I still see some federation issues:

  • It sometimes takes a few tries before a remote post or community is found
  • Remote replies don’t show up
  • Subscriptions to remote communties are stuck in ‘pending’

I’ll look into that.

  • @[email protected]
    4•1 year ago

    Ok, I’ve been setting up a bunch of remote subs and I think I have a better idea of the behavior we’re seeing here. I should note, I don’t know what’s SUPPOSED to be happening and I don’t know what happens on other Lemmy instances. But I can now see what’s happening here on lemme.world and it’s consistent but complicated enough to be confusing.

    Basically, it seems like the community list at https://lemmy.world/communities is some kind of local cache and it seems to get populated whenever someone searches for a sub with the bang syntax, like !mastodon@lemmy.ml. So you end up with a confusing sequence of events like this:

    • Time 0:
      • James visits https://lemmy.world/communities to look in the ALL list for mastodon@lemmy.ml, but it’s not listed.
      • James does a keyword search for mastodon in the community searchbox, the mastodon community is not returned because it’s not in this instances community list yet.
      • James gives up, reports that the mastodon community is missing.
    • Time 1:
      • Janet visits https://lemmy.world/communities and searches for !mastodon@lemmy.ml using the bang syntax. No results are returned.
      • In the background, Janet’s search causes our instance to discover the community and silently add to the community list. I don’t know why this happens, but it happens reliably.
      • Janet gives up, reports that the mastodon community is missing (even though she actually just added it to the list, she didn’t check again to realize that).
    • Time 2:
      • Tom visits https://lemmy.world/communities and sees mastodon@lemmy.ml is already there. Reports everything is fine, other people must have been confused or that replication kicked in on its own (even though Janet JUST added it to the list, he didn’t see the timing correlation to realize that Janet’s search triggered the community being added to our list).
      • Tina does a keyword search with mastodon, and it returns the community she’s looking for.
      • Janet searches using the bang syntax like !mastodon@lemmy.ml, STILL gets no results even though the community is in our community list.

    So you can see that you’ll observe different behaviors based on whether you do a keyword search, bang-syntax search, or browse the community list… and you’ll see different results depending on whether ANYONE has searched using the bang-syntax yet.

    So the reliable way to subscribe to a community is first to search by bang-syntax, then scan the community list (or keyword search) AFTER the bang-search… and then you’ll find your community.

    No idea if this weird behavior is by-design, a bug in Lemmy itself, or a problem with the lemmy.world setup. But I’m pretty sure it explains all the weird behaviors we’ve seen around communities sometimes being easy to find and other times being hard to find.

    • @Klaymore
      2•1 year ago

      As a new user on sh.itjust.works this has been my experience as well. It also seems like just pasting the link to the community causes the search to find it as well, which can be a bit more convenient than typing out the bang. Even pasting the link to a comment from a different community procs the search to find it. It is weird that it doesn’t show up the first time and you have to redo the search though.

    • @[email protected]
      1•1 year ago

      There are 2 searchs that you could be cross talking about. The search on the Lemmy.world communities page and the search in the lemmy.world header (or hamburger menu on mobile)

        • @Klaymore
          2•1 year ago

          I think the difference is one of them auto filters to only communities and one searches for all types, that was a bit hard for me to notice at first

          • @[email protected]
            3•1 year ago

            I think the difference is one of them auto filters to only communities and one searches for all types…

            Yeah, that’s true by default. But in both cases, the search results page includes a dropdown of types. The header version defaults to all and the communities version defaults to communities. But they’re the same search results page, and you can filter the types however you want on either if you change the value of that dropdown once you arrive at the initial search results.

    • Phil
      1•1 year ago

      Thanks been wondering what the hell was going on , this definitely works on lemmy but not on kbin as far as I can tell

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        URL searches exhibit the same behavior as bang-searches. Is it documented somewhere that the bang-syntax is deprecated? If you visit any community on lemmy.ml, the bang syntax is how it recommends to search for the community on a remote instance, like in the upper right box of https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy.

        • @[email protected]
          2•1 year ago

          The Lemmy project is not well documented and is not close to being settled. I’d consider it beta software

    • RuudOPM
      1•1 year ago

      Thank you for the research. I will take this up with the Lemmy devs.