We're currently running the latest release candidate of Lemmy 18.2. It has many fixes; however, there are still some remaining issues.
One example is that some buttons do not appear correctly on the dark themes. I will keep my custom dark theme as the default theme for now. I think it just looks better, even with broken upload buttons. I will attempt to apply a fix to it later today.
If you see any other issues, please, let me know so I can forward them to the core development team-- if you don't wish to do so yourself.
Thanks a lot! -jgrim
Currently, Lemmy search does not make discovery. You have to know already what you want to join to be able to find it.
This will eventually change; however, you must use a tool like https://browse.feddit.de/ to discover communities.
Then if you wish to federate them start syncing with discuss.online you search for them to import them.
For example, if I found Meme's on lemmy.ml I would search for "!memes@lemmy.ml" or "https://lemmy.ml/c/memes". That would then fetch the community locally.
If you use the discovery tool, a little icon copies the full path to your clipboard for easy searching once clicked.
This isn't ideal for discovery and is certainly a known issue for user experience. It's on the map to resolve.
I hope that makes sense. If not, let me know.
Thanks for the explaination. I'll give that a try. So once one person on the instance causes a sync will it apply to everyone else on the instance? e.g. Become searchable?
I like using https://lemmyverse.net/communities for discovery
@jgrim@discuss.online
I always forget about that one. Thanks! It’s so much better looking.
Yes, exactly. And the first time you do the sync, it only pulls the past 20 posts. So it doesn't pull down the full history.
If you see a post you specifically want, you can search for its URL, and it'll pull it down if someone has already joined the community. If not, and if you see a post that's 21 posts old, you'd first search for the community to start the syncing. Then you can search for that old post to fetch it down.
It's a bit cumbersome currently. But it's new and will get better with time. Mastodon is another federated network, and they have some workaround to prevent such a headache. We'll get it soon enough.
But once a community is in sync, it'll stay in sync from now on. So it's only a headache until there are regular links between instances.