I'm new here, fleeing reddit and it's war on anonymity. Happy to be here!

I created my account on Lemmy.world, and yesterday learned how to subscribe to communities on other servers.

I was adding a few from Lemmy.ml, but hit a snag with a couple, using the 'Privacy' community as my example: when I hit 'subscribe' and enter 'Lemmy.world' as the instance to follow from, I just get a white page with 'Server error'.

I left it 24hrs and tried again, and its still the same.

Any hints?

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[–] 7 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Are you using a Lemmy mobile app? On voyager I just view the privacy community at privacy@lemmy.ml and select subscribe from a drop down. I don't have to choose any instance to follow from. I've never had an issue subscribing from voyager.

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    I am now! Summit let me subscribe with a single tap, and I prefer the UI to the web version.

    Cheers.

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  • [–] 2 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

    Summit is one of the most beautiful apps for Lemmy. That said, it can be very hard to do things in it, so you may want to get acclimated to using the webpage version of Lemmy before you let yourself enjoy the ease and beauty of Summit on a daily basis, so that you are not as frustrated trying to get things done more quickly later on.

    Fwiw, I am typing this using Voyager, but here too I often find myself needing to pop open a post in the browser environment. 🙂

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 13 hours ago (1 child)

    Cool, I did a quick search to see what FOSS non-slop apps people were recommending, and summit came out well.

    Can you elaborate on specifically what is more difficult to achieve within the app? I don't

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  • [–] 1 point 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

    It's been months so I don't recall specifically in terms of things that are more unique to Summit that are not also shared with other third-party apps like Voyager, but one thing that all third-party apps seem to share is a difficulty writing a message when you also want to browse the Threadiverse looking for information to put into it. You can't really easily keep pausing and resuming a draft, unlike in a browser setting where you simply open up a new tab and you are good to go.

    Also to copy things that you can clearly see on the screen seems somehow impossible. So once more, back to the browser it is to perform the most basic of functions. Same with searching, like through an extremely long post or through the set of possibly hundreds of comments looking for specific text or whatever. One "trick" I did find for Voyager is that while you cannot select and copy text from a post or comment innately, you can do so in the reply window, so you can pretend to reply, copy the text, and then cancel that (it's still obviously a major impediment if you wanted to paste that into a message draft that you were writing).

    And sometimes text does not fully display, like a very long username@instancename combination goes too long for the space allocation for it, especially deeper into the replies where the space allocation gets smaller and smaller sliding off to the right to represent indentation, so if I really really need to see that information it takes clicking and time and interrupting the flow to find out, or again popping back into the browser. And sometimes usernames are different than what is displayed, making it harder to reconcile what you see vs. being able to tag someone with their actual rather than display name. The same goes with community names as well.

    In Voyager specifically and I don't recall about Summit, searching for communities has less information and filters than the browser version.

    Although conversely, trying to write a long comment in the browser on a Lemmy instance is insanely difficult as, at least for me (Firefox on Android) once the replay reaches a certain length threshold, after that every single key press would cause almost the entire screen to jump and skip and move as the text window got updated.

    So on a more daily basis third-party apps can offer a superior experience than the basic Lemmy UI, but not fully 100% of the time. And so it is good to know your way around using the basic web browser interface, for those situations. You might say that the web browser UI is the most fully featured of them all, even though ironically sometimes the most basic feature of all, writing comments, does not work very well. Although better than one approach vs. the other is to have both options at your fingertips for when what you want done is within its set of capabilities, and then the ability to quickly hop into the more basic and foundational web browser UI at a moment's notice (e.g. via "sharing" the post to accomplish the rest of whatever you want done).

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  • [–] 1 point 21 hours ago (2 children)

    Summit is great. On the web, search for remote communities in your own instance server. This will let access the com within your home server, and you should be able to subscribe with a single click.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 13 hours ago (1 child)

    Yeah so this is how I started -searching !privacy@lemmy.ml however despite me knowing its there and being able to visit it, it doesn't appear as a result.

    That's what led me to visiting Lemmy.ml and clicking subscribe from that end.

    Any way - subscribing from Summit has worked, and the privacy@lemmy.ml appears in my subscription list on the web ui too.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    Cheers and welcome. Not sure if this is your issue, but I found I can’t subscribe to an community that has a user with the same name as the community…never found a workaround for that. Also, .world may have just banned .ml out right lol.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Thanks! That's... An interesting bug. I've added a couple of communities from .ml without issue, so it does seem to be specific to that one community.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    It is and whoops you said that lol. Yah I tried to subscribe to it from my instance as well and it retuned “Server error” as well so it’s not just you.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Thanks for trying.

    Maybe its the username thing - who do we talk to about bugs around here?!

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  • [–] 1 point 18 hours ago

    I just unfollowed and re-followed Privacy on .ml, and it's left my follow request as 'pending'. Not sure what's up there, but it does seem like there's something a little wonky going on on their end.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago

    Seems to be solved already from one of your comments, but there's some useful tips in such cases.

    For example, if you write in a comment, post, DM, etc. the community handle, you get a community mention you can open locally (at least on browser; I don't use the apps), e.g. !privacy@lemmy.ml becoming !privacy@lemmy.ml

    Similarly, if you go to https://lemmy.world/search and search for a post's link, it should pull the given post even if it hadn't previously been fetched, thus allowing to view the community too (which also gets pulled if it hadn't before either). For example, searching for https://szmer.info/post/17039481, a post from the Privacy community you wanted to join in, pulls the local copy for lemmy.world, https://lemmy.world/post/54245878.

    Another thing, an external community only gets populated when older posts are pulled manually, e.g. through the search function above, and/or when someone subscribes to that community, thus pulling newer ones as they come.

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