Apologies for yet more dumb questions. Not sure if it’s a Thunder thing or a Lemmy thing.
When I go to search for new communities, I only get the option now to search within the instance I signed up on (Aussie.zone) instead of everywhere. Have I accidentally changed a setting somewhere?
Well I’m confused because a few weeks ago I’m sure I used Thunder to browse for communities outside ‘mine’.
To clarify this, there is an option within the search page that allows you to filter search results for local/all instances. By default, it should be all instances. However, to have a community that is not part of your instance show up, at least one person from your instance has to subscribe to them to federate (by searching the full URL as others have mentioned). I’ve attached some screenshots to help explain what I mean. I hope this helps!
If this is not the case you’re seeing, then feel free to create an issue on GitHub and we can take a closer look at the issue!
You can see this on this picture (search results show communities from different instances):
To switch the search filter to local/all, tap on the corresponding filter button and select the filter you want:
Your local instance search will return communities from other instances if somebody on your instance already subscribes to them.
As others already pointed out, search for the whole URL otherwise.
AHH!!! NOW! THAT’S interesting! How curious!!! What a whacky phenomenon!
So in theory, if I set up a new account and subscribed to all 26k communities, (made up number) then everyone else on ‘my’ instance could see them too!
Yes.
I even saw scripts which mass subscribe to popular communities to populate new instances.