Yesterday I learned about https://lemmy.ca/c/ontario_community_directory (edit: I got a wrong link somewhere – this one should have been https://lemmy.ca/c/ontario_index) and my local city sub of https://lemmy.ca/c/waterloo. I can’t find them in magazine search (eg, https://kbin.social/magazines?q=waterloo). They’re not brand new (several days).
If I visit the URL I expect them to have (eg, https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]), I get a 404 and no option to subscribe (I heard some people mention before how Lemmy would show empty communities until the first person on your instance subscribes – not sure if that even applies to kbin and I can’t seem to subscribe anyway).
I can see other subs on the same instance. The whole reason I learned about these subs is because I can see https://kbin.social/m/[email protected] fine. So it doesn’t appear to be the instance.
Anyone have any ideas what’s wrong and how to fix it?
You would search for @ [email protected] (removing the space) within kbin which should then give you the option to subscribe.
Oops, I must have had a bad link before. It’s @ontario_index. Searching that worked.
I think it doesn’t need the @. The confusing part is that it needs to be the non magazine search. The magazine search does not show it until you first do the magazine search and subscribe. Oof.
Thank you, thank you! I’ve been wrestling with this all night and this fixed it for me too :)
I personally saw someone working on fixing the links so you can just click on them, hopefully we get some form of autosearch when the magazine is not federated
Making the links clickable will definitely help. It’s very painful right now. Right now, you often end up with someone sharing a link in a form like https://lemmy.ca/c/waterloo, which is obviously a different instance and thus you can’t subscribe from there.
But more than that, I’ve discovered that:
- You can’t just go to the normal community URL to subscribe (well, you can if you’re not the first – this is what particularly confused me, as it seems every other sub I’ve subbed to, I’m not the first kbin user to sub).
- You can’t find the magazine in magazine search (what’s the point of a magazine search that can’t actually search many magazines?)
You can only find it in non magazine search (very confusing).
I migh be able to help with these types of links, look for the kbin link extension, it’s available for Firefox and chrome.
It’s an extension I made to help with this situation.
More info here: https://github.com/daniel-lxs/kbin-link
As an update, now it shows up in the magazine search. But I don’t know if it’s because of something I previously did, something another viewer did, or something else. I still don’t feel like I understand why.
This is actually the first major usability issue I’ve had and I’m pretty technically inclined. What can we do to improve this, because this has gotta confuse other people too.
From what I’ve seen, its because you are the first person to try and search for that community from this instance of kbin. That means this instance of kbin wasn’t aware of the existence of that community yet, which is why it 404’d. After you searched for it the first time, this instance became aware of it and started to sync with it, so when you searched it again it showed up and you could subscribe.
I was curious what the experience is like for Lemmy and it’s pretty much just as bad. I could not find this small community from lemm.ee at all. It seems you have to specifically search for “[email protected]” to find it. It will not show up in search with a leading “@” like kbin, nor without the “!”.
Trying to go directly to the URL that the community would have still 404s. The 404 page is even worse on Lemmy (it’s basically plain text that just mentions the fact it’s a 404).
That said, one thing Lemmy does better is that once I subscribed, I could actually see content instantly. On kbin, the sub was empty (presumably no retroactive syncing of content).
So this is a major usability issue for both kbin and Lemmy. It’s a prominent issue for smaller communities to be able to not just take off, but for smaller instances to be even remotely user friendly. The user experience on a big instance when browsing big subs is very, very different from small instances and small subs.
This also seems like it would encourage any aspiring people who want to create a sub to basically seed subscribers in every major instance. Which is just a silly amount of busywork and pointlessly inflates account numbers. But any new sub that doesn’t do this is probably gonna have growing pains. I wonder how many subs actually have purposefully already done this?
