not sure if it is fully functional but the magazines on beehaw and lemmy .world that I have just subscribed to today are showing up in my kbin feed.

      • Otome-chan@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        not sure “fully” is the right word (some testing with fedia seems that fedia and kbin.social aren’t exactly sharing) but lemmy.world people and beehaw people seem to be posting and interacting fine.

    • McBinary@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      I think the federation is working now, but the sync is behind. It seems like newer communities out there have just not been added yet, where some others from those same instances will show up.

      • Otome-chan@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yeah federation is definitely working now as I’ve had some chats with other instances. I think you’re right about the syncing thing though.

  • Kuroneko@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    Thank you so much for this! I couldn’t figure out why I my searches for communities weren’t working and it was driving me crazy.

  • Elle@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    Same formatting advice applies when searching for Lemmy communities via Mastodon btw, for any folks that may be using a mix of Kbin/Mastodon.

    Search for [community]@[instance] to find them, albeit personally I’d not recommend following communities via Mastodon, as their formatting differences are enough that they don’t display as clearly there. Instead I’d recommend copying the post/comment urls and commenting/replying with your Mastodon account, should that be what you want to do.

    • asteroidrainfall@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      On KBin, if you click “more” on a KBin post you can copy the “fediverse URL” of that post.

      • Fediverse: https://lemmy.world/comment/192266
      • “Normal”: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/19884/For-those-who-might-not-know-Here-is-the-way#entry-comment-79559

      Not sure about on Lemmy though. TBH, I thought this post was on KBin before I got into the details…