The devs actually talked about this in the AMA from a couple of days ago. Sounds like the current plan is to have all federating servers send their entire list of communities to each other on a regular basis.

The other thing that I think is worth mentioning is Lemmy Community Boost which is basically a bot that serves the same purpose.

I'm surprised there was no issue filed for this already, maybe I just failed to find it, but I made a new issue

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4412

if anyone wants to give it a thumbs up reaction then the devs will know to prioritize it, and if you have any ideas you could leave a comment there

Edit: that was somewhat a duplicate of this issue

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951

Give that one a thumbs up

The community you're trying to subscribe to only has one post, and I believe that post may predate your instance spinning up.

It's not really a good example of federation on Lemmy, because it doesn't have content to federate.

Even your ping idea wouldn't have worked here

Lemmyverse.net show both communities: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=watchreddit

It probably didn't show up in the first place it only has 66 subscribers, and probably none on SJW.

About your second point, you indeed have to promote your community, using [email protected], or related communities. This works quite well usually.

I will add that in your case, people knew about your community as you posted in other communities, but as discussed then, people seemed happy with the existing Reddit-focused communities.

Isn’t that intentional though? I don’t believe many instances, especially the small ones, can afford to federate every community. Sure, sometimes it can be a bit annoying but you can always check on lemmyverse.

A good implementation would be a warning at the creation of a community. Lemmy looks if a community already exist on the instances and display them. It would be on top of a better search.

Yeah there's a tool called LCB (Lemmy Community Boost but it's not a perfect solution to this issue. A good idea would be to have something like that built right into Lemmy, where instances can have an internal account that will look for and subscribe to communities which opt into discovery.

Soemthing like how the join-lemmy site works where it finds instances, but for communities. Obviously this would need to be enabled and allowed by instance moderators, smaller instances and personal ones with limited space probably don't want to pull from every community in the fediverse, but for larger ones, such a feature would be greatly beneficial.

Yes. Lemmy is deep in "good enough" territory. It mostly works for most people, much of the time. But if you stray outside of the main use cases, you're gonna be disappointed.

Tip is to feature it on the [email protected] community, crosspost the first few posts from there to more popular communities, and be sure to link various discussion threads from that community in other communities. Get people interested enough to Subscribe then posts will spread to that instance.

This inconvenience is partly by design in Lemmy. People that start up a new server don't want to have ALL the content across the Fediverse rush through and explode their PC or hosted VM. Or a troll that makes a new community, spams a bunch of posts or puts up illegal material in a new community can easily be caught in the home instance before it spreads to others.

Pressure your instance to join https://boost.lemy.lol and pressure your mods to add the community there (or you can add it yourself if the instance is already part of the project).

Yeah, that's the issue federation for lemmy have. I'm from a very small instance and my "All" feed only shows just a fraction of community from those big instance. If i need more community post showing i need to manually request federation for each and every community. It's not too big of an issue if you're from big instance as people will likely look for more community to subscribe, but for small instance it will be barren most of the time if no one try to look for new community using external browser, which makes people migrate to bigger instance, and defeat the purpose of having multiple instance.

Though i must say, manually federating is quite fast these day, i remember last year i have to keep refreshing for it to shows, and it take hours for the content to federate. The dev surely do magic.

Something tells me that neither one of those communities are going anywhere anyway. No matter what tweaking is done to Lemmy. The one you mentioned is so dead you might as well have made another. There’s already Reddit themed communities that are meant for the same thing really as that’s all most of us want it to do is die.

[email protected]

[email protected]

This. I want to be able to see every community of every instance i‘m federated with with post and sub count. Thats a laughable amount of data. This would boost subscriptions by insane amounts.

The number of subscribers being completely different depending on which instance you search from is really weird/bad too IMO.

I don’t think it’s bad thing that content is hidden.

To me, it’s comforting to think of cyberspace as being kind of like the real world. And in the real world, there’s distance. You can be near or far from things. You can travel, and the longer you travel the further you go. Things percolate through at a steady pace, and so everything’s not perfectly mixed but there are different zones with things going on.

When we had cyberspace shown to us in Snow Crash or Disclosure or NetRunner, it was always a space. Like a second world you could go live a life in.

I know it’s a loose connection, but I like how, in order to discover more instances I might have to travel to neighboring instances and then from there to others. Like each user you hear from has an instance in their username. That’s a way to discover instances.

And having redundant communities? That’s a great idea. Then you get that separation and divergent/recombinant evolution in those communities too.

Just a thought. As we add features, and remove constraints, from lemmy, we make serious architectural choices that will affect the way it feels and acts as space for communities to grow in.

We call it a Fediverse not a Fedidatabase. A ‘verse is a place you go through, at a speed, taking time. A ‘verse is a vast and wide place.

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected], [email protected]