I find it awkward to go to another instance (say lemmygrad.ml) where I’m not registered to figure out if I like it or not.
Without logged in profile I cannot participate in the discussion, can’t upvote, subscribe to communities. To do all that I need to go to my main instance where I’m signed in and manually type address of a community on another instance. Only after that I can participate in it.
So I’d like to preview a federated Lemmy instance or at least list of its communities without leaving Lemmy.ml
Can I do that?
P.s. I realize I can preview separate communities on federated instance but can I preview the whole instance?
Other platforms address that via a
remote interactionbutton, that propose you to open the link on your own instance when you click the comment box.A nice workaround is to use your lemmy instance as a custom search engine : with my settings, I just have to add
l/at the beginning of a post’s url to open it in lemmy.mlI submitted a GitHub issue about this not so long ago. It seems to not be implemented yet but the devs are working on it.
It might be possible, but would be very complex to implement, and would increase resource usage of Lemmy a lot, as it would have to fetch all communities, posts, comments, users and votes which exist on another instance. The solutions suggested by @liwott@nerdica.net are much more reasonable.
The closest thing I’ve seen to what you’re asking for was to be found on Lemmur, the android client. You used to be able to click on the instance attached to the user’s name which takes you to a page that showcases the said instance (sidebar, stats and list of communities).
Sadly, the app has been abandoned a long time ago and you can’t login anymore.
