I noticed that some communities on lemmy.ml are unable to be seen on other instances. For instance, federating the lemmy community works fine:
https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected]
But federating the kubuntu community returns 404: couldnt_find_community:
https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected]
I’m certain that second one should work… I’ve found perhaps two dozen other communities that have the same problem. Meanwhile, dozens of others work fine.
Edit: @[email protected] suggested I try searching for the community first. I had actually tried this but it didn’t work, which is why I started trying the deep link approach above; that worked for some communities.
Turns out the deep link by itself will not discover new communities, only searching for them will, and the search can take a long time and will show “No results” for a little while.
So if you’re experiencing this, search instead for !community_name@instance.host from the remote instance, then the deep link will start working.
Yup, this is really unintuitive and frankly there should be a better solution. For now, wouldn’t it at least be possible to make the error more descriptive? Hint that the instance might be unaware of the community?
You can search by URL instead https://lemmy.ml/c/kubuntu
it will show the community in results
Using!community@instance.hostcould take some seconds, and you need to search again for community name only without the instance.EDIT: Here’s a guide https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/
