• feddit has a good community browser
• because all the instances are federated, they don’t download information from another instance until it is necessary (to save on bandwidth and server space)
  • instances become linked when a user from one instance subscribes to a community/magazine on another instance or when they try searching for content on another instance
    • this is also why there’s a delay when searching “All”, gotta give the instance a little bit to go out and start grabbing content – and this is why searches come back with nothing but if you just wait, suddenly it starts populating half a minute later
  • you can see which instances your instance is already linked to (and which instances your instance is blocking) by adding /instances to the end of your instance’s url – ex. lemmy.world/instances

There were several ways to search in the past weeks, it got simplified with the 0.18 update (lemmy users can check their version at the very bottom).

This means the tipps you can find from previous week and before are a bit outdated (although not completely wrong). I was confused then, and am still in the process of learning.

For now, for lemmy users, the best way (AFAIK) seems to be to search for the full community URL, like https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions

I still think it works better when not searching for ‘Communities’, but for ‘All’, but maybe my habits aren’t updated yet.

A general technical insight about federation: New communities do not make themselves known to all federated instances. For each instance, one user has to ‘discover’ them first. This first lookup will be slower (a few seconds) and display as ‘No Result’, then switch to the result.

This means users from small instances and/or users who search for new or small communities have a chance to run into this issue.

As such, I wouldn’t trust the in-built search function too much, but use external tools to see what is out there. Once you know a community exists, you know when to ignore the ‘No Results’ message and wait longer, or ask for help.

Tools I know:

• https://lemmyverse.net/communities
• https://browse.toast.ooo/communities
• https://browse.feddit.de/
• https://lemmies.blue42.net/
• https://sub.rehab/

Once you are the first subscriber from your instance to a remote community, you also don’t get the full history of posts and comments right away, but something like 20 only. So your logged in view (relative, such as /c/nostupidquestions) may show much less content than the native view (first link, full community URL).

One more thing to understand: The development is active and ongoing. Not only did many users join, but also some developers.

Notifying @Glide@lemmy.ca. @ryan@the.coolest.zone, maybe checking federation with https://fba.ryona.agency/ can help?

PS: We should use the wiki much more for these things. This would also allow the answers (if they link to the wiki) to remain updated, instead of outdated answers in older comments.

Posting because I want to know the same thing.

Basically, look at kbin, and also look at lemmyverse.

An instance only knows about communities someone has told it about, that is, searched for them in the @name@instan.ce format.

Once the first person has done that, the instance then knows about that magazine/community, and it will show up in search in the future.

There are a few ways. People have set up special websites to index servers and communities:
Lemmy Explorer filters through names and descriptions: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
and there’s also still Lemmy Community Browser which is a little older: https://browse.feddit.de/

Community promotion and discovery, there’s a lot:
community promo https://lemmy.ca/c/communitypromo
find a community !findacommunity@lemmy.ml
wow this Lemmy exists! https://lemmy.ca/c/wowthislemmyexists
a few more search sites turn up with this filter in Lemmy Explorer: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=find+communities

Generally, your home server will know a commuity’s existance only after someone has searched for it. I don’t know if this has already been fixed, but the advice has been to enter the whole URL of a community into the search bar in order to get it known to your server instance. And once you follow the link in the search result it should start to syncronise, which may take some seconds in the beginning.

ping: @Glide@lemmy.ca

here’s something that might be helpful for finding communities: lemmyfind.quex.cc

Piggybacking on myself. I can’t figure out how to subscribe to one of the other communities. One says to paste “!cfb@fanaticus.social” into my instance’s serach field, but when I do that, I get a result that says “empty.”