Will anyone explain how communities become available for members of an instance to see/be able to subscribe to?
I joined a smaller instance on lemmy, but I’m having trouble finding some communities. Eg. “nostupidquestions” shows no results, so I think someone needed to have added it? But I’m not sure who
If nobody from your instance has subscribed yet, it won’t show up in searches. You can manually grab it by pasting “!community_name@instance.name” into the search field in the “Communities” tab up at the top. It’ll say “not found” but then you should be able to find it by searching just the name or just going straight to the URL. Keep in mind it’ll fetch the submissions but you won’t be able to see old posts, only new posts from after you subscribed.
I don’t know what the procedure is for kbin.
The community browser (https://browse.feddit.de/) is your friend here - it can see across most instances, and searches here (rather then directly in the ”search communities” feature in your instance) to find communities.
Once you got the full identifier (like for this /c it is
!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world), you can then directly look it up in your instance’s Search)Ref: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/01-getting-started.html#following-communities
I did encounter some times where I searched for a /c that should exist, but some how not findable via my instance though - hope someone more knowledgeable can chime in. (Yup, I did check that my instance federates with the other instance).
In any case, if you can’t find it in the community browser, feel free to be the one to start it on your instance!