I have a lemmy account on lemmy.sdf.org

When searching for communities to join I can see several in the list from lemmy.ml and beehaw.org

but while searching for some communities that I know exist on lemmy.ml or beehaw.org I am getting no results

will a community from instance A only appear in search results on instance B if a user from instance B has already manually subscribed to that specific community from instance A?

basically, there is no scraping of ‘all available’ communities even when two instances know of each others existence? only ‘specific communities’ are indexed when a user has manually found/subscribed?

  • kiwi@kale.social
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    1 year ago

    I think that would be possible to do to help with searching for new communities. Although for now I’m not sure there’s too much difference between it existing on each instance vs on https://browse.feddit.de/. Other than ease of use of staying on one website I guess.

    • lackthought@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      yeah for me its mainly laziness so I don’t have to use an external site to search

      but new users who may not be aware of external directories could have trouble finding niche communities if no one from their instance has subscribed yet

      just a user experience thing I was thinking about