A super helpful feature that PieFed (a new fediverse thread aggregator like Lemmy & Kbin) has is an "Add Remote" button on its communities page. This button allows you to get a community on another instance to appear on your PieFed instance (and thus get the PieFed instance to start getting posts from that community).
Here, for example, I use it to get /m/kbinStyles to appear on piefed.social.
- The "Add Remote" button at the top of the communities page.
- The "Add Remote" interface.
- Typing in "kbinStyles@kbin.social" to add /m/kbinStyles to piefed.social's community list.
A dedicated button & interface like this would be super nice to have on Kbin, as it'd help a ton with scenarios where someone's created a new community on Lemmy and you want it to federate over here. Currently, you can just type the community address in the search bar, but a dedicated UI would make this a lot clearer and more intuitive.
Maybe you misunderstand what I mean. Right now, if I were to create a new community on lemmy.world called /c/thatonekirbymainisawesome, it wouldn't show up if I searched for it here on the kbin.social magazines page. That's because kbin.social currently doesn't know that this community exists and thus isn't fetching anything from it. The same goes for any other two instances. If you want a non-hypothetical example, go to sh.itjust.works and search "geometrydash". You won't find /m/geometrydash (or at least I didn't at the time of making this comment). If you go to https://sh.itjust.works/c/geometrydash@kbin.social, you just get an error, because sh.itjust.works doesn't know about geometrydash@kbin.social yet.
To fix this, someone needs to essentially tell an instance, "Hey, this community over here exists, and you should start fetching stuff from it." On Kbin, this is done by putting the community's address in the general search bar. So if I were to search "thatonekirbymainisawesome@lemmy.world" on kbin.social's, that community would finally appear, and I'd be able to subscribe from it and see any posts made after that point.
What I'm suggesting is that instead of having to type the full community address in the normal search bar (which can be unintuitive), there should be a dedicated interface for adding remote communities (i.e., letting your instance know that communities on other instances exist). PieFed does this with its "Add Remote" interface, and I think it'd be nice for Kbin (and Lemmy as well) to have something similar.
my subscriptions have been mostly coming through posts about new communities.
when someone posts a link to a remote, they are formed in such a way that my mbin instance automagically searches for, creates and dumps me into that newly created remote community. im sure its just a part of its search/routing.
at that point, the instance is subscribed to the remote community.
then i click 'subscribe', which subs my specific account.
edit: yep, theyre crafting the links to force it through the processor like this
!photorestoration@lemmy.world
more literally: /search?q=photorestoration@lemmy.world
True, and the same happens here on kbin.social. However, in the case where there isn't a link to automatically do the search for you, I still think it'd be helpful to have something more intuitive than the community only appearing when the exact address is put in the general search bar.
EDIT: To give an example where this would be useful, what if you're someone on a newer Kbin instance and want to add an existing community? You'll have to know the method of doing it, and if you don't, you're out of luck. Having a dedicated button and interface for this would make it much more intuitive. When I saw PieFed's "Add Remote" button, I immediately got what it did, whereas I still have no clue how to make Kbin communities visible on most Lemmy instances.
oh yep, its confusing.
i think an elegant solution would be a '+' link on the subscribed side-panel, which could popup a single textfield for you to paste or search in., which then redirects you to either the newly created sub, or the failed search results. so basically what you requested. this kind of thing is more cosmetic than anything as all those bits already exist..might be trivial to implement.