Hello, When I go to communities and list all, I can only see two pages of communities. If I search for a community I know about there’s a good chance it does not show until I go to https://lemmy.nz/c/group@instance
Once I do that I can subscribe to the community and it’s behaving normally.
Is this an effect of it being federated?
Thanks
Just to add some anecdotal information to the discussion already in this post.
I’ve been trying to sub to !futurology@lemmy.ml since I created my account early yesterday and it’s just shown up a few minutes ago in a search.
Anyway, thank you @Dave@lemmy.nz for starting this instance up.
Edit: added link to !futurology@lemmy.ml
My pleasure! None of the communities I’ve searched for have taken longer than about 15 seconds to show up, and that includes many on lemmy.ml. However, I know their server is getting smashed by new users, so it may have been a problem with their server at the time. I put the URL or community name in the search, and it eventually shows up after a decent amount of time sitting looking like it’s doing nothing and saying “No results”.
As far as I’m aware our server hasn’t had any issues. There are 26 people online right now as shown on the sidebar on the main page, and the server’s CPU is at about 10% (the larger servers find the CPU to be the bottleneck). So it was probably them, not us.
Yeah mate. Your take on it sounds about right with a dash of lesser used communities are less prioritised… IDK, just making things up at this point.
LOL, This is starting to feel a bit like the the days of direct dial-up BBSs, where I’m in a chat with the sysop. Love it :D
I don’t think smaller communities are less prioritised, but on larger communities it’s much more likely someone else has searched it up first so it’s already federated with the server.
If you want more tech stuff, go join the Instance Admin chat on Matrix. All the highs and lows and everything in between. It’s a public room so anyone can join: https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-space:matrix.org
I don’t think smaller communities are less prioritised, but on larger communities it’s much more likely some I else has searched it up first so it’s already federated with the server.
Fair enough, It’s just a half baked supposition I came to after some larger non-federatred communities showed up almost instantly and a few others took more of time.
linux@lemmy.ml and xbox@lemmy.ml are two examples.
And more interesting, parenting@lemmy.ml exists at lemmy.ml, however even trying to go directly to the community on this instance fails.
I believe searching is required. You can’t just skip to https://lemmy.nz/c/parenting@lemmy.ml
However, once one (logged in) user from lemmy.nz has searched for it by URL or as !parenting@lemmy.ml, then you can visit that URL.
I’ve just searched for this community and it’s now showing fine, but when I first searched it had the pause on “No results” like it hadn’t federated yet. You should be able to join it now no problem.
I feel like as lemmy matures, this is a process that a client app can automate. eg. If given a lemmy community url check if it exists, if it does then search for it on the users intance, then retry periodically until it’s available.
