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 “[email protected]” all you need to do is remove the “!” at the start making it “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”. 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.
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.
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.
yeah there’s a handful of beehaw and lemmy world magazines that are on here already, presumably before the federation went down. so all the posts in them are like 6 days old lol. there’s been a trickle of posts in and out it seems with particular instances, but it’s a gamble whether it happens.
might be more open today? I haven’t checked.
I’m trying to subscribe to [email protected] and can’t seem to get it to show in search results, so it’s not just you.
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?
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 😁
Yes, federation is fully working now. I’m writing from jerboa on Lemmy.world.
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.
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.
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.