- feddit has a good community browser
- because all the instances are federated, they don’t download information from another instance until it is necessary (to save on bandwidth and server space)
- instances become linked when a user from one instance subscribes to a community/magazine on another instance or when they try searching for content on another instance
- this is also why there’s a delay when searching “All”, gotta give the instance a little bit to go out and start grabbing content – and this is why searches come back with nothing but if you just wait, suddenly it starts populating half a minute later
- you can see which instances your instance is already linked to (and which instances your instance is blocking) by adding
/instances
to the end of your instance’s url – ex. lemmy.world/instances
- instances become linked when a user from one instance subscribes to a community/magazine on another instance or when they try searching for content on another instance
No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
There were several ways to search in the past weeks, it got simplified with the 0.18 update (lemmy users can check their version at the very bottom).
This means the tipps you can find from previous week and before are a bit outdated (although not completely wrong). I was confused then, and am still in the process of learning.
For now, for lemmy users, the best way (AFAIK) seems to be to search for the full community URL, like https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions
I still think it works better when not searching for 'Communities', but for 'All', but maybe my habits aren't updated yet.
A general technical insight about federation: New communities do not make themselves known to all federated instances. For each instance, one user has to 'discover' them first. This first lookup will be slower (a few seconds) and display as 'No Result', then switch to the result.
This means users from small instances and/or users who search for new or small communities have a chance to run into this issue.
As such, I wouldn't trust the in-built search function too much, but use external tools to see what is out there. Once you know a community exists, you know when to ignore the 'No Results' message and wait longer, or ask for help.
Tools I know:
- https://lemmyverse.net/communities
- https://browse.toast.ooo/communities
- https://browse.feddit.de/
- https://lemmies.blue42.net/
- https://sub.rehab/
Once you are the first subscriber from your instance to a remote community, you also don't get the full history of posts and comments right away, but something like 20 only. So your logged in view (relative, such as /c/nostupidquestions) may show much less content than the native view (first link, full community URL).
One more thing to understand: The development is active and ongoing. Not only did many users join, but also some developers.
Notifying @Glide@lemmy.ca. @ryan@the.coolest.zone, maybe checking federation with https://fba.ryona.agency/ can help?
PS: We should use the wiki much more for these things. This would also allow the answers (if they link to the wiki) to remain updated, instead of outdated answers in older comments.
Posting because I want to know the same thing.
Basically, look at kbin, and also look at lemmyverse.
An instance only knows about communities someone has told it about, that is, searched for them in the @name@instan.ce
format.
Once the first person has done that, the instance then knows about that magazine/community, and it will show up in search in the future.
Piggybacking on myself. I can't figure out how to subscribe to one of the other communities. One says to paste "!cfb@fanaticus.social" into my instance's serach field, but when I do that, I get a result that says "empty."
To piggyback on this - this reply itself did not make it to my instance. I needed to search for it specifically using the "copy link to fediverse" and paste it in to my search box to consume this top-level reply. Here is a great example of how replies can be missed across instances.
I do see that from feddit.online this magazine is not being found. I am unsure why. I know that, at some point, some changes were made to lemmy to block incoming federation from kbin instances unless that is specifically removed by lemmy instance admins (e.g. you might reply or post and it never makes it to the actual lemmy instance), but that should not affect federating out to my understanding.
There are a few ways. People have set up special websites to index servers and communities:
Lemmy Explorer filters through names and descriptions: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
and there's also still Lemmy Community Browser which is a little older: https://browse.feddit.de/
Community promotion and discovery, there's a lot:
community promo https://lemmy.ca/c/communitypromo
find a community !findacommunity@lemmy.ml
wow this Lemmy exists! https://lemmy.ca/c/wowthislemmyexists
a few more search sites turn up with this filter in Lemmy Explorer: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=find+communities
Generally, your home server will know a commuity's existance only after someone has searched for it. I don't know if this has already been fixed, but the advice has been to enter the whole URL of a community into the search bar in order to get it known to your server instance. And once you follow the link in the search result it should start to syncronise, which may take some seconds in the beginning.
ping: @Glide@lemmy.ca