tl:dr at the end.
I am one of the many people that were active in Reddit but I am also one of the ones that is going to delete their Reddit account on the 12th of June and move to Lemmy(Fediverse) full time.
I have encountered a specific issue though which I am not sure how to solve.
I wanted to create the equivalent community of /r/greece here, but I can see that the /c/greece is already existent but moderated by a user that is now banned, so that community is in limbo. People recommended 2 things:
- Request the community in !community_requests@lemmy.ml
- Create a new
/c/greececommunity in another instance.
I have encountered an issue with both of these solutions.
For the 1st solution, I created a request post 2 days ago which went unanswered(either accepted/declined) while other posts after and before mine, have been answered/resolved. I can understand there has been an increase in users and Dessalines can’t administrate/moderate everything on their own but I can see that there are multiple Admins in lemmy.ml and I believe they should be doing something or step down and appoint other people there that want to do it. I have since, recreated the same request post in hopes that I can get the community and bring it to fruition.
For the 2nd solution, I had created the /c/greece community in @lemmy.world but the problem is, that by going there I cannot find any community using the search functionality. I have 2 windows open, one logged into lemmy.ml and one in lemmy.world and when searching the same term, lemmy.world brings massively fewer results for communities so even if I wanted to use my account on lemmy.world I would have to use another instance to even FIND new communities. I am not sure why the reduced number of results but I guess there is an admin setting there that allows for federation with fewer instances.
TL:DR Why is the searching for communities so vastly different between instances and how can users overcome it to discover new communities?
Remote communities are only indexed/listed on an instance when it was fetched before (i.e. enter the URL to the community in the search bar). Until then the server does not know about the existence of a community.
A possible solution to this are third pary applications that crawl and index all possible instances. One such an application is https://browse.feddit.de
When a server federates with another it should just get a list of all it’s communities and sync that list periodically so when you search you can actually see it. Idk why they’d do it differently, making it only look for it when you specifically look for it by name is just backwards and wierd. I guess it could save on bandwidth but how much realistically? Honestly I like Lemmy but holy shit the way some things are done is just odd. I mean I’m not a developer but as a user some things just seem like “how can we make this more confusing and worse for the user?”
I do not know the technical details but it might be that this comes from ActivityPub (the protocol used for communication between servers). Also the way it is now it is easier to host small instances. If all communities from all across the fediverse were fetched, the storage requirements would skyrocket. This way you would only fetch/store communities you are actually interested in.
As suggested by @sunaurus@lemm.ee and @monobot@lemmy.ml, a possible solution would be including a central index (like the one mentioned in my previous post) in apps and browse communities there, and then only fetch it when someone accesses it there. One could argue that this would be against the decentralised philosophy but since nothing stops you from the “old way” it could be a viable compromise IMO.
That’s a great application, but it would be ideal if such functionality was available within Lemmy itself
Yep, and in applications.
How does one fetch a remote community?
While using anonymous mode on Jerboa I could see liminalspaces@lemmy.ml, now I just created an account and can’t find liminalspaces anymore. That’s because nobody on sh.itjust.works fetched the community yet, right?
Exactly! Fetching the communities does not work from Jerboa yet. For now you have to do this from the website.
Thank you, now I’m able to visit it from the app too :)
Yeah, seems like you pretty much have to know which instance the community is on. Which will be very hard for regular users, there would also be room for multiple communities of the same name on different instances.
So you’d pretty much have to always refer to your community by it’s full address including instance name to make sure it can be found.
