very new here, visiting different instances, and noticing that when I search “all” communities, I get different results based on what instance Im searching from. I joined one instance and subscribed to a community, but that instance was having technical problems, so I joined another instance, but I cannot find that same community to re-subscribe to. And searching from other instances gives new results not available in the first two.
Edit: okay so the answer is that someone from that instance has to subscribe to that community first before it will show up under “all” communities searches. Before that happens, go to an actual community aggregator like Lemmy Explorer to find the community, copy the url, go back to your instance, click the search icon at the very top, set your search to “all” and paste the url and search and it should pop up. do not open the “communities” page, even though the search bar there pulls up an identical looking page to the one pulled up by the search icon, they are two different pages and the url’s will not work on the community page.
Each instance needs to first “connect” to a community on another instance for it to show up in their own “all communities” list.
The way you can connect a community to your instance is to be the first to subscribe to the community. To do this:
Get the real url of the community, go to the search icon -> paste the url, set search to “search all” and you should be able to find it and subscribe.
Now your instance should be federating with the community on another instance.
Edit: link to a comment I made awhile ago where I explain everything with a pic: https://lemmy.one/comment/237988
Oh that’s a weird issue. You have to go to the search icon. Even though the search bar on the communities page pulls up an identical looking page, searching for url’s on that page does not work.
Yup sadly you need to use the global search if you arw connecting your instance for the first time to a new community.