2y ago

I'm trying to search for a community that definitely exists: but it doesn't show up in search

!programming@programming.dev clearly exists (see https://programming.dev/c/programming), but I can't seem to find it in Lemmy.world's search bar.

I see that "someone needs to search" for a community for it to appear in the search bar. Furthermore, if I go to "lemmy.world/c/programming@programming.dev", I can see and subscribe to that instance just fine.

I'm just worried about discoverability. How was I supposed to even discover programming@programming.dev if this instance didn't know about it?

10 comments

When you do the search in your instance, sometimes it works better to search for (for example) "https://programming.dev/c/programming" instead of "!programming@programming.dev". Using the full URL seems to work better. I don't know why. And sometimes you have click search more than one time for it to show up.
Still some bugs to be worked out here, lol.
- Searching the full url forces a federation update.
- Yeah, looks like I just didn't wait long enough after hitting the "Subscribe" button. I guess Lemmy.world has queues and tasks and a bunch of background processing before things show up in Search.
- Thank you. Clicking search more than once is what seemed to work for me.
Check out point 2 of the "find and subscribe" section of: https://lemmy.world/post/9296.
In short, if you're the first on your instance to discover a community, you have to search for it in a particular way to "teach" your instance about the community. After that it shows up in /communities/ and anyone can subscribe the simple way. That doc explains what to do. It sounds like someone else already taught lemmy.word about this community, so you should be good. But still good to know what to do to fix it yourself next time.
When you subscribed to that community, that caused the lemmy.world server to know about it, and now it is available in the communities search.
https://lemmy.world/c/programming@programming.dev
It works now.
I'm having this problem on kbin. Turns out it needed @programming@programming.dev not !programming@programming.dev

10 comments