I’m sharing this post and it’s thread because I’ve run into this issue of not being able to find communities, users, posts, or comments on other instances, or the communities are missing a substantial number of comments and votes even after interacting with these posts and receiving new replies. Is this functionality standard and desirable behavior? Why or why not? I’m trying to understand how it’s expected to work, because it’s not very intuitive starting out to explore other instances sometimes.

Maybe we could brainstorm a way to make it more intuitive. What are the trade-offs involved? Why does it work the way it currently works? Is there a better way?

The main point that has been brought up is the fact that users from smaller, newer instances will not be able to access the backlog of posts and comments from older more established instances. I’d say a lot of the value of the platform comes from this foundation of posts sorted by votes on a link aggregator site like this. Should new users be encouraged to join the older, more established instances in order to have access to the most content?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/357141

SOLUTION FOUND - thank you

There is a community called Tarot on lemmy.world, and I want to subscribe to it. The url is https://lemmy.world/c/tarot. I’ve been to lemmy.world when not logged in and I can see it there. But when I try to find it from here, I can’t. I tried putting !tarot@lemmy.world in the search and got “no results found”. I’ve been told that “someone needs to search for it, for it to appear”, but I have already tried to search for it, many times. What else needs to happen for me to be able to see and subscribe to this community?

Or do I just have to make a second account on lemmy.world?

  • @empireOfLoveEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Yes, all new posts and comments from specific communities that have been accessed will always be federated between the two, as long as the worker threads are working and the databases tracking what’s new and such don’t get fucked up. (So, theoretically yes, but no guarantees, federation can get slow and out of sync sometimes with how much load many instances are under currently)

    As I understand it they don’t grab the entire server contents because that would result in a ridiculous amount of traffic. Just communities that individual users have browsed to.