Hello everyone, first post here! I’m trying to get a hang of Lemmy and Mlem at the same time. When I switch my feed to “All posts”, it looks like it’s only showing posts from my local server. Is there a way to see all posts on all servers? Thanks!
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This appears to be one of the most limiting factors in Lemmy right now and is not unique to Mlem. Essentially, your instance can only “see” communities that at least one user on that instance has subscribed to.
Example: I’m on the lemmy.blahaj.zone instance. I’m not subscribed to !196@lemmy.world, but someone on lemmy.blahaj.zone IS, thus it shows up in my All feed:
lemmy.directory is trying to solve this by subscribing to as many communities as they can find, serving as an “/r/All” for Lemmy as a whole. But you can’t make an account there, so the idea is you browse the directory and subscribe to any communities you like, thus making them available to other users on your instance.
Thanks for the explainer! Looks like I was just confused about how the communities were presented. Not showing the server name alongside the community name made me think that the community was hosted locally
The other thing that can be confusing is that community names are not unique across instances. So, in my example, there is a “196” community on lemmy.world- https://lemmy.world/c/196- which is why it shows me the server name, but someone else has also created a 196 community on my instance, https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196, which does NOT show the server name because it’s local:
These two “196” communities are completely discrete and have no interaction or shared content between them. Although a multireddit-like feature has been requested, so you could at least create a single feed containing both of these communities if that gets implemented.
Cool! Thank you for the explanation. How do users subscribe to instances? Is that done through the web interface?
Edit: I think I may have done it… Thank you to everyone for writing all these guides!
The easiest way is to copy the full url of the community- e.g., https://lemmy.world/c/196, and paste it into your search bar. Once you click on it, you will still be on your instance, but viewing the remote community, where you can subscribe from the sidebar.
Just a note- if you are searching for a remote community and you see that it has 0 subscribers (in the search results), that means no one on YOUR instance has subbed yet. If you subscribe, those posts will start showing up in All for everyone on your instance.
Thanks!
This is how Mastodon works as well.
Hmm whenever I switch my feeds to “all posts” I’m pretty sure I can see everything on Mlem. I’m honestly not sure what the issue could be that makes you not able to see everything since it’s all pretty new to me too.
Mine seems to be showing posts from other instances, but I’m not sure what I did to achieve this. Have you, while logged into your local instance, subscribed to communities on another instance yet? Maybe that has something to do with it.
All it takes is one person on your instance to search for a community on another and from then on your instance will track it and show in all. Only an admin could remove it after that single user triggers the search. The more users on your instance the more likely it is that at one searched for something else.
This is confusing me as well. Where do I go for a search to uncover new sub whatever they are called and then how do I change to only see posts from that sub? Using Mlem as well and as far as it goes it seems to be ok, just missing the filter and search options for now.
It’s the downside of federation. It would be very hard to implement and come at humongous costs/traffic.
