Community Discoverability Inconsistencies

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨9limmer@piefed.zip⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

I’m using Interstellar with a PieFed account, and I’ve found communities quickly and easily (including many on this instance) as soon as I start typing partial words. But I just discovered that skateboarding@lemmy.world and rollerskating@lemmy.world aren’t returned in searches unless I type out “!skateboarding@lemmy.world” in full. I only discovered these communities exist when I switched to Jerboa and my Lemmy account. Is this a quirk of federation, a mod setting, or something else?

I’m new to the Fediverse so please be gentle. 😂

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ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
By default, a piefed/Lemmy instance only knows of the existence of its own local communities. To see any off-instance communities in the search, they first have to initiate federation by a local user manually searching that community and/or subscribing to it.

Once the off-instance community has been federated by a single user, it will stay that way forever, and other users on your local instance will see it show up in the search as well.

There is an effort to automate that initial federation by Lemmy-federate, which creates a bot on participating instances to automatically subscribe to participating communities, but I’m not sure if piefed instances are compatible with it yet.

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- 9limmer@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Interesting. Thanks for the clear explanation. So in the beginning, it must have been like screaming into the void. I see that “Auto add” is off for lemmy.world. Is that also part of why I couldn’t find those communities?
  
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- Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  but I’m not sure if piefed instances are compatible with it yet.
  
  I don’t believe they are. I tired posting a piefed community and it didn’t seem to work.
  
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  - Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    chat.piefed.social/#narrow/stream/10-mods-.2F-com…
    
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olorin99@kbin.earth ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Pretty sure this is just a quirk of federation. The way federation works is that a community needs at least 1 subscriber on an instance before content is sent across, so it's likely no one on your instance had subscribed yet.

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Auster@thebrainbin.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Not very familiar with PieFed, but from my experience on Mbin and Lemmy, communities only exist for another instance if either someone already follows it, someone click on a ! link to a community and follows it, the link of a post from a given community is searched in the instance's search field, someone comments or up/downvotes on a post, or, microblogging/Mbin-specific, someone boosts a post and is followed by someone from another instance. However, neither are fail-proof from what I tested, and from the little I used PieFed, it seems a bit more bureaucratic to find external stuff, which added to being the newer of the thread-type site engines, might make it a bit slower to find stuff initially.

Though, on this last part, similar to what I observe in Mbin, propagation is exponential, so at some point having to manually track stuff should become just a memory.

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- Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  Piefed has multiple ways of pulling in comms an instance doesnt yet know about. The newest version for example pulls in comms that have been posted on !newcommunities@lemmy.world
  
  piefed.zip/comment/1546001
  
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