Hello. I recently joined Lemmy, and quite like it. I have been on Mastodon for a while. So, I was interested in following some of the communities and posts here on Lemmy within my Mastodon account. I did manage to successfully follow two communities from this instance, those being NDP and Ontario. However, other communities, such as Toronto, Biking, Canada, and some others, the search turned up empty (I had a screenshot to better illustrate this, but I was given a syntax error when I tried to upload it). So, I was unable to follow them on Mastodon.

Of the communities that I did manage to follow, I have been able to interact with them using my Mastodon account. However, some actions have not been as I expected them to be. I would put a hashtag in the title of a post here on Lemmy, expecting this to show up in a hashtag search on Mastodon (since, you know, we’re all federated), but this didn’t work. The post, when I search for it, appears on Mastodon, but it does not appear in a search of the included hashtag (which I find odd). But I digress.

My main question is why can I find and follow some Lemmy communities on Mastodon but some I simply cannot?

  • Julian@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    For your main question, my best guess is that the two instances haven’t federated yet. When you first search with a url, it will start that process but it might take a minute or so, so try again now and see if it shows up.

    As for the other question, there are some differences in how mastodon and Lemmy operate - they federate but it’s not 1-to-1. I think hashtags are actually links, and mastodon just generates them for you - check out this post.

        • MarkG_108OPEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          Thanks for your comment. However, I have found that putting an exclamation mark before the name of the community does not work, despite this being the default instruction given for how I “can subscribe from another Fediverse account”. As I mentioned, I successfully followed some of the communities (hockey, ontario, ndp --> and this was by searching for these communities without the exclamation mark, because the exclamation mark prevented the finding of these communities) whereas others, with or without an exclamation mark, were not to be found (IE, toronto, canada, main).

      • Julian@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Weird, I’m getting the same thing… Not sure what’s going on then, maybe try asking whoever runs lemmy.ca, could be something on their end.