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.