I noticed that some communities on lemmy.ml are unable to be seen on other instances. For instance, federating the lemmy community works fine:
https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected]
But federating the kubuntu community returns 404: couldnt_find_community:
https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected]
I'm certain that second one should work... I've found perhaps two dozen other communities that have the same problem. Meanwhile, dozens of others work fine.
Edit: @[email protected] suggested I try searching for the community first. I had actually tried this but it didn't work, which is why I started trying the deep link approach above; that worked for some communities.
Turns out the deep link by itself will not discover new communities, only searching for them will, and the search can take a long time and will show "No results" for a little while.
So if you're experiencing this, search instead for [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) from the remote instance, then the deep link will start working.
I did just now and it worked, and in fact the deep link works now too.
I tried it with another community I was unable to fed, [email protected] and it said "No results" for a while but then it found it. After that point, the deep link works for it too.
So evidently 1) the deep link only works with already-federated communities, 2) searching as you described causes the community to be federated, and 3) the search is slow and will say "No results" for a while.
I'll play around with a few others and see if this is correct.
This is correct. If you are the first user on an instance to look for a community, the instance has to look for it. This takes a bit.