How does this work on kbin at the moment?

My understanding is that, at least on Lemmy, you should be able to search for a full community name, wait a while, and have it show up and start federating. I’ve been searching for two communities (in the format [email protected]) on kbin since yesterday and it still shows no matches.

Both are small (<20 subscribers) and currently inactive (no new posts in a week). Do I need to wait until there is new content in them?

  • pb2004@fedia.io
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    1 year ago

    If a search for a particular magazine, e.g. [email protected] in the magazines section, does not yield a result, it means that you are the first person to search for it. In this case, search for [email protected] in the general search (magnifying glass icon on the top right). Then a federation with that magazine will be created.

    • exscape@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      Huh! That seems like an oversight, I expected it to start federating when you search for magazines, even when you’re the first to look for them; I expected the main search to search for threads/posts only.

      Doing what you said worked immediately, but it says the (local versions) were created 31 minutes ago, so I don’t think I was the one to fix it for these two particular communities.

      • Kichae@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        When someone searches for an off-site community for the first time, two things happen: One, the local site sends a query to the remote site, asking of that community exists, and two, if it does, the local site creates a local space for that community that links back to the original.

        If you’re doing this on a lemmy-based website, it’ll also, I believe, pull in the 20 most recent posts from the remote community.

        But that’s it. Thta’s as far as it goes. The back catalogue doesn’t come with it, and new posts don’t show up until someone on the local site subscribes to the remote group. Someone needs to actively signal that they want the future content, otherwise it’s just taking up bandwidth and CPU cycles and disc space.

        • exscape@kbin.socialOP
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          1 year ago

          Right, but that’s what I did maybe 15 times before it finally worked today. I have no idea if kbin did send any queries, or if it didn’t get any replies, or if I did something wrong (such as searching under /magazines and not the main search icon – I only tried under /magazines until today), but there were no hits and it didn’t create the local space.

  • TooL@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Have you guys also seen communities not federate fully? Like if you browse https://lemmy.world/c/tampabaylightning from within kbin, you see 2 posts. But from an instance like lemmy.ca, you’ll see the entirety of 6 posts.

    Obviously, this community is pretty well dead but it’s interesting to me that it appears to be federating, but is still missing part of the content.

    • exscape@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      The community on kbin (i.e the federated version) was created 3 days ago, I don’t think posts older than that are ever going to be visible on kbin.

      • Kichae@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        They will be if someone who can see those posts boosts them.

        That’s what boosting does. It republishes posts so that newer users can see them, too.

  • cjerrington@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I wonder if some of it also has to do with how federation works. Once a user visits and follows another instance the two instances start to federate. The more instances and sites of lemmy/kbin and the more users the harder it might get.

    Are the communities on lemmy or kbin you are looking for?

    On Kbin looking for lemmy or other federations: /m/[email protected]
    On kbin looking for the geddit info community on geddit.social: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]

    On lemmy looking for /m/KbinMeta: /c/[email protected]
    https://geddit.social/c/[email protected]

  • HidingCat@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’ll admit, it doesn’t always work, but if you search a few times it seems to come up eventually.

        • exscape@kbin.socialOP
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          1 year ago

          Haha, uh, it did find a community when I searched for the URL, but it found [email protected] – that’s pretty bizarre.

          I think this is either a bug (I mean, in one sense it’s certainly a bug) or just that something needs to change in the community before it shows up and is created locally (which kind of is a bug too).

          If the kbin codebase wasn’t so complex I’d try to check the code to see how this all works.

          • asjmcguire@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            it’s probably related to the bug that is known about and getting fixed - that kbin is currently case sensitive - which breaks things a bit when it comes to remote communities.

      • dm_me_your_secrets@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        The way to do it in kbin is to go to the magazine section specifically. The normal search doesn’t find magazines I believe. Then search in the following format: syncforlemmy@lemmy.world. I use that as an example because I had to learn this very thing a few minutes ago.

        • exscape@kbin.socialOP
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          1 year ago

          That’s exactly what I’ve been doing maybe 15 times since yesterday. It finally worked earlier, but according to a top comment you should not use the magazine search if the magazine doesn’t already exist on kbin.