help finding a community on a different server RESOLVED
SOLUTION FOUND - thank you
There is a community called Tarot on lemmy.world, and I want to subscribe to it. The url is https://lemmy.world/c/tarot. I've been to lemmy.world when not logged in and I can see it there. But when I try to find it from here, I can't. I tried putting [email protected] in the search and got "no results found". I've been told that "someone needs to search for it, for it to appear", but I have already tried to search for it, many times. What else needs to happen for me to be able to see and subscribe to this community?
Or do I just have to make a second account on lemmy.world?
its because no one has yet subbed to that community from your instance, as a result it may take some time for the information to come over. I find sometimes searching for a post in the sub helps but it can take multiple tries and a wait before it works.
Once you get there, sub and with in a day youll start getting updates from that community on your instance.
How far back will posts and comments appear? I've had issues where I'm getting like 10% of the votes, comments and posts from communities on other instances.
if the server has not synced it before then it starts at the time of the first sync. there is no concept of syncing archives in this protocol though the API does support it IIRC
I mean putting "https://lemmy.world/c/tarot" into the search input in https://sh.itjust.works/search and do the search. I know it is a bit counterintuitive but this is how the UI works at the moment. It will likely take a while to show up. Just be patient.
you might have to search for the plain url (https://lemmy.world/c/tarot) in order for it to show up in the search. Make sure search type is set to "All" as well.
There is no way to discover communities for the first time for a particular instance without leaving your instance webpage
Viewing a previously unfederated, or recently federated server is missleading, since votes and comments are missing, and so posts are not sorted, and also often missing since they were posted pre-federation.
Even on a federated instance, there is no interface to view all the communities present on that instance.(especially ones older than the date of federation) without leaving your home instance (appearing to be logged out)
All these issues put together makes for a clunky discovery process, and separates the ability to interact with a community from the act of viewing it for the first time. (You have to leave your instance to view it in it's entirety, but since you're no longer logged in, you can no longer interact with these posts unless you copy and search for every individual post AND each comment that you want to interact with from your home instance)
It looks like you've successfully gotten it to appear, I can search "tarot" on the Jeroba app and it comes up. Try that if you're using Jeroba, if you're just using the mobile sh.itjust.works site you do need to select "All" before searching, and it's showing up for me.