Community Discoverability Inconsistencies (piefed.zip)

submitted 2 weeks ago by 9limmer@piefed.zip to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I'm using Interstellar with a PieFed account, and I've found communities quickly and easily (including many on this instance) as soon as I start typing partial words. But I just discovered that skateboarding@lemmy.world and rollerskating@lemmy.world aren't returned in searches unless I type out "!skateboarding@lemmy.world" in full. I only discovered these communities exist when I switched to Jerboa and my Lemmy account. Is this a quirk of federation, a mod setting, or something else?

I'm new to the Fediverse so please be gentle. 😂

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[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

By default, a piefed/Lemmy instance only knows of the existence of its own local communities. To see any off-instance communities in the search, they first have to initiate federation by a local user manually searching that community and/or subscribing to it.

Once the off-instance community has been federated by a single user, it will stay that way forever, and other users on your local instance will see it show up in the search as well.

There is an effort to automate that initial federation by Lemmy-federate, which creates a bot on participating instances to automatically subscribe to participating communities, but I'm not sure if piefed instances are compatible with it yet.

[-] 9limmer@piefed.zip 6 points 2 weeks ago

Interesting. Thanks for the clear explanation. So in the beginning, it must have been like screaming into the void. I see that "Auto add" is off for lemmy.world. Is that also part of why I couldn't find those communities?