I’ve noticed that communities from sopuli.xyz aren’t showing up in the search. Is Pawb.Social having issues federating with that instance? Or is it just that the instance might be overloaded?
Searching is a bit odd, I’ve found. You’ll need to search for what you’re looking for first - if no one else has before searched it on your instance, it won’t show up the first time, but it’ll prompt the instance to search for it.
The next time you search for it (give it a minute or so) , it should show up unless it’s not federated from my understanding.
I did end up getting it to work. It’s a bit buggy I had to try again several times for some of them, or wait like 5-10 minutes before trying again.
Basically, from what I’ve gathered, if you’re the first user to try and talk with that community/instance from this one, you need to do an external search, i.e. !communityname@instance.site
Give it about 30 seconds to a minute for the servers to link up, and our instance will grab that community’s info and their top 20 posts to populate. Then you can just search it by its community name and it’ll show up to subscribe. Once you sub to it, it’ll formally federate and pawb.social will start downloading posts from that community regularly.
It’ll be up to us early users to build the connections for later folks to use.
Wow, that makes so much more sense. It would be nice if the UI made that behavior clear, as just returning 404 errors generally means “this does not exist”, not “I might need to take a second to look for this”.
I found an interesting thread in another federated instance with other communities. When I clicked on the address to view it from pawb, it 404s me. However, if I click on a direct link, it takes me to the community, but I’m logged in as it took me to the site itself.
I’m wondering if this is a federation issue or some sort of limitation.
I think people need to be following communities from that instance for that instance to show up in search.
How do you follow the community if you can’t search? I’ve tried to follow homebrew@lemmy.radio, but I can’t get it to connect from pawb by searching, or even typing it in directly (pawb.social/c/homebrew@lemmy.radio - that’s the correct format, right?).
If it’s external you need to search with a “!” before. So, !homebrew@lemmy.radio.
Thanks! It’s working now.
Something else I found out, is that if someone else already searched for it with the exclamation mark method, it should show up for everyone else by just typing the name. For example, I just typed “homebrew” into search and it showed up because you already searched it.
You have to go to your instance and do a search for “!homebrew@lemmy.radio” or copy the URL and paste it into the search. It takes a few moments to find it.
