Interacting on instances which are not yet discoverd and connected to instance where we are registered is pain in the ass. Copying URL into search bar? That is really repelling. I’m sure it was discussed before but I can’t find this discussion. How to make it easier? Do devs need to make changes to protocol or it’s enough and it can be done within the apps themselves? How close are we to the solution?
https://lemmy-federate.com/ goes a long way to make sure that communities are federated to most of the active instances
Its absolutely an issue that can be solved. The issue is that activpub is push based so their is no sing e source of truth. U could do a atproto style collector service that provides a search interface. U could also probably get a good but imperfect search by using the concept of n degrees of separation. Ie u search ur instance then search other instances who then search other instances.
Also some of the larger instances avoid the search issue by having a bot from their own instance subscribe to communities on other instances so that the content federates.
The current solution is for bots on participating instances to automatically perform the search + subscribe song-and-dance routine. This is pretty surprising to some people[1], and it requires someone to set it up in addition to the instance itself, but it does work.
[1]: I tried to translate an explanation into Japanese for some folks experimenting with Mastodon/Lemmy interaction yesterday – they thought Lemmy had a ton of spam accounts following groups instantly…
Copying URL into search bar? That is really repelling.
I wonder if Lemmy should have the search bar always visible, like Mastodon does
or at least if your window is wide enough to fit it, otherwise it can collapse to the icon, I’ve got plenty of room up here
Thing is, search bars are for typing in keywords, not urls.
Certain other federated reddit clones just have a ‘add remote community’ button on the communities list.
The first time I learned you could fetch a remote post by searching for its URL, my mind was blown.
I’m still pretty sure the majority of people here aren’t aware of this.
I think the answer is anything between what the fediverse is now and what email did to get where it is now…I’d like to see some kind of history of how email developed over the years now that I think about it, that would be pretty interesting at least.
Seems to me the solution to this is registering protocol handlers for URLs, which Mastodon tried and gave up on because they weren’t happy with how web browsers handled it.
The easier way is to use lemmyverse.net’s search after you set your home Instance, then when you open a link, it’ll open it from your instance which triggers it to federate.
Dude try search any lemmy.word group in there. Either it doesn’t work or someone is filtering them off.They appear now.There was a bug that prevented instances running old versions from showing up, perhaps it’s back?
They’re back
Yay! Wonder what caused the outage.
They were still there a few days ago
They do not appear at the moment. Something is probably broken.
The Devs of every fediverse software run the biggest instances of that type and those instances don’t have this problem.
Content discovery on Mastodon can be hit or miss
to me, this goes to instance management and how its not just a setup and walk away thing. if youre going to manage an instance part of your administrative duties is to presub to the most active communities for your users to have easy access. there are several methods to achieve this using bots or whatnot.
