YSK: lemmyverse.net is the best way to find active communities
YSK: lemmyverse.net is the best way to find active communities
You should know this because finding communities on lemmy can be tough.
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I dont get why a third party site can see more of the fediverse than the fediverse can.
A brand new instance on the fediverse doesn't initially know about any other instances. Only when someone searches for a community@instance does it then go talk to that instance and subscribe to get posts/comments etc.
Maybe you can help me. I joined under Lemm.ee. I want to subscribe to c/[email protected] but it doesn't show up on my search list. What do I type in to find it?
Search [email protected]. Make sure to include the exclamation mark. Give it about 30 seconds and search it again, and the community should appear, and now you can subscribe.
Thanx for the reply! For some reason, I didn't get the results in my search bar via the Connect app, but I was able to subscribe via my desktop. Not sure what the difference is, but at least I can see my working cats now :)
I'm also not sure what the difference is, but the desktop app does seem to be better about initial federation. Glad you were able to get your working cats, feel free to ask if you have any other questions
It sees the same information, just aggregates it differently I guess.
They explain it on the project's GitHub:
How does discovery work?
It uses a seed list of communities and scans the equivalent of the /instances federation lists, and then creates jobs to scan each of those servers.
How long till my instance shows up?
How long it takes to discover a new instance can vary depending on if you post content that's picked up by one of these servers.
Since the crawler looks at lists of federated instances, we can't discover instances that aren't on those lists.
Additionally, the lists are cached for 24 hours, so it can take up to 24 hours for an instance to show up after it's been discovered till it shows up.
And why is it using this method, and not the third party sites method that sees more?
The Fediverse (Lemmy/Mastodon/etc) is based on a following/subscribing model; each instance only "sees" what it's users are currently following or subscribed to. This keeps storage and systems usage lower since each instance doesn't need a complete copy of the entire Fediverse. This third party is more like a web crawler like Google, just crawling from instance to instance and saving the data. Hopefully in the future Lemmy could add something like this discovery feature, maybe something like Mastodon Relays, to aggregate community lists, but it would definitely put more strain on each instance.