From mastodon to follow an account or a community on lemmy you use the @name@server format and there is no difference between a community name and a user-name

so i was wondering if anyone tried and checked what happened

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    It actually couldn’t find the community when I limited the search to communities, either, and I had to type the URL. No idea what that’s about

    https://lemmy.ml/search?q=world%40lemmy.world&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

    Notice no community result.

    https://lemmy.ml/search?q=world%40lemmy.world&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

    Also no community result. On my instance, I could scroll to the end of the list, and when the call to the resolve endpoint returns, the user but not the community gets added as a single entry to the very end. Like I say, no idea what that’s about, although it seems to be a bug distinct from the bug I’m describing,

    https://lemmy.ml/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fc%2Fworld&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

    Also doesn’t work? That’s a little strange, honestly. Like I say, no idea. I’m just describing the somewhat different but also wrong behavior I see on my instance.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        why would you be searching for it? You already have it!

        Because the search UI is how Lemmy chooses to expose the concept of resolving a network resource which you may or may not already have synced to your instance. That’s, arguably but not definitively to me, a design bug separate from the original design bug I was talking about, or whatever it is that’s causing it not to work right now.

        You can see by opening up the developer tools and doing a search for world@lemmy.world. It’ll submit two requests: One to /api/v3/search, and one to /api/v3/resolve_object. For whatever reason, that second call is only returning the user @world@lemmy.world, but not the community, for me right now. Am I misremembering somehow? This is how I have always located communities, to subscribe to them, when I’m not sure whether they already exist on my server. Typing the full URL https://lemmy.world/c/world still works, and returns what you would expect in the response.

        I didn’t choose to put that functionality in the “search” UI. The Lemmy developers did. I kind of get the idea behind it, I’m not 100% sure it’s a design flaw, but it was definitely surprising to me to find it there, originally.

        So tell me: If I “already know the user or community I’m looking for,” I know what to type, but it might not exist on my server… how do I subscribe to it? What UI do I use? I know of one answer; if you know of a different answer than the one I’m aware of, it will be news to me.