Right now, there is no import/export. It’s a known useful feature, but the devs have no time to work on it (I’ve been following all the optimization work they’ve been doing on github, I don’t know if they sleep). You’ll have to start over atm, sorry.

Hi all, wandering around random small Lemmy servers seeing if I can be of use. To pull communities into your instance, you need to first have someone subscribe. Useful picture in this comment, but basically you go to “Communities” at the top, and start a search with the full URL of the community you want (https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy, for example) and change “Communities” to “All” in the search options.

Once you’ve clicked through to the community and subscribed, it’ll be pulled in forever. If you want to dig around for communities to subscribe to, go to the community finder.

Good luck, and see you around Lemmy :)

Nope. You can subscribe/post/comment on any community on any instance. There is one small seam though: if you’re the first person to subscribe from your instance, you need to put in the full URL of the community (https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming, for example) to pull it into your instance.

After that, everybody on the same instance as you will see it when searching for communities just like it was local.

EDIT: Oh, forgot to mention: make sure the search is set to “All”, not “Communities” when you do this.