As I am trying to spread awareness of our instance and communities to others, I am running into issues with other instance users being unable to find certain communities. Example:
While I am able to search communities on their instance just fine from fanaticus.social (in this case, lemmy.one), they are unable to find us and I am also unable to find some of our communities when I use the lemmy.one search function. @headie_sage I don’t know if you have more knowledge in how to resolve this.
There are no results for our Nationals community.
There is not a result for our NFL community, just one of my posts to !nfl@lemmy.ml.
The !cfb@fanaticus.social community does appear in the results.
Hmm…I’m not sure what the issue is. Since you first brought this up I’ve:
In the admin chat, others have explained that (initial) searching is disabled for anonymous users. From my understanding, the “initial search” is more like discovery. It’s when a user on their home instance searches for a community on a foreign instance. That search usually has some significant latency as it’s pulling not just the stats and info but also some of the recent posts (but not comments).
The admins are speculating that an anonymous search returning results (e.g. !baseball@fanaticus.social on lemmy.world, would indicate that a local lemmy.world user had already done that initial search.
Good info, I appreciate all of this. It did cross my mind that anonymous searching might not be enough to trigger federation, especially for a newer community on a different instance. I’ll keep an eye out for similar issues and I might try to set up an account on a couple different instances to see if I can get more of these communities to federate properly. Thanks as always!
Hey just wanted to let you know that a nice lemmy.world user ran some tests for me and confirmed that he had to execute a full url search and subscribe in order for a foreign community (on fanaticus) to show up in the simplified search (both
!community@instance.tldand justcommunity).It looks like it’s an initial subcription by someone on their home server kicks off the initial federation job.