How do you access a community from another instance that isn't already "indexed"?
From what I understand, in order for you to be able to see a community from another instance, it has to have been looked at by someone else from your instance, or something like that? But I'm not sure how it works.
For example, I've been trying to get to lemmy.world/c/geometrydash from here, but it doesn't show up in search (I'm using jerboa), and going to the url beehaw.org/c/geometrydash@lemmy.world doesn't seem to work. So, how does it work?
At this point it seems that being in a more popular instance is generally better because most of those connections will already be there.
Edit: well it worked magically now (with that you said below) soo 🤷
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Search for !geometrydash@lemmy.world in Beehaw's search and it should come up. This initial search would cause federation.
However, if the instance you're searching for has been explicitly defederated with by Beehaw, you won't be able to see it here at all. We're federated with that instance already though, I thought, so it's strange that it wasn't showing up with other search terms.
Does that federation include all communities from that instance? If so, I should've had no problem, since lemmy.world is the 2nd biggest instance and was most likely already federated. I do seem to be able to see other communities from there I think, but idk. Searching for that only turns up the comments on this post lmao
The sync between federated instances happens on a per-community basis, so they won’t show up in search until someone has searched for the community once. Depending on instance load, it may take some time for the initial sync of comments to happen after the first subscription.
I searched for it before posting the original comment and it appeared.
It works now, thanks! I'm not sure why it didn't before but well
I've had some intermittent issue switch this behavior and have just chalked it up to the influx of users and constrained Infrastructure.
From what I've been seeing, there seem to be some delays in the search surfacing results for communities from other instances. I was searching for a community over in lemmy.sdf.org from this instance (lemmy.world) and despite folks from there posting in world (which should federate them, I think?), it still took a few tries & waiting a moment for a community from sdf to show up in search results.