I am trying to find an additional home base lemmy that I jive with that is a bit smaller and less likely to get crushed. While exploring I have found disparities in which foreign communities I can search for and find despite all being in the federated instance list. Most of the time I can’t find the community I know exists, or I do find and the User count is so wildly off that I question if I have found the correct one(I have).
It seems to me that the communities@foreignInstance are irregularly/periodically updated into a local cache. If I am correct can Lemmy servers at least expose ‘Last Update time’, ‘Next Update time’ and just general mean time between updates?
Lemmy instances only know about communities in other instances until a user searched for it, so a bigger instance like lemmy.ml is more likely to already have each community you search for.
But an instance like mine won’t have them unless I manually search for them to be imported.And also, in my instance I won’t be getting updates from that community to see in the “all” feed until I subscribe, so my “subscriptions” will be the same as “all”.
Still learning, so take with salt.
Someone has to be the first to discover a community. Let’s say we’re looking for https://lemmy.example/c/community a.k.a. community@lemmy.example
You can discover it by prefixing a bang: !community@lemmy.example
Oddly enough, it also sometimes helped me to search for ‘All’, not specifically for ‘Communities’, in order to discover communities.
Sometimes all of that did not work, but I could visit the community with a manually constructed link. Say my home instance is home.instance, then the link would be: https://home.instance/c/community@lemmy.example
I try all of these and eventually succeed. Sometimes it takes up to 1 day though. I guess and hope that’s due to the load caused by the reddit migration.
Probably what’s happening is your instance is still doing the initial import of the community.
When someone searches for a community for the first time the instance also fetches 20 posts (I’m guessing the most recent ones).
Because of this the search result for the first time will not contain the community, after a few minutes it will appear.
One thing is for sure, you need to use the correct format to denote a community and also do it in the search page.
So with vommunities the only instance that has a full count of all subs is the host. As an example if i want to know an accurate count of how many people subscribe to !technology@lemmy.ml i need to open lemmy.ml, click communities, and choose technology. The sub count on any other instance for that community will only show how many on that server are subscribed. To put this in real terms lemmy.ml says its technology community has 14.7k subs. Now my instance monero.town says that same community has 3 subscribers. That only means that 3 people from monero.town sub to !technology@lemmy.ml
Hope that makes sense
This needs to be fixed, IMO.
It’s not at all obvious to newcomers. If you signed up on a smaller server (as you’re advised to do), it makes it look like there’s not much going on on Lemmy. It also makes it harder to find active communities and discourages participation.
So now everyone and their dog is building Lemmy community explorers. This functionality should be baked into Lemmy itself, and available on every instance, so you can just browse and search all communities (seeing the true community sizes) and simply click join and be done. No confusing redirection to other instances, or having to copy and paste weird snippets of text into search boxes in other tabs.