Hey, so, I’m trying to subscribe to a few communities from lemmy.ca such as !alberta@lemmy.ca and !calgary@lemmy.ca. https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/canada@lemmy.ca works and loads properly so I was able to subscribe, but these two smaller ones just give an error 404: couldnt_find_community. I can confirm these do exist since going to the lemmy.ca version it loads properly.
I know how fediverse stuff works is that it only caches communities that a member of the community is a part of, same with other instances. So in this case, Im not sure how to get our instance to fetch the data from these smaller communities. It fetches from the larger !canada@lemmy.ca, just not the smaller ones. Is there a way to subscribe to it so that I can see the communities load properly? Not sure what exactly to do here.
Put !alberta@lemma.ca into the search bar and be patient lol Refresh and try again if it doesn’t pop up after a couple minutes
Sometimes it can take minutes for the backend to fetch the remote community or even fail if the remote server is under load with no error message on your side.
That works! Thanks so much. Wasn’t sure since didnt work earlier, so the confirmation that it is the right technique is helpful!
Yes, putting the !calgary@lemma.ca into the search bar prompts our instance server to create the connection and start federating that community.
When I searched for !calgary@lemma.ca, only your post came up, but the spinning circle on the search button didn’t stop.
Gave it about 30 seconds and searched again, the server now retuned the community as well.
This comment from Ada explains it as well: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/196367