this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Lemmy.nz Support

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Having trouble finding communities? Here's some tips. (self.support)
submitted 1 year ago by 2dollarsim to c/support
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I just joined the NZ lemmy here, because Lemmy.world was slow. This instance is much faster for me, but when searching for communities, many that I was subscribed to with my lemmyworld account didn't show in the search results.

I fixed this by manually finding it in the address bar, like this:

https://lemmy.nz/c/linux@lemmy.world

And this will work for all communities, just replacing the appropriate parts:

https://lemmy.nz/c/[communityname]@[instancename]

Then you can subscribe and it will show in your 'Subscribed to communities' on the main page. (sometimes I have to refresh for all to show up).

This might be a known issue at the moment, but I've only been on Lemmy for like 3 days so idk

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[–] Mishmash2000 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, it's kinda crazy that you can start in a small instance like this but can view and comment / post to other much larger instances but I think it only pulls over each one as you sub to it (if you're the first to do so from your instance) and even then only from that point in time onwards? Not 100% sure about this but it could explain the delay/refresh required.

But then you can also sub to kbin.social which isn't even Lemmy. And somehow you can comment from Mastodon to Lemmy which isn't even the same type of service / link aggrigator. It's a lot, but it's pretty cool learning how it all works.

[–] Dave 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

but I think it only pulls over each one as you sub to it (if you’re the first to do so from your instance) and even then only from that point in time onwards?

Honestly I'm just not sure about this. People say this but then I've seen it pull over posts from years ago when we've only existed a month so there must be more to it.

But then you can also sub to kbin.social which isn’t even Lemmy. And somehow you can comment from Mastodon to Lemmy which isn’t even the same type of service / link aggrigator. It’s a lot, but it’s pretty cool learning how it all works.

Magic! Nah, it's just that everything is using ActivityPub, which is a protocol not a site (think how for email, there is a protocol that makes it work (actually a few), and then you have a way to access that (gmail.com, Outlook application, etc). I can access the same emails whether I log in to Gmail.com or use an email application like Outlook. And then I can send emails to people who aren't even on my server, say yahoo.com. And then sites like Github send you an email about a comment, and you can reply to the email and suddenly it's on the website! (facebook used to do this too).

So it's just that there is one technology behind the scenes, and different people are building Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc to use that technology for sharing the data, and then displaying it in different ways that suit what they are trying to do.

[–] Mishmash2000 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly I’m just not sure about this. People say this but then I’ve seen it pull over posts from years ago when we’ve only existed a month so there must be more to it.

Okay, so maybe not? I just noticed that when I first sub the community looks empty. Next time I go back there's a few posts but I didn't acctually pay attention to whether they're new or old content, I just assumed I was seeing new content from the point when I subbed as that's what I read happened. Maybe it also pulls in active posts so if someone comments or upvotes an older post it gets pulled across?

Magic! Nah, it’s just that everything is using ActivityPub

It does feel pretty magic when you're not used to it. I was replying to a kbin post from lemmy.nz as easily as if it were a lemmy post and then I copied the direct link into Mastodon and replied a couple more times then went to kbin.social and it was all there! You've reminded me of when I first used twitter and replied to tweets from my non smart phone using SMS :-) I thought that was pretty cool too. I guess I'm easily impressed :-)

[–] Dave 2 points 1 year ago

Okay, so maybe not?

I have no idea, because I also don't think it pulls all posts from before anyone subscribed. Maybe it's got criteria?

I guess I’m easily impressed :-)

Oh it is impressive, honestly it's really cool.

[–] sik0fewl@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can search for communities across many instances at https://browse.feddit.de/.

However, it looks like it just indexes Lemmy and not kbin.

[–] Dave 2 points 1 year ago

There's also https://lemmyverse.net/communities which is listed in the FAQ

Though I think the OP is about having trouble finding communities you already know about, where as the community browser is for finding new ones.

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm having a bit of difficulty with this.

Does it mean I need to know exactly where a community is hosted to be able to search it up?

I.e., I now know there is an NBA community on Lemmy.world, but when I was searching for "nba" communities, it wasn't coming up?

[–] Dave 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm, when I go to the search, type NBA, choose "communities" in the filter for what to search for, then hit search, I get two communities. One is the one I think you're looking for, https://lemmy.nz/c/nba@lemmy.world

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Actually I think I was mistaken. I think I was a bit thrown off by the fact that the NBA community has 2 subscribers, and so I dismissed it.

[–] Dave 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's certainly confusing! It's saying that there are two subscribers from lemmy.nz. If you go to the original URL at https://lemmy.world/c/nba then you'll see 2,000 subscribers.

If you look at the average daily users on https://lemmy.nz/c/nba@lemmy.world you'll see this is higher, but you'll also see it's not as high as visiting the original URL at lemmy.world. I have no idea why it's all over the place but Lemmy is still young so eventually we should see things like this tidied up.

As someone else has mentioned, often it's easiest to use a third party community browser such as this one: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=NBA

That will show you the NBA community. At the top right of the page, click the house to set your home instance. Enter "lemmy.nz". Now the links to the communities will take you to the lemmy.nz page where you can subscribe.

[–] luthis 4 points 1 year ago

dude this is SO HELPFUL

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Interesting. Thank you for clearing that up!

Ahh that community browser is so helpful. Really makes it a lot easier :)

Thanks for the detailed breakdown. Really appreciate the help in getting started out.

[–] Dave 2 points 1 year ago

You're welcome! I literally just learnt about the home instance setting while writing the comment to you, so really it should be me thanking you 😆

[–] benji1304 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is so helpful.

I've set my home community to lemmy.nz but when I open a community, I still cannot subscribe?

edit: If i click Create Post, then go back the Subscribe link now works and I get Subscribe Pending

[–] Dave 1 points 1 year ago

Specifically with lemmy.ml, a lot of people from many instances are having trouble with pending subscribe requests.

I think it's because lemmy.ml is having trouble with so many users, the site is overloaded. You may just need to wait for it to eventually resolve.

[–] Dave 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah stuff like this is not the best experience at the moment. One thing to be careful of is that if you try to visit the URL directly, e.g. https://lemmy.nz/c/linux@lemmy.world, then it will not work if someone from lemmy.nz has not already searched for the community to trigger the federation.

Officially you should search for the community like so: !linux@lemmy.world

This works for me when searching in the search box, but there is a weird thing where Lemmy will say "no results" then a couple of seconds later it will show up. If you're the first person searching, it can be 5-10 seconds (maybe longer if the other instance is under heavy load).

The community search result is also just one thin line, so can be hard to see if you get post results as well which are a lot taller. You can change the filter to only search for communities, but there was previously a bug where if you were the first person to search for that community then it wouldn't show up if you filtered by communities, only if you set it to All. Not sure if that's fixed yet.

[–] z2k_ 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’ve actually noticed better results if you search for the url instead of the !community-name.

ie. search for “https://lemmy.world/c/linux”

Edit: Bonus is that it also works for searching kbin magazines.

You can search: “https://fedia.io/m/firefox” for example.