So, I was curious and realized that for whatever reason, I can’t see my own community !nier@lemm.ee on lemmy.ml or Blahaj Zone. I can see it if I try using lemmy.world, but not the others. My comments at least show up.
Is this a bug with the federation difficulties or is it one of those problems of being defederated?
Some examples of my profile. Posts should have more than just the game development one I made since I’ve done posts to the community made on this instance.
https://lemmy.world/u/Louise@lemm.ee?page=1&sort=New&view=Overview
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/Louise@lemm.ee?page=1&sort=New&view=Overview
Did you include the exclamation point (!) in the search bar? Like exactly: !loveisland@lemmy.fmhy.ml
Ah, yes that works, but not from wefwef , only on the web. But now I’ve searched it I can find it normally.
So when I perform a normal search for communities it’s only searching those that have been “indexed” by fmhy - and basically my community is completely invisible to other instances unless they specifically search for it?
Correct. The way federation works (as it was explained to me) is that just creating a community does not by itself propagate that community to all federated instances. Most likely, this is a measure against overloading all servers by spam-creating instances. It can still be found by that full-name search with exclamation mark. As soon as anyone on your instance subscribes to that community, it will connect to that instance and should be searchable normally from others on it and posts made in that community should now populate the All feed on that instance etc.
Also I think you’re right about the exclamation point search not working on WefWef, should probably notify the developer.
Basically it’ll get indexed the first time Someone from your instance searches for it with the „!“
In general lemmyverse.net is the best way of finding communities right now
Thank you, that makes sense - I do feel like there should be the option to search unfederated communities without having to know the explicit name & instance, but maybe I’m wrong :-)
I’ve opened a feature request with wefwef dev, thanks for explaining how things work round here !
Yeah discoverability could definitely use some work. Lemmyverse.net is still the best way to find communities I think but Search-Lemmy.com was just launched too. Hopefully third party apps can integrate those in the future which should help.