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.
     

Ultimately, my goal is to subscribe to communities from the instance I’m logged into but can’t find by searching All from there, for whatever reason. How do I do that?

  • darkfoe@lemmy.serverfail.party
    3·
    2 years ago

    For a remote community to show up on all, someone on the instance has to be subbed to it.

    So, if you type !community@server.com in the search you’ll see it, and be able to sub as the first person on your instance. Once done then it’ll show up on all to other users.

    Sometimes takes a few seconds after you hit “search” for it to pop up. Has to fetch content and process it, etc so give it about ten seconds and it’ll be done.

    Exception to this: if your instance blocks server.com, then you won’t be able to sub to communities on it. Most instances don’t block much though

    • DarraignTheSane@lemmy.oneOP
      2·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, mostly I’m searching from / logged into lemmy.one, which as far as I know doesn’t block anything. Trying to find communities on midwest.social for example, and even with the !community@midwest.social syntax it doesn’t seem to find them. “Communities > All” is selected up top. Not sure if it’s something I’m doing wrong or what.

      • qantravon@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        I’m having the same problem, searches for any communities not on my local instance (with a few exceptions from lemmy.ml and beehaw) turn up zero results, even with the ! token.

        A workaround someone mentioned on another thread was to just directly go to a the address with the following format:

        https://home.server/c/community@community.server

        This does seem to mostly work (I’m sometimes getting 404 errors when I try), but I’ve had issues with some where I’m only getting a few posts when viewing from my home server.