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What should users understand about finding communities in the fediverse?

I'm missing something.

I've been looking for a college football magazine. When I clicked "Magazines" on my Kbin home and entered football or cfb, nothing came up. Something comes up now, because I made one. But then I saw a link to a web page called "Lemmy Explorer" and when I search there, four or five CFB communities show up.

What's the simplest path for finding communities or magazines based on a keyword and making sure I'm not missing anything?

Bonus question: How does subscription to a magazine affect content I see? So far, I have only tracked down subscribed material by having notifications turn on and following those links?

flathead ,
@flathead@quex.cc avatar

here’s something that might be helpful for finding communities: lemmyfind.quex.cc

Spzi ,

There were several ways to search in the past weeks, it got simplified with the 0.18 update (lemmy users can check their version at the very bottom).

This means the tipps you can find from previous week and before are a bit outdated (although not completely wrong). I was confused then, and am still in the process of learning.

For now, for lemmy users, the best way (AFAIK) seems to be to search for the full community URL, like lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions

I still think it works better when not searching for ‘Communities’, but for ‘All’, but maybe my habits aren’t updated yet.

A general technical insight about federation: New communities do not make themselves known to all federated instances. For each instance, one user has to ‘discover’ them first. This first lookup will be slower (a few seconds) and display as ‘No Result’, then switch to the result.

This means users from small instances and/or users who search for new or small communities have a chance to run into this issue.

As such, I wouldn’t trust the in-built search function too much, but use external tools to see what is out there. Once you know a community exists, you know when to ignore the ‘No Results’ message and wait longer, or ask for help.

Tools I know:

Once you are the first subscriber from your instance to a remote community, you also don’t get the full history of posts and comments right away, but something like 20 only. So your logged in view (relative, such as /c/nostupidquestions) may show much less content than the native view (first link, full community URL).

One more thing to understand: The development is active and ongoing. Not only did many users join, but also some developers.

Notifying @Glide. @ryan, maybe checking federation with fba.ryona.agency can help?

PS: We should use the wiki much more for these things. This would also allow the answers (if they link to the wiki) to remain updated, instead of outdated answers in older comments.

cerement ,
@cerement@slrpnk.net avatar
  • feddit has a good community browser
  • because all the instances are federated, they don’t download information from another instance until it is necessary (to save on bandwidth and server space)
    • instances become linked when a user from one instance subscribes to a community/magazine on another instance or when they try searching for content on another instance
      • this is also why there’s a delay when searching “All”, gotta give the instance a little bit to go out and start grabbing content – and this is why searches come back with nothing but if you just wait, suddenly it starts populating half a minute later
    • you can see which instances your instance is already linked to (and which instances your instance is blocking) by adding /instances to the end of your instance’s url – ex. lemmy.world/instances
MentalEdge ,
@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

Basically, look at kbin, and also look at lemmyverse.

An instance only knows about communities someone has told it about, that is, searched for them in the @[email protected] format.

Once the first person has done that, the instance then knows about that magazine/community, and it will show up in search in the future.

Rainhall OP ,

Piggybacking on myself. I can't figure out how to subscribe to one of the other communities. One says to paste "!cfb" into my instance's serach field, but when I do that, I get a result that says "empty."

ryan ,

To piggyback on this - this reply itself did not make it to my instance. I needed to search for it specifically using the "copy link to fediverse" and paste it in to my search box to consume this top-level reply. Here is a great example of how replies can be missed across instances.

I do see that from feddit.online this magazine is not being found. I am unsure why. I know that, at some point, some changes were made to lemmy to block incoming federation from kbin instances unless that is specifically removed by lemmy instance admins (e.g. you might reply or post and it never makes it to the actual lemmy instance), but that should not affect federating out to my understanding.

Glide ,

Posting because I want to know the same thing.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •