Generally if you search for the full URL or handle of a profile or community your server should be able to find it. For example to find a user like mark ruffalo I just searched for @MarkRuffalo@mastodon.social on my lemmy instance. After a few tries it did find him but not his posts. I've only reliably gotten this searching to work through the main lemmy ui so your mileage may vary depending on the app you use. Misskey should work similarly I believe but I don't follow or know of anyone on there so not sure

Hi @SleepingTower@lemmy.world,

a Mod Note: Please phrase your title as a Question ( Its our Rule 1 ) please change it in the next hour or we are forced to take down this post.

Thank you.

Full disclosure I can be completely wrong, but this is my understanding.

I don't believe it is possible today to connect your Lemmy to Misskey. I may be wrong, but Lemmy at the moment supports kbin and lemmy. For example, Mastodon can read Lemmy, but Lemmy cannot read Mastodon. This is just a limitation of the way the app is programmed, even though the ActivityPub backend can communicate.

Well, the "how" is technically simple. You paste the URL to the search box and you hit subscribe. You can do that right now with:

• Lemmy communities
• Kbin communities
• PeerTube channels
• Mayyyyybe a.gup.pe / chirp.social groups???? idk how well those would work

Lemmy itself only let you subscribe to ActivityPub Group actors though, so it's quite restrictive in that regard. kbin adds user follows and microblogging into the mix, but you can't do those through Lemmy yet (or perhaps ever).

However, the real "problem" is presentation. While you can, say, follow a Lemmy group from Mastodon. Mastodon is not intended for groups so it kinda breaks and ends up spamming your home timeline with all the posts and comments. Other implementations such as Akkoma or Misskey or Calckey (pending rename) might end up interacting better (because Mastodon will try to convert everything it gets into Notes in a "lossy" fashion).

While the protocol does allow you the freedom to interact between services, you will not get the best experience if you're not on a "similar enough" service. Although that does not stop you from following a PixelFed account from Misskey, or a Mastodon user accidentally finding their way into the Lemmy comments section. (You can tell because they'll be the only comments that end up tagging people when replying)

Ppl have already provided really good information.

I wanted to add that generally a lot of things work in theory rn for Lemmy and other fediverse entities, but a lot of them are still riddled with bugs and stuff, so your experience might not line up with what is theoretically possible.

I'd assume in January a lot of the apps are already broadly usable for the most part with some minor bugs still sticking around. So things will definitely improve greatly over the next while. But until then things might not always look like you'd expect them to.

It's been compared to email. There are many different clients and ways to send and receive email, and they are all compatible with the core text. It's not perfect, some places still don't see others, but the concept is that everyone can share a base communication and connect to each other using different methods and styles.