this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Not able to see/subscribe to some communities from here? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Orygin@sh.itjust.works to c/main@sh.itjust.works
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Hello,

I have subscribed to a few communities already (some on other instances, like lemmy.ml ou beehaw), but some communities cannot be accessed from here, even tough other communities from the same instance are available.

For example, I cannot access !golang@lemmy.ml from here, even though I can access other communities from lemmy.ml here, and the community is accessible from other instances (like feddit.de: https://feddit.de/c/golang@lemmy.ml). I only get a 404 error: https://sh.itjust.works/c/golang@lemmy.ml

Is there any reason why? Maybe related to load issues @lemmy.ml?

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[–] Orygin@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Ok, figured it out.

For those in similar cases, you MUST first search the community in the search bar here. Searching !golang@lemmy.ml only returned this thread initially, but after a few seconds the community appears in the search results.

From there, the community will sync here and will be visible here, with new posts appearing over time (afaik it doesn't sync existing posts, only new ones).

Hope this clears up the process for the next persons in my position :)

[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sounds like you're sorted, but for more context check this post out: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827

TLDR:

  • The community list syncs "lazily", only adding a community when a user tries to interact with it.
  • So at any given time, your instance knows about the list of communities that you and other users on that instance have searched for.
  • Communities in the list can be easily subbed.
  • Missing communities have to be "taught" to the instance with a very precise search.
  • This makes community discovery frustrating. There are some external community discovery resources, life gets a lot better when you use them... but you still have to do the dance about "teaching" your instance about a a new community when you're the first to find it.
[–] Weird_With_A_Beard@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would be nice if this was configurable. Or maybe someone enterprising can write a script to do some searching now, while our usage is low, and the number of external communities is also low.

I know as things start to get really high usage, and the number of Lemmy instances grows, and communities per instance grow, that it might be untenable. But at least for this early onboarding process where we expect a lot of new users, it would be cool to give them a soft landing experience

[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I don't have a link handy, but I've heard the devs are thinking about ways to make this better.

I suspect the initial impetus for this scheme was to prevent overloading the federated network with eager replication of community announcements that no one cared about or subscribed to. But the result is that community discovery is just... Really bad. I think that there's broad agreement that this is one of the most critical onboarding and usability issues and after a wave of performance stuff and work to keep the lights on for a MUCH bigger userbase that we'll see attention directed at improving community discovery.

[–] sauce@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I tried this with !motogp@lemmy.world and it never returns, I’m guessing Lemmy.world isn’t federated yet?

[–] supro47@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

More federated communities were showing up for me last night vs today. I’m thinking it’s a lot of new users bogging both ends down. There’s a lot of growing pains, but I think things should be sorted out eventually. No one was really ready for all of Reddit to onboard

[–] Orygin@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It may not appear in search, but it is viewable here: https://sh.itjust.works/c/motogp@lemmy.world

[–] sauce@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Interesting, got a 404 last time I tried that. Thanks!

[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I find that searching by community string never actually returns any results. It's essential to make the search in order to add the community to the communities list, but you don't find anything useful that way.

But AFTER doing the community string search, I can do a keyword search and it works. So each of these searches is from the communities page on the instance where you have your account...

  1. Search motogp, get no results because the community isn't known to your local instance.
  2. Search [!motogp@lemmy.world](/c/motogp@lemmy.world), get no results... because... I dunno. Because we can't have nice things is why.
  3. Search motogp again and it works because now the community is known to your instance.

I though the blahaj post was giving this same advice, but their steps are subtly different. Try the above if the sticky posts advice doesn't get it done for you.

Edit: I just tried the blahaj instructions and they DO work for me. Searching the bang-prefixed community with the "type" constrained to "communities" (or anything other than all) returns nothing. But searching the bang-prefixed community string with types set to "all" does return the community. No idea why it doesn't get returned when constrained to communities, seems like a bug.

[–] Klaymore@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I found that just searching for the URL works as well (as long as type is set to all)

[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I just learned that today when making this comment. For the longest time it never occurred to me to set it to all... since.. like... I'm definitely searching for a community. But lemmy disagrees I guess.

[–] Klaymore@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

yeah it took me a while to even register that those buttons were important lol. Hopefully it can get polished up a bit

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

It could be that the instance was down/overloaded. For example, I have been trying to connect to selfrepair@lemmy.ml today, but lemmy.ml is down. I can see and comment on existing posts from lemmy.ml though, so I'm interested to see how that works once it's back on-line (i.e. will it eventually show up?).

Good luck, maybe try again later! FWIW, I do see that community now, so I guess it got cached when @Orygin accessed it.

[–] nLuLukna@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Right so for a slightly deeper explaination, I was here about a week before the main wave so I got a pretty solid explaination from the old community But essentially our instance doesn't know about any communities that no one on our instance has subscribed to. Once someone has subscribed to it from this instance, it just gets added and everything is cool. What will happen over time is people will find this problem increasingly rarely since sh.itjust.works members will have already subscribed to most of the important or interesting communities You might already know that so I'm going to leave this here for anyone else who wants further explaination

[–] randomposter@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Going through this process but searching ALL worked great