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Do Lemmy admins have to federate communities? (midwest.social)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Suuuuper new to Lemmy, so apologies in advamce if this is a particularly stupid question. DDG has been no help.

I'm a member of midwest.social. I'd like to subscribe, and post to, a community (sub?) on another server. I know the other server is federated with midwest.social, because I can see other subs, and I know the sub on the foreign server (in this case, lemmy.ml), which I found with DDG.

So why can't I find the sub in Jerboa? I've searched by name, by name including server, by every combination of reference I can think of. !, #, @.

It's a technical sub, and I can't imagine it's been intentionally blocked. So I'm thinking that maybe Lemmy is whitelist-based? Do admins have to explicitly include subs from other instances? Or is there some magic that I've somehow missed about how to get to a federated sub that maybe nobody has yet accessed on the instance I've joined?

I found an old (1y) discussion about how to make Lemmy more accessible to new users. Someone offhand referenced this topic (accessing federated subs) needing more clarity, but with no explanation. A pointer to a how-to would be handy; maybe answers will help some future user when they find this post through whichever fad search engine privacy wonks are using in a couple of years.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

for a sub to show up in your search it needs to have been accessed by the instance before. to force it to access the sub, paste the link (yes, the literal HTTP link) into the search bar. it may not work on the app, but it definitely will on the web frontend

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Inserting the community with the instance into the url when using the web UI also works. For example, if you would want to subscribe to the Technology community but you can't find it with the search function, you could enter https://midwest.social/c/[email protected] to subscribe to the community. From what I've heard, communities not being searchable is because no one else from your instance subscribed to that community yet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

ah i didn't know that, that's pretty useful! especially if you're comfortable with manually writing links, which i am

i'm pretty sure if you just open a sub from your instance that will cause your instance to become aware of it and include it in searches. but you may be right