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PSA: How to link users & communities so it doesn't break for other instances
(lemmy.reckless.dev)
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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The only problem is that if your instance doesn't know about that community yet, it'll just 404, you still have to search for it first because visiting the link doesn't make your instance fetch the community yet.
This should still be the default behavior when it autofills a community link though, I hope they make this change ๐
Seeing the rampant confusion this causes when trying to subscribe to remote communities makes me wonder if the full community list could be shipped on initial federation, and community creation/change events could be eagerly shipped network-wide.
I get that in federated/peer-based systems you need to be choosy about eagerly propagating messages network-wide, but the list of extant communities seems like it would be fairly small even on a big server. Like hundreds would be common, and tens of thousands of communities on a big server could still compress down to a message-size of a few KB. Having the
/communities/search and all-communities page do something useful from the moment of federation seems like it would reduce a lot of confusion.Or fetch it when a link is followed for the first time.