Subscribing to communities on other instances when they can't be found from searching All?

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?

Barbarian,

Figured it out! In the search options, make sure it's set to "All" and not "Communities". For whatever reason, that seems to be the issue for me.

This is in a browser, not on Jerboa. I don't know how to make it work there.

DarraignTheSane,

That does seem to be the trick. Have to dig through comments, etc. that also match, but it did show up that way. Thanks!

darkfoe,

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

So, if you type !community 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,

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 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.

ccryx,

I've experienced that it doesn't work in jerboa but does work in the web UI.

qantravon,

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.

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