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?