Continuation of my last federation update post with some updated info
Hexbear
After we got removed from the hexbear allowlist I talked with one of their admins about it. Theyre running a poll currently for their users to determine if they want to refederate or not with opinion in that poll seeming to be mostly in favor
It is very likely we will be federating with Hexbear again. However, things such as political communities will be hidden from our feeds by default meaning you wont see those posts unless you explicitly subscribe to those communities (so if youre just browsing the all feed you wont see any of them)
In terms of comments made in other instances that aren't hexbear or programming.dev (e.g. lemm.ee) that is up to the admins of those communities to handle (and if an instance has defederated from hexbear such as lemmy.world threads in their instance will have no hexbear members on them)
If you participate in the hexbear instance make sure to follow their code of conduct and dont participate in communities that are labelled as being for hexbear members only (I should be hiding any that exist)
If theres a community I missed that should be hidden reach out to me with it and ill hide it. Hidden communities will show up with no posts when you look at them without subscribing
And to leave off this update ill give you guys a couple hexbear communities that might be relevant to you once federation is up again
https://hexbear.net/c/gamedev https://hexbear.net/c/technology https://hexbear.net/c/games
~~Well this is bad news for me or anyone else using RSS readers to subscribe to communities vs on the platform. Many of us subscribe to community RSS feeds in our RSS readers—not on the Lemmy platform—and get updates that way. This will prevent us from doing that now. ~~
EDIT: The issue doesn't have anything to do with this announcement, but an issue with how "hidden" communities work on Lemmy.
RSS feeds arent affected by this, hidden communities being hidden is handled by the UI and things that dont take that into account still see posts as normal
If i click through to a hidden community (to which I'm not subscribed) from within my RSS reader, will the posts show?
Because the sentence I pointed out makes it seem like the posts wont show up, since I'm not technically subscribed to the community on programming.dev.
From when I tested it rss feeds still gave the exact same posts ignoring the fact communities were hidden (since rss feeds arent tied to what happens on the site at all). What rss reader are you using, I can check
It's not the rss reader. The rss reader just navigates to the community link.
If I navigate to a hidden community (without having subscribed to it), will all the posts in that community show in the view? Or do I have to subscribe to the community in order to see the posts?
Ok I might be semi misunderstanding what your rss reader does by what youre saying but ill go through everything that happens with this feature
For anything relating to rss readers im using fluent reader as that is what I use
Typical Behaviour (In P.D)
When someone navigates to a community in programming.dev and the community is hidden they are shown this
With the no posts text appearing on the left but the stats on the right having posts
Then when they subscribe to that community they are shown this
With all of the posts now appearing
RSS Feed behaviour
When you look at a community page initially (either from manually going to it or getting sent to it by some other thing) you get the same view as in the default behaviour
if you then right click on the rss symbol beside the post sort dropdown and click copy link you get a link to the rss feed for that community
If you then add that link to your reader it will show posts in it
In terms of getting to the content, direct links to posts still work while the community is hidden
if your rss reader just navigates to the community link and doesnt do anything else no posts will show no. You would need to subscribe within the reader that case (although all of them should support the rss post feed)
Thanks for the detailed explanation. This helps. I think this is just my misunderstanding of how "hidden" communities work. I always thought that when a community is hidden, its posts just won't show up in the Local/All/etc timelines. I wasn't aware that community posts are hidden when you navigate to the community directly.
I use the Lemmy RSS feeds from openrss.org, which are different (and a little more robust) than the RSS feeds offered on the Lemmy instance. Some of the rss content has embedded links that go directly to a Lemmy community URL. So if I'm not subscribed to a hidden community and navigate to it, it'll just show an empty page of posts, similar to your screenshot above.
So appears that this isn't a problem with the RSS reader, but this behavior of a hidden community can surprise a person when they navigate to one and see no posts.
Yeah its not ideal but its due to this being a feature programmed in the lemmy backend but not the lemmy frontend (I had to manually do http calls to get things hidden). In the new frontend im making for the instance itll be much more apparent that a community is hidden rather than just having no posts
Ill see if I can get it working better with various aspects like that as well while developing
Ok cool. No worries. Thanks for helping me understand. 👍
Why not do both?