I just joined the NZ lemmy here, because Lemmy.world was slow. This instance is much faster for me, but when searching for communities, many that I was subscribed to with my lemmyworld account didn’t show in the search results.
I fixed this by manually finding it in the address bar, like this:
https://lemmy.nz/c/[email protected]
And this will work for all communities, just replacing the appropriate parts:
https://lemmy.nz/c/[communityname]@[instancename]
Then you can subscribe and it will show in your ‘Subscribed to communities’ on the main page. (sometimes I have to refresh for all to show up).
This might be a known issue at the moment, but I’ve only been on Lemmy for like 3 days so idk
Yeah, it’s kinda crazy that you can start in a small instance like this but can view and comment / post to other much larger instances but I think it only pulls over each one as you sub to it (if you’re the first to do so from your instance) and even then only from that point in time onwards? Not 100% sure about this but it could explain the delay/refresh required.
But then you can also sub to kbin.social which isn’t even Lemmy. And somehow you can comment from Mastodon to Lemmy which isn’t even the same type of service / link aggrigator. It’s a lot, but it’s pretty cool learning how it all works.
Honestly I’m just not sure about this. People say this but then I’ve seen it pull over posts from years ago when we’ve only existed a month so there must be more to it.
Magic! Nah, it’s just that everything is using ActivityPub, which is a protocol not a site (think how for email, there is a protocol that makes it work (actually a few), and then you have a way to access that (gmail.com, Outlook application, etc). I can access the same emails whether I log in to Gmail.com or use an email application like Outlook. And then I can send emails to people who aren’t even on my server, say yahoo.com. And then sites like Github send you an email about a comment, and you can reply to the email and suddenly it’s on the website! (facebook used to do this too).
So it’s just that there is one technology behind the scenes, and different people are building Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc to use that technology for sharing the data, and then displaying it in different ways that suit what they are trying to do.
Okay, so maybe not? I just noticed that when I first sub the community looks empty. Next time I go back there’s a few posts but I didn’t acctually pay attention to whether they’re new or old content, I just assumed I was seeing new content from the point when I subbed as that’s what I read happened. Maybe it also pulls in active posts so if someone comments or upvotes an older post it gets pulled across?
It does feel pretty magic when you’re not used to it. I was replying to a kbin post from lemmy.nz as easily as if it were a lemmy post and then I copied the direct link into Mastodon and replied a couple more times then went to kbin.social and it was all there! You’ve reminded me of when I first used twitter and replied to tweets from my non smart phone using SMS :-) I thought that was pretty cool too. I guess I’m easily impressed :-)
I have no idea, because I also don’t think it pulls all posts from before anyone subscribed. Maybe it’s got criteria?
Oh it is impressive, honestly it’s really cool.