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Dave

I'm noticing a much smaller list of communities here (self.support)

submitted 1 year ago by Whitt to c/support

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Hello, When I go to communities and list all, I can only see two pages of communities. If I search for a community I know about there's a good chance it does not show until I go to https://lemmy.nz/c/group@instance

Once I do that I can subscribe to the community and it's behaving normally.

Is this an effect of it being federated?

Thanks

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[–] Dave 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is normal (as far as I know).

Lemmy federates one community at a time. If you are the first person to search for the community, it will say there are no results. If you wait about 5-10 seconds, it often will pop up. Or once you refresh the page you can search and find it. I presume this is just the time needed to contact the other server and download whatever is needed.

As the instance is still small, and as other instances are rapidly growing and adding new communities, you'll likely often find you are the first person to add the community. But once it's added, it's now federated with us and so future searches (by anyone on this instance) should be quick.

Edit to add: I believe federation can only be triggered by a logged in user, so if you search while logged out then it won't attempt to federate.

[–] torturedllama 3 points 1 year ago

Ah, this explains it. I figured it was something to do with federation, and this still being a small server. Good to hear it will fix itself eventually.

[–] SpiderPig2000 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just to add some anecdotal information to the discussion already in this post.

I've been trying to sub to !futurology@lemmy.ml since I created my account early yesterday and it's just shown up a few minutes ago in a search.

Anyway, thank you @Dave@lemmy.nz for starting this instance up.

Edit: added link to !futurology@lemmy.ml

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

My pleasure! None of the communities I've searched for have taken longer than about 15 seconds to show up, and that includes many on lemmy.ml. However, I know their server is getting smashed by new users, so it may have been a problem with their server at the time. I put the URL or community name in the search, and it eventually shows up after a decent amount of time sitting looking like it's doing nothing and saying "No results".

As far as I'm aware our server hasn't had any issues. There are 26 people online right now as shown on the sidebar on the main page, and the server's CPU is at about 10% (the larger servers find the CPU to be the bottleneck). So it was probably them, not us.

[–] SpiderPig2000 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah mate. Your take on it sounds about right with a dash of lesser used communities are less prioritised... IDK, just making things up at this point.

LOL, This is starting to feel a bit like the the days of direct dial-up BBSs, where I'm in a chat with the sysop. Love it :D

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

I don't think smaller communities are less prioritised, but on larger communities it's much more likely someone else has searched it up first so it's already federated with the server.

If you want more tech stuff, go join the Instance Admin chat on Matrix. All the highs and lows and everything in between. It's a public room so anyone can join: https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-space:matrix.org

[–] SpiderPig2000 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t think smaller communities are less prioritised, but on larger communities it’s much more likely some I else has searched it up first so it’s already federated with the server.

Fair enough, It's just a half baked supposition I came to after some larger non-federatred communities showed up almost instantly and a few others took more of time.

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

linux@lemmy.ml and xbox@lemmy.ml are two examples.

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

And more interesting, parenting@lemmy.ml exists at lemmy.ml, however even trying to go directly to the community on this instance fails.

[–] Dave 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I believe searching is required. You can't just skip to https://lemmy.nz/c/parenting@lemmy.ml

However, once one (logged in) user from lemmy.nz has searched for it by URL or as !parenting@lemmy.ml, then you can visit that URL.

I've just searched for this community and it's now showing fine, but when I first searched it had the pause on "No results" like it hadn't federated yet. You should be able to join it now no problem.

[–] Whitt 2 points 1 year ago

That does make sense, thanks for having a look.

[–] z2k_ 2 points 1 year ago

I feel like as lemmy matures, this is a process that a client app can automate. eg. If given a lemmy community url check if it exists, if it does then search for it on the users intance, then retry periodically until it's available.