Lemmy instances can’t see most communities out there, part of how the network works to keep load low for any one instance. Only when at least one user on that instance is subscribed to a community elsewhere do they see it. You want to search the whole Threadiverse, you want to open your web browser and hit lemmyverse.net, click on “Communities”, and search there, as they have a bot that walks all the instances out there and builds a list of communities.
This is not, unfortunately, made incredibly obvious to new users.
If you see an community that you like on there, copy the name – which will be of the format “!communityname@instance.name” – and search for it on your instance. If your instance doesn’t know about that community, it’ll go talk to the instance with the community and fetch the community information. Your home instance is lemmy.world, which is the largest Lemmy instance, so you’ll probably have decent visibility, but this will ensure that you aren’t missing something.
There are also some instances that are defederated from other instances – that is, they don’t talk to each other, because the administrators on one instance have concerns about another instance. So, for example, you can’t reach !guns@hexbear.net from your home instance, even if you go search for it on lemmy.world, because lemmy.world’s admins have defederated from hexbear.net. You can see defederations at /instances – for lemmy.world, that’d be https://lemmy.world/instances
Yeah, it’s because of what I mentioned above (added it to my comment a while back, and you may not have seen it if you hadn’t reloaded the comments…I specifically mentioned that community) – your home instance is lemmy.world, which is defederated from hexbear.net, so it won’t be able to see communities on hexbear.net.
I’d avoid hexbear, personally. I was excited to possibly find a more left leaning instance at first, but it was giving off russian bot vibes so now it’s on my block list.
Lemmy instances can’t see most communities out there, part of how the network works to keep load low for any one instance. Only when at least one user on that instance is subscribed to a community elsewhere do they see it. You want to search the whole Threadiverse, you want to open your web browser and hit lemmyverse.net, click on “Communities”, and search there, as they have a bot that walks all the instances out there and builds a list of communities.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
This is not, unfortunately, made incredibly obvious to new users.
If you see an community that you like on there, copy the name – which will be of the format “!communityname@instance.name” – and search for it on your instance. If your instance doesn’t know about that community, it’ll go talk to the instance with the community and fetch the community information. Your home instance is lemmy.world, which is the largest Lemmy instance, so you’ll probably have decent visibility, but this will ensure that you aren’t missing something.
There are also some instances that are defederated from other instances – that is, they don’t talk to each other, because the administrators on one instance have concerns about another instance. So, for example, you can’t reach !guns@hexbear.net from your home instance, even if you go search for it on lemmy.world, because lemmy.world’s admins have defederated from hexbear.net. You can see defederations at /instances – for lemmy.world, that’d be https://lemmy.world/instances
Damn. Been here a year+, didn’t know any of that.
Can’t get it working. !guns@hexbear.net seems active, but I’m not finding it when I search that from lemmy.world.
Yeah, it’s because of what I mentioned above (added it to my comment a while back, and you may not have seen it if you hadn’t reloaded the comments…I specifically mentioned that community) – your home instance is lemmy.world, which is defederated from hexbear.net, so it won’t be able to see communities on hexbear.net.
I’d avoid hexbear, personally. I was excited to possibly find a more left leaning instance at first, but it was giving off russian bot vibes so now it’s on my block list.
You want join hexbear?