https://lemmy-federate.com/ goes a long way to make sure that communities are federated to most of the active instances

The current solution is for bots on participating instances to automatically perform the search + subscribe song-and-dance routine. This is pretty surprising to some people[1], and it requires someone to set it up in addition to the instance itself, but it does work.

[1]: I tried to translate an explanation into Japanese for some folks experimenting with Mastodon/Lemmy interaction yesterday -- they thought Lemmy had a ton of spam accounts following groups instantly...

Copying URL into search bar? That is really repelling.

I wonder if Lemmy should have the search bar always visible, like Mastodon does

or at least if your window is wide enough to fit it, otherwise it can collapse to the icon, I've got plenty of room up here

I think the answer is anything between what the fediverse is now and what email did to get where it is now...I'd like to see some kind of history of how email developed over the years now that I think about it, that would be pretty interesting at least.

The Devs of every fediverse software run the biggest instances of that type and those instances don't have this problem.

The easier way is to use lemmyverse.net's search after you set your home Instance, then when you open a link, it'll open it from your instance which triggers it to federate.

Seems to me the solution to this is registering protocol handlers for URLs, which Mastodon tried and gave up on because they weren't happy with how web browsers handled it.

to me, this goes to instance management and how its not just a setup and walk away thing. if youre going to manage an instance part of your administrative duties is to presub to the most active communities for your users to have easy access. there are several methods to achieve this using bots or whatnot.