Had to split post (because it’s loo long?), see comments.
| url | result | status |
|---|---|---|
| https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] | shows up, up-to-date | 🟢 |
| https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected] | shows up but all votes and comments missing | 🟡 |
| https://lemmy.one/c/[email protected] | shows up, some votes missing | 🟡 |
| https://midwest.social/c/[email protected] | couldnt_find_community | 🔴 |
| https://feddit.nl/c/[email protected] | couldnt_find_community | 🔴 |
| https://lemmy.nz/c/[email protected] | couldnt_find_community | 🔴 |
| https://sopuli.xyz/c/[email protected] | couldnt_find_community | 🔴 |
| https://mander.xyz/c/[email protected] | shows up, some votes missing | 🟡 |
| https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/[email protected] | couldnt_find_community | 🔴 |
| https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] | shows up, some votes missing | 🟡 |
| https://vlemmy.net/c/[email protected] | show up, all posts missing | 🟡 |
| https://feddit.de/c/[email protected] | couldnt_find_community | 🔴 |
| https://lemmy.ca/c/[email protected] | shows up, some votes missing | 🟡 |
Users on those instances need to search for your community then subscribe, only will then new posts/votes/comments show up. Federation is opt-in, not automatic.
This is correct; until someone on those remote instances searches (or maybe subscribes?) then the c/ultralight won’t be federated to those remote instances. You should use a larger community as your test case, if you are trying to verify federation, or take is a sign that your (very niche?) ultralight community just hasn’t got many subscribers yet.
Aha, ok! With that in mind I searched some of the “red” status instances for communities containing “ultralight” and couldn’t find [email protected]; so does this mean in order for users to be able to find my community from their instances, I (or someone else) needs to register for each instance and then subscribe?
Pretty much, yeah. This is why external discovery tools (like browse.feddit.de and others) are so important and useful. Also posing to any of the new community or community announcement/discovery meta communities. Also sidebars linking to other related communities like on that other site.
I see, so discovery happens out of band, so in order to find it someone has to already have found it. “Search All” is only searching what has already been found on this particular instance, and so the results can vary depending on where you are.
Exactly, your instance stores what you post (local) on it and what gets federated to it (cache, basically). You search those local and cached things. To do it some other way would basically man that either all instances somehow discover each other and send everything to each other all the time or your instance somehow discovers and searches all other instances when you do a search.
There has been talk about something that should make things better as far as “couldnt_find_community” more or less auto-searching a remote community when you go to a
/c/community@example.comsort of link so the experience is less jarring and doesn’t require you to know you have to do a search.I tried subscribing from my instance, check it out after a while to see if it propagated all the stuff: https://lemmings.world/c/[email protected]
the posts appear but the votes and comments are missing. the “community pinned” post at the top is missing. the stats in the sidebar are way off. compare https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
BTW, you can force the server to see a comment by searching for the URL of that content, but this obviously only works if you know the comment exists. I don’t think there’s a user-side way to trigger the server to look for contents en masse. Not sure if it’s something that the instance admin can configure.