The problem is that you can't have spaces or capitals. The error message isn't very useful, it tells you to match the requested format but doesn't tell you the format that's being requested.

I have it set up so that a bot user is subscribing, not my user. That way the communities are populated with comments and appear in All if I'm interested in the future, but otherwise I wouldn't see them. It makes my instance feel much more alive.

Also, it's worth noting that you can provide a list of the Lemmy instances in the config. You can be as obscure as you like here.

I think the job of seeking out smaller, more niche communities has to be a manual one.

I believe it just means the subscriber count on the instance you’re subscribing to hasn’t been updated.

If you check out lemmit.online you will find bot reposts of reddit threads. Useful until this place gets more content.

You could try using a tool like LCS to flesh out your instance a bit by automatically subscribing to popular communities.

Has it been approved in Australia or New Zealand yet?

Memmy is really good. The TestFlight is full but it’s about to get released on the App Store

wefwef is a web app and it’s also really good. You can install it to your home screen and you’d never know it wasn’t a native app.

Mlem has potential but so far it’s got a bit of work to do to catch up to the above two.

You can’t, but you can provide a list of instances and then tell it to subscribe to the top X communities in TopDay, Hot, Active, etc.

I’m running a very small instance and I highly recommend using LCS:

https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs

Essentially it automatically subscribes to popular communities from other instances on behalf of a user within your instance. That way, when you want to subscribe to a community at some point, it’s quite likely that it will already be full of comments already.

That's interesting, they're two of my biggest interests. I wonder if this is true for a lot of other people.

Has anyone tried it yet? Two downsides for me:

• there's no desktop app
• there's no Safari desktop extension (I know most people don't care about this)

It's also more expensive than Bitwarden even at €1/mth