How does the search function work and why does it sometimes not work from different instances when searching All?

In other words -

  • I search for a community that exists on Lemmy instance A (e.g. midwest.social) from Lemmy instance B (e.g. lemmy.ml) and it finds it.
  • I search for that same community from Lemmy instance C (e.g. lemmy.one), and it doesn’t find it.
  • Lemmy instance A, B, and C are all connected / federated.
  • PriorProject@lemmy.world
    7·
    2 years ago

    I encountered this while trying to set up my community subscriptions on lemmy.world, which is a very new server and had few people subscribing to remote communities when I joined. Here’s my comment outlining the behavior:

    https://lemmy.world/comment/1692

    Summarizing:

    • Federating with a remote instance does NOT seem to add all it’s communities to your local instance’s list. Immediately after federation, most communities will be missing from /communities/ on the local instance, and keyword searches on the local instance for the community will return no results.
    • Searching for a community using its url or bang-prefixed-id causes the local instance to “discover” that particular remote community. It now shows up in /communities and keyword searches.

    Also, as others have mentioned, there’s https://browse.feddit.de/ for a distributed community search, though it seems to take some time for new communities to show up there. As an established instance, I also find lemmy.ml’s community search useful for discovering communities even though that’s not where my account is. “Most” big communities have been added to it’s list by someone organically searching for them by bang-id or url.

  • derek@bbs.vault48.org
    5·
    2 years ago

    Because every instance fetches other instance’s communities when you first type that name in a search.

    It means, when you search for “!community@midwest.social” (mind “!” at the begining), you should reload page after some time and search again. In that period your instance will fetch it from midwest.social and show in community search.

  • Rentlar@beehaw.org
    3·
    2 years ago

    To add to the other answers, when you search for the community that isn’t registered yet, it will take 10 seconds or so for it to appear in the search, slower than everything else. You also have to type out the full name to register it.

  • Kichae@kbin.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    I’m not 100% certain yet how federation works with lemmy, but I’m assuming it works similar to how it works on Mastodon and Calckey, only with group actors.

    In that case, servers don’t share all of their content with each other wholesale. Someone on your instance would need to already be subscribed to a community on another server in order for it to receive content from it, or to even know it exists.

    In order for people to see content from actors (ie people or groups) that aren’t currently being followed by someone on their server, actors they do follow need to boost that unshared content. And I’m not sure how that works on Lemmy.

    To subscribe to communities that aren’t currently being shared with your server, go to their home server, find the community there, get the community’s URL, and then enter that into the search bar on your instance.

    • RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml
      2·
      2 years ago

      I’m assuming “Ask Lemmy” is like “Ask Reddit” where there is supposed to be an implied concept that you mean “Ask Lemmy Community”, and the word “Community” isn’t explicit.

      Right now the community description on the right sidebar says “A loosely moderated place to ask open ended questions”… it may be beneficial to make that more verbose: “A loosely moderated place to ask open ended questions to the Lemmy community of users”. Not to say newcomers will read that ;)