Yesterday I learned about https://lemmy.ca/c/ontario_community_directory (edit: I got a wrong link somewhere – this one should have been https://lemmy.ca/c/ontario_index) and my local city sub of https://lemmy.ca/c/waterloo. I can’t find them in magazine search (eg, https://kbin.social/magazines?q=waterloo). They’re not brand new (several days).
If I visit the URL I expect them to have (eg, https://kbin.social/m/waterloo@lemmy.ca), I get a 404 and no option to subscribe (I heard some people mention before how Lemmy would show empty communities until the first person on your instance subscribes – not sure if that even applies to kbin and I can’t seem to subscribe anyway).
I can see other subs on the same instance. The whole reason I learned about these subs is because I can see https://kbin.social/m/ontario@lemmy.ca fine. So it doesn’t appear to be the instance.
Anyone have any ideas what’s wrong and how to fix it?
I was curious what the experience is like for Lemmy and it’s pretty much just as bad. I could not find this small community from lemm.ee at all. It seems you have to specifically search for “!waterloo@lemmy.ca” to find it. It will not show up in search with a leading “@” like kbin, nor without the “!”.
Trying to go directly to the URL that the community would have still 404s. The 404 page is even worse on Lemmy (it’s basically plain text that just mentions the fact it’s a 404).
That said, one thing Lemmy does better is that once I subscribed, I could actually see content instantly. On kbin, the sub was empty (presumably no retroactive syncing of content).
So this is a major usability issue for both kbin and Lemmy. It’s a prominent issue for smaller communities to be able to not just take off, but for smaller instances to be even remotely user friendly. The user experience on a big instance when browsing big subs is very, very different from small instances and small subs.
This also seems like it would encourage any aspiring people who want to create a sub to basically seed subscribers in every major instance. Which is just a silly amount of busywork and pointlessly inflates account numbers. But any new sub that doesn’t do this is probably gonna have growing pains. I wonder how many subs actually have purposefully already done this?