Users on those instances need to search for your community then subscribe, only will then new posts/votes/comments show up. Federation is opt-in, not automatic.
This is correct; until someone on those remote instances searches (or maybe subscribes?) then the c/ultralight won’t be federated to those remote instances. You should use a larger community as your test case, if you are trying to verify federation, or take is a sign that your (very niche?) ultralight community just hasn’t got many subscribers yet.
Aha, ok! With that in mind I searched some of the "red" status instances for communities containing "ultralight" and couldn't find !ultralight@lemmy.world; so does this mean in order for users to be able to find my community from their instances, I (or someone else) needs to register for each instance and then subscribe?
Pretty much, yeah. This is why external discovery tools (like browse.feddit.de and others) are so important and useful. Also posing to any of the new community or community announcement/discovery meta communities. Also sidebars linking to other related communities like on that other site.
I see, so discovery happens out of band, so in order to find it someone has to already have found it. "Search All" is only searching what has already been found on this particular instance, and so the results can vary depending on where you are.
Exactly, your instance stores what you post (local) on it and what gets federated to it (cache, basically). You search those local and cached things. To do it some other way would basically man that either all instances somehow discover each other and send everything to each other all the time or your instance somehow discovers and searches all other instances when you do a search.
There has been talk about something that should make things better as far as "couldnt_find_community" more or less auto-searching a remote community when you go to a /c/community@example.com sort of link so the experience is less jarring and doesn't require you to know you have to do a search.
I tried subscribing from my instance, check it out after a while to see if it propagated all the stuff: https://lemmings.world/c/ultralight@lemmy.world
the posts appear but the votes and comments are missing. the "community pinned" post at the top is missing. the stats in the sidebar are way off. compare https://lemmy.world/c/ultralight@lemmy.world
BTW, you can force the server to see a comment by searching for the URL of that content, but this obviously only works if you know the comment exists. I don't think there's a user-side way to trigger the server to look for contents en masse. Not sure if it's something that the instance admin can configure.
Hello! I am still figuring out this federation stuff after having created the community !ultralight@lemmy.world. I’ve heard discussion about how fast lemmy.world is growing and outpacing the other instances, and some discussion how it’s important to spread users out. I wondered if I should recommend instances other than lemmy.world or perhaps even move myself. With that in mind I wanted to see what my new community looked like from other instances. I decided to sample some of the larger instances from https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ - as of 10am July 3, 2023 EDT here’s what I see:
(See table above)
Out of the 13 instances !ultralight@lemmy.world is only really usable from 4 of them, and only up-to-date on one of them, lemmy.world. If this is representative of the state of things generally I’m a bit concerned for the implications that it will funnel everyone onto a single instance and turn lemmy.world into a monolith.
I've also observed this issue with stuff on lemmy.ml not making it over, I assume because the servers are just too slammed. It's not exclusive to lemmy.world. (Although it does seem to be the worst with lemmy.world.)
That's weird. As an aside, it shows up fine on my instance https://lemux.minnix.dev/c/ultralight@lemmy.world I recently upgraded to 18.0.
it shows up but has no votes nor comments. compare to https://lemmy.world/c/ultralight@lemmy.world
Let me subscribe and see what happens
Just sub'd, and federation has started slowly - see the Hi post in 'Hangout'
Someone just told me that only updates are sent over, no history on its own: https://lemmings.world/comment/8444
Not sure how exactly it works, though.
Thank you for this! Valuable info I'm sure. I think this might be due to the newest Lemmy software version which not every instance may be updated to yet. As I understand Lemmy.world just updated only a day or two ago. Hope most instances will be green by end of week.
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