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
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!