EDIT: Solved! Feel free to comment/message me if you’re having the same issue and I’ll be happy to help.
Supposedly I can subscribe to stuff from *fediverse accounts on other instances, in fact it’s one of the main selling points of the fediverse, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how.
"You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: "
Except nothing ever shows up in any search, either in community searches or the top search bar. It doesn’t even look like it’s trying to search. I also can’t find a place to just paste what specific instance sub I want to sub to.
Does this just not work or am I missing something obvious?
EDIT: Here’s a screenshot https://imgur.com/04FfhiC
EDIT2: I DID IT! So my error was following the instructions to “paste the following into the search engine of your instance” !syncforlemmy@lemmy.ml. What I ACTUALLY needed to do was just search for syncforlemmy in ‘All’.
Also, I can just use the URL field to navigate to a page that has a subscribe button, like this: https://lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy@lemmy.ml I still have no clue what !syncforlemmy@lemmy.ml does and why I’m instructed to use it 🤷
I just want to point out, your hack for searching for just “syncforlemmy” will only work with two Instances that are already federated. While most large ones already are, it may not always work with small Instances.
This is why it is not preferred. But most of the time it should be fine.