Yesterday I learned about https://lemmy.ca/c/ontario_community_directory (edit: I got a wrong link somewhere – this one should have been https://lemmy.ca/c/ontario_index) and my local city sub of https://lemmy.ca/c/waterloo. I can’t find them in magazine search (eg, https://kbin.social/magazines?q=waterloo). They’re not brand new (several days).
If I visit the URL I expect them to have (eg, https://kbin.social/m/waterloo@lemmy.ca), I get a 404 and no option to subscribe (I heard some people mention before how Lemmy would show empty communities until the first person on your instance subscribes – not sure if that even applies to kbin and I can’t seem to subscribe anyway).
I can see other subs on the same instance. The whole reason I learned about these subs is because I can see https://kbin.social/m/ontario@lemmy.ca fine. So it doesn’t appear to be the instance.
Anyone have any ideas what’s wrong and how to fix it?
As an update, now it shows up in the magazine search. But I don’t know if it’s because of something I previously did, something another viewer did, or something else. I still don’t feel like I understand why.
This is actually the first major usability issue I’ve had and I’m pretty technically inclined. What can we do to improve this, because this has gotta confuse other people too.
From what I’ve seen, its because you are the first person to try and search for that community from this instance of kbin. That means this instance of kbin wasn’t aware of the existence of that community yet, which is why it 404’d. After you searched for it the first time, this instance became aware of it and started to sync with it, so when you searched it again it showed up and you could subscribe.