My biggest gripe with *lemmy is the community search only brings up communities that have already been cached by the instance you’re on

At first I would search for communities and be shocked that there’s so many that don’t exist until I realized I have to manually go on my browser and type myserverurl/c/communityIFoundSomewhereElse@ItsInstance if im the first one from my instance to want to sub to that community

Is there a site that can search all communities that this app can communicate to, then force my instance to cache from a search result?

Would make this app really stand out

  • CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    It’s not app specific - that’s just how the Lemmy code works at the moment.

    For this specific reason, Lemmy integrated search feature is fundamentally broken at the moment, so you should be using https://lemmyverse.net/

    When I first joined my instance I couldn’t see any Xbox communities so I created one. It got a little following, but then I found out there were already two communities literally called Xbox but no one from my instance joined before, so I couldn’t see them.

    • cjoll4@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Holy shit, you just blew my mind. Thank you so much for sharing this. Turns out there are so many communities for topics I’ve been searching for that I couldn’t find before.

      It has been such a fucking frustrating experience migrating to Lemmy from Reddit. Nothing is easy or intuitive. Nothing just works straight out of the box.

      EDIT: Case in point, I found a community on lemmyverse, clicked the link to open it in Jerboa, and it stuck me in a loop where pushing the back arrow did nothing but load the same page over and over again. Had to kill the app and re-launch it. Yay.

  • PriorProject@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It has to do with how federation works. There’s no federated broadcast to all instances in the threadiverse when a community is created. Each instance has to be taught about each community via a search. I think this was done to prevent broadcast storms due to community creation, though in normal circumstances community creation is not a high frequency activity. I think the world would be better off if community creation broadcast but was rate limited.

    At any rate, in the meantime search for communities at lemmyverse.net. It’s way WAY better than the native community browser. Then just use the native community browser to find an sub the specific thing you found in lemmyverse.

    • andyquest@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      Yup but a feature built into the app to search lemmyverse and be able to pull in missing communities to your instance would make this the best lemmy app by patching a huge hole in the fediverse

      • johntash@eviltoast.org
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        1 year ago

        I’d like some sort of remote search feature in Lemmy. Maybe it’d be at the client level, but something that could search either lemmyverse or maybe a list of servers you know about.

    • 6db
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      1 year ago

      In that case it seems like there’s should be some sort of GitHub automation tool that maybe uses a network of test accounts from popular instances to sub and then unsub the new community to make it visible. Other than for that purpose, I feel like that’s a very bad idea haha

  • BrownPolarBear@lemmy.pt
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    1 year ago

    This is not the way. Remember, most if not all instances are non for profit. If you force an instance to host all of the federated lemmy content even content nobody on that instance is subscribed to it will have a financial cost that I think no admin is willing to pay. Also admins will soon be purging data that is not being subscribed to by the users of that instance, so it will just be a waste of time, and might even get you banned from that instance.

    • andyquest@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      Nah I’m not saying to force my one instance to cache all communities

      I’m saying a feature on the app that lets me search all communities in a site that already indexes them, like lemmyverse

      And then once I’ve found thr community ive searched for, a feature to load just that one community from my instance to add it to my subs or peruse, not every community.

      • BrownPolarBear@lemmy.pt
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        1 year ago

        ah sorry my bad, misunderstood your post. I agree then, sounds like a useful feature.

        Be sure to check out the github issues for jerboa there might already be someone asking for this.

        If not, you should think about creating one. It will have a better chance of devs responding than here.

  • jozo@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    After i visit community on another instance and it shows up searching from my instance, do i or someone else on my instace need to join on that community for it to show on my all communities feed?