Since lemmy.world is having trouble for the second time in three days, I decided to switch back over to my lemmy.ml account. Unfortunately I don't have all of my communities back over here in my .ml account, and it took me over an hour to manually subscribe to the ones I had over on my .world account.

It would be great if there was a way that we could export our community list from one instance and import it to another. It would make it much easier to change communities if the need arises.

I am relatively new to Lemmy, although I’ve had my account since before the current Reddit uprising and migration. I want to create a community for pen lovers, since that was one of my favorite subs over on Reddit and there’s not one here.

I was able to go to the main page on Lemmy.ml and choose to create a community. I put in the sidebar text, an icon, a banner, etc., and pressed “Create”, but I keep getting a popup telling me to “Match the requested format” over name at the top. I’ve tried “pens”, “!pens”, “c/pens”, “/c/pens”, and “https://lemmy.ml/c/pens”, and nothing seems to work. Any idea what it’s asking for?

(And yes, I did a Google search and fell down several rabbit holes, but came up empty for an answer.”