[SOLVED] Why is my Lemmy instance not finding other instances' communities?
Edit: YOOOOOOOO YOU CAN EDIT TITLES HERE
Anyway, you have to first search for the community in the format [email protected]. It doesn't show up the first time but if you mash Enter for a while it will...
Also, this FAQ linked by @[email protected] is pretty helpful and covers some of the pitfalls of being the first (or only!) person in an instance to subscribe to a community: https://lemm.ee/post/37715
Edit 2: Found https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3055 requesting better support for discovering federated communities. Please consider upvoting that issue if you have a github account and think it would be helpful!
You may notice I am not writing to you from said lemmy... because https://tortoisewrath.com/c/[email protected] is a 404. In fact, though it appears to have federated itself with a bunch of other servers, it only appears to be able to see two communities. These were among the first few communities I tried to access ([email protected] didn't work but those two did) - since adding those two, I haven't been able to see any others, even on lemmy.ml where the first two were.
Is this normal? Do I just need to be more patient and it'll figure it out on its own, or is there some switch I need to flip to make it do the thing?
(Apologies if this is obvious to those who understand the fediverse but I have no idea what I'm doing)
Have you tried searching for the communities first? As I understand it from some other posts, if you try to access a remote community via URL through your home instance before it "knows" about it, you'll get the 404 error. Someone (you) on your instance has to make your instance "aware" of the remote community by searching for it first. Then, after your instance is aware of the community and federating it, you can access it via URL as you posted above.
I didn't remember doing this for the first two, but I guess I must have. (I would reply from there, but comments haven't synced yet, which I guess is expected)
For me this is happening at a community level, not instance.
Like I can be federated with lemmy.ml or beehaw.org but to join/index a community I haven’t been to, I have to spam search first to get the server to pull it. Then I’m good (except for lemmy.ml which I have a ton of pending subscribes going)
Ya I'm confused why people think this is a good thing, the use cases where someone would edit a title in good faith seem very limited to people trying to take advantage of the feature
Yep this is my process too, after search it does show up even if there are no results, you can just change the search filter to "All" and search again then it shows up, or you can go to communities to find it.
Is there a description like this for kbin.social? Not sure if it's just because of some cloudfare issues but for example communities on the Lemmy instance feddit.de do not show up for me on kbin.social. Some of their posts do, though.
But if I search for e.g. [email protected] on kbin.social it won't show up and therefore I can't subscribe to it from kbin's side.
EDIT
Now it suddenly shows up under Magazines on kbin.social. How often do new communities on Lemmy instances get federated to kbin?
I believe you just need to remove the exclamation point and search for [email protected] on kbin. Not totally sure why but I expect this is just one of the kinks that'll be ironed out once things are less on fire around here
At the moment it's a bit convoluted, but you'll need to go to the search page (https://tortoisewrath.com/search) and then search for the name of the community, in this case [email protected]. This will at first say no results but should eventually show the community (5-10 seconds in my case).
I've found that searching for the name like that never works for me, but searching for the URL does eventually work.
Other times, the search doesn't appear to work, but the community does start appearing in the communities list under the "all" filter.
Sometimes, neither of those work. In those cases, I try searching for a post or comment URL. If that works, I can click on it and then click on the community from there.
Seems like there's a lot of rough edges at the moment.
I'd also like to know how it works. I switched to sh.itjust.works because it's a lot faster than lemmy.world, but trying to migrate my subscriptions, lemmy.ca doesn't show up, nor does lemmygrad.ml.
Things in the fediverse can be pretty fractured. Many instances block lemmygrad. Kbin has not been federating right because it is buggy, a newish feature for it, and/or under insane load. About 2 hours ago beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
Similar things happened during the mastodon boom. Lots of federation/blocking drama between various instances. A lot of drama about "free speech" instances and NSFW in particular, IIRC. A lot of the GNU Social side of the fediverse leaned heavily into the "free speech" aspect, which was jarring for some new users/servers admins to mastodon.
Honestly, your best option is to selfhost or find a small instance with some sort of non-open admission policy. Even that can make things hard as some instances can have a restrictive federation policy (only federating to explicitly allowed instances), though I don't think that is a very popular at the moment. If spammers start spinning up their own servers instead of making accounts on open servers that may start happening.
This is the main reason I'm here - I realized that with an account on lemmy.world or something some admin somewhere could just unilaterally decide to defederate some major server and I wouldn't be able to get to half the communities I like anymore. And lo and behold, beehaw.org defederated lemmy.world while I was setting this up.
I always thought this mechanic would drive a lot of people away from the fediverse, but mastodon still seems to be pretty active after the mass migrations from Tumblr and Twitter so what do I know?
Oh interesting. I could selfhost and then have access to any of the instances? Would I be able to access an instance that's defederated? Seems like Beehaw has a ton of activity and now it's defederating. It's almost sus bc if I was trying to discredit the fediverse and Lemmy in general, I would get as many people on my instance as possible and then cut it off completely.
yeah there was some inbound federation struggles with lemmy.ca the past few days, those might still be persisting. its where I'm homed, it works great from the inside! :)