Asklemmy

44883 readers

2205 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Why can I find communities that exist from some Lemmy instances but not others? (lemmy.one)

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

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

How does the search function work and why does it sometimes not work from different instances when searching All?

In other words -

I search for a community that exists on Lemmy instance A (e.g. midwest.social) from Lemmy instance B (e.g. lemmy.ml) and it finds it.
I search for that same community from Lemmy instance C (e.g. lemmy.one), and it doesn't find it.
Lemmy instance A, B, and C are all connected / federated.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I encountered this while trying to set up my community subscriptions on lemmy.world, which is a very new server and had few people subscribing to remote communities when I joined. Here's my comment outlining the behavior:

https://lemmy.world/comment/1692

Summarizing:

Federating with a remote instance does NOT seem to add all it's communities to your local instance's list. Immediately after federation, most communities will be missing from /communities/ on the local instance, and keyword searches on the local instance for the community will return no results.
Searching for a community using its url or bang-prefixed-id causes the local instance to "discover" that particular remote community. It now shows up in /communities and keyword searches.

Also, as others have mentioned, there's https://browse.feddit.de/ for a distributed community search, though it seems to take some time for new communities to show up there. As an established instance, I also find lemmy.ml's community search useful for discovering communities even though that's not where my account is. "Most" big communities have been added to it's list by someone organically searching for them by bang-id or url.