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Not able to see/subscribe to some communities from here? (self.main)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Orygin to c/main

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Hello,

I have subscribed to a few communities already (some on other instances, like lemmy.ml ou beehaw), but some communities cannot be accessed from here, even tough other communities from the same instance are available.

For example, I cannot access [email protected] from here, even though I can access other communities from lemmy.ml here, and the community is accessible from other instances (like feddit.de: https://feddit.de/c/[email protected]). I only get a 404 error: https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected]

Is there any reason why? Maybe related to load issues @lemmy.ml?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sounds like you're sorted, but for more context check this post out: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827

TLDR:

The community list syncs "lazily", only adding a community when a user tries to interact with it.
So at any given time, your instance knows about the list of communities that you and other users on that instance have searched for.
Communities in the list can be easily subbed.
Missing communities have to be "taught" to the instance with a very precise search.
This makes community discovery frustrating. There are some external community discovery resources, life gets a lot better when you use them... but you still have to do the dance about "teaching" your instance about a a new community when you're the first to find it.

[–] Weird_With_A_Beard 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would be nice if this was configurable. Or maybe someone enterprising can write a script to do some searching now, while our usage is low, and the number of external communities is also low.

I know as things start to get really high usage, and the number of Lemmy instances grows, and communities per instance grow, that it might be untenable. But at least for this early onboarding process where we expect a lot of new users, it would be cool to give them a soft landing experience

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I don't have a link handy, but I've heard the devs are thinking about ways to make this better.

I suspect the initial impetus for this scheme was to prevent overloading the federated network with eager replication of community announcements that no one cared about or subscribed to. But the result is that community discovery is just... Really bad. I think that there's broad agreement that this is one of the most critical onboarding and usability issues and after a wave of performance stuff and work to keep the lights on for a MUCH bigger userbase that we'll see attention directed at improving community discovery.