Question about how communities are discovered from other instances

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?

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kiwi 8 points 3 years ago

If nobody from your instance is already subscribed, then you can only search for the community by the full url. I wrote a bit more about this here: https://lemmy.directory/post/34207

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lackthought 1 point 3 years ago

that lemmy.directory looks great!

a minor issue with this workaround is that when I search for a community they all show 1 subscriber (your scraper obviously) and no more information about the true size of the community, you have to click on them to see which ones may or may not have user activity

so if the original design of lemmy is to only index previously subscribed communities it will be difficult for smaller/niche communities to grow and become discovered (unless someone uses your directory obviously)

hopefully the standard lemmy search can be changed so it is more universal by default and with better metrics rather than just # of subscribers from the current instance

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kiwi 1 point 3 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! I think if your main goal is to just search for communities by name, then it’s best to use: https://browse.feddit.de/.

I find lemmy.directory the most helpful in browsing all posts across the lemmyverse in a single feed (via the “All” filter).

Searching for new communities may be able to be made more universal, but automatically pulling in those feeds (subscribing) is probably not a good general idea. See here for more info on that: https://lemmy.ml/comment/476925

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path: 0 34587 34762 34863, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 3