You should know this because finding communities on lemmy can be tough.

    • r00ty@kbin.life
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      1 year ago

      A brand new instance on the fediverse doesn’t initially know about any other instances. Only when someone searches for a community@instance does it then go talk to that instance and subscribe to get posts/comments etc.

      • Kittybeer@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Maybe you can help me. I joined under Lemm.ee. I want to subscribe to c/catswithjobs@lemmy.world but it doesn’t show up on my search list. What do I type in to find it?

          • Kittybeer@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Thanx for the reply! For some reason, I didn’t get the results in my search bar via the Connect app, but I was able to subscribe via my desktop. Not sure what the difference is, but at least I can see my working cats now :)

            • TheSaneWriter@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I’m also not sure what the difference is, but the desktop app does seem to be better about initial federation. Glad you were able to get your working cats, feel free to ask if you have any other questions

    • charles@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Same here. I understand the whole notion of how an instance is able to “see” communities on another instance on the fediverse. But I don’t get what these kinds of website do differently to see all communities on all instances and why instances can’t do that directly.

        • charles@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Appreciate the clarification! I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how the fediverse works but I’m far from a programmer so some parts are still a bit confusing to me.

          Is it just a different approach to reach the same goal or is there some inherent limitation to how the fediverse works that prevents instances from using crawlers?

            • charles@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              Wow, thank you so much for taking the time to write such a detailed explanation. It really clears up a lot of what I was confused about.

              The community across the board on Lemmy has been so refreshing compared to the last few years on Reddit or any of the alternatives I’d tried before.

    • badblocks@badblocks.rocks
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      1 year ago

      They explain it on the project’s GitHub:

      How does discovery work?

      It uses a seed list of communities and scans the equivalent of the /instances federation lists, and then creates jobs to scan each of those servers.

      How long till my instance shows up?

      How long it takes to discover a new instance can vary depending on if you post content that’s picked up by one of these servers.

      Since the crawler looks at lists of federated instances, we can’t discover instances that aren’t on those lists.

      Additionally, the lists are cached for 24 hours, so it can take up to 24 hours for an instance to show up after it’s been discovered till it shows up.

        • badblocks@badblocks.rocks
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          1 year ago

          The Fediverse (Lemmy/Mastodon/etc) is based on a following/subscribing model; each instance only “sees” what it’s users are currently following or subscribed to. This keeps storage and systems usage lower since each instance doesn’t need a complete copy of the entire Fediverse. This third party is more like a web crawler like Google, just crawling from instance to instance and saving the data. Hopefully in the future Lemmy could add something like this discovery feature, maybe something like Mastodon Relays, to aggregate community lists, but it would definitely put more strain on each instance.