So, I was curious and realized that for whatever reason, I can’t see my own community !nier@lemm.ee on lemmy.ml or Blahaj Zone. I can see it if I try using lemmy.world, but not the others. My comments at least show up.
Is this a bug with the federation difficulties or is it one of those problems of being defederated?
Some examples of my profile. Posts should have more than just the game development one I made since I’ve done posts to the community made on this instance.
https://lemmy.world/u/Louise@lemm.ee?page=1&sort=New&view=Overview
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/Louise@lemm.ee?page=1&sort=New&view=Overview
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An instance only knows about communities it’s been told about. lemmy.world knows about your community because someone there has searched for it, which indexed it and it now has 3 subscribers from there.
If it’s giving a 404 error on other instances like .ml and blahaj, that means nobody from those instances has yet been the first to ssearch for it and those instances just straight-up don’t know it exists yet. Note: people not registered there can’t index new communities.
Makes sense, as your community is very small and I can’t quite tell what it’s about but it looks pretty niche so might not be something people are looking for in big numbers.
You are already listed on lemmyverse.net though, so if anyone is very interested in whatever your topic is they’ll be able to find you and index you on their server easily. Other than waiting for that to natually happen, all you can really do is get the word out. Hang out in spaces that might be interested in your community and namedrop it as appropriate, post to the “hey look at my new community!” places, etc etc.
Or you could also make a ridiculous number of burner accounts to go around indexing it on ever server but that would be pretty pointless if nobody knows it exists in the first place!
Oh, interesting. That explains why I could not see some communities Lemmyverse shows that I want to see on this instance. Guess I should search for it and hope that community is indexed so I can also pariticipate there.
To clarify, all that has to be done is being logged in on the instance and searching the name? Or does it need to be specific (with the ! and @ in saying the community name)?
And yeah, a little bit niche! It’s for a game franchise that is published by Square Enix though it’s had more popularity in recent years.
The official way to search is the
!community@instancesyntax, but I’ve seen people say just putting the entire URL in works too.Bear in mind this is all changing pretty quickly as well, I think the recent Lemmy update tried to add some behind the scenes indexing when you visit a community your instance hasn’t seen before but it seems to be patchy at best.
That worked in trying to search for that community I couldn’t find earlier and should solve it then if anybody asks me why they can’t see it on their instance. Thank you for all the help!
No worries, glad it’s sorted!
It’s possible that you’re the first person to search for your community on those instances. When you search for a community on instance A that hasn’t been searched for before from instance B, it takes awhile to search all of Lemmy to look for that community. Try again a few minutes later. I don’t know if that will help you, but I’ve seen that happen before.
I’m not too sure if it’d be a search issue considering I did try searching before I myself even made any accounts or communities.
It seems from testing and also trying an account on other instances that communities on Lemm.ee just doesn’t appear for most other instances for some reason. Lemmy.world works fine, but lemmy.ml and others seem to struggle. Blahaj Zone is a good example in that this community is the only lemm.ee community I can find, and it only shows posts from over two weeks ago.
Honestly, I’m not sure if that means it’s an issue with lemm.ee or other instances, but it certainly is a concern just because it limits heavily who can actually see the community.
I can see it from lemm.ee. I don’t understand it, but I see it!
I’m having the same problem, i created loveisland on lemmy.fmhy.ml , and when I switch to lemmynsfw.com and try and search for it it says no communities found. Scratching my head a bit :(
It’s most likely not federated yet. Log into lemmynsfw.com and put !Loveisland@lemmy.fmhy.ml in the search bar. It should show up and you can go subscribe to it. After that it should federate normally and be searchable without the full thing (I think).
I just tried again and that didn’t work, it doesn’t make sense as I made the community days ago! Is fmhy not federated to lemmynsfw.com maybe?
Did you include the exclamation point (!) in the search bar? Like exactly: !loveisland@lemmy.fmhy.ml
Ah, yes that works, but not from wefwef , only on the web. But now I’ve searched it I can find it normally.
So when I perform a normal search for communities it’s only searching those that have been “indexed” by fmhy - and basically my community is completely invisible to other instances unless they specifically search for it?
Correct. The way federation works (as it was explained to me) is that just creating a community does not by itself propagate that community to all federated instances. Most likely, this is a measure against overloading all servers by spam-creating instances. It can still be found by that full-name search with exclamation mark. As soon as anyone on your instance subscribes to that community, it will connect to that instance and should be searchable normally from others on it and posts made in that community should now populate the All feed on that instance etc.
Also I think you’re right about the exclamation point search not working on WefWef, should probably notify the developer.
Basically it’ll get indexed the first time Someone from your instance searches for it with the „!“
In general lemmyverse.net is the best way of finding communities right now
Thank you, that makes sense - I do feel like there should be the option to search unfederated communities without having to know the explicit name & instance, but maybe I’m wrong :-)
I’ve opened a feature request with wefwef dev, thanks for explaining how things work round here !
Yeah discoverability could definitely use some work. Lemmyverse.net is still the best way to find communities I think but Search-Lemmy.com was just launched too. Hopefully third party apps can integrate those in the future which should help.
In addition to the great replies here already I’ll add that Kbin and Lemmy are having some federation issues at the moment. So if you’re looking at those just know that it’s an unresolved issue still. Communities on Lemmy typically lag many hours behind when viewed from Kbin and posting a comment on a Kbin magazine when using a Lemmy account sometimes results in it not showing up at all when viewing it on the Kbin side.
