Yes. Every post in the Fediverse does not magically appear in every instance, the instance has to tell a community that it wants to receive new activities from it.
You want more posts in your instance? Subscribe to new communities.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
22 points (100.0% liked)
PieFed Meta
1658 readers
98 users here now
Discuss PieFed project direction, provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics.
Wiki
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
So, subscribing to an outside /c from one instance will make visible that specific community to the home instance's total userbase, correct? But it only works in terms of fetching that specific /c, right? I.e., it doesn't automatically pull the total list of /c's from that other instance, if I understand correctly.
So, subscribing to an outside /c from one instance will make visible that specific community to the home instance's total userbase, correct?
Yep.
But it only works in terms of fetching that specific /c, right? I.e., it doesn't automatically pull the total list of /c's from that other instance, if I understand correctly.
No, it doesn't pull every other comm from the instance.
Lemmy v1.1.0 should be getting the ability to receive a minimal list of all the comms an instance has: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951
This doesn't mean that the instance will subscribe to every comm. It will only know about their existence and show them in the comm list, so basically a builtin lemmyverse.net.
I don't know if this is already a thing or planned in PieFed.
Sounds good, thanks!
Right now it does seem like PieFed-instance /c's don't show up too much in Lemmy, Mbin, etc instance searches for the reasons you've already covered.
Also, various outside tool searches don't seem to find PF stuff for other reasons, such as: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Not sure if there are alternative, FV-wide tools that can do a more inclusive job of such searches, but so far I don't think I've found any. :S
Not sure if there are alternative, FV-wide tools that can do a more inclusive job of such searches, but so far I don’t think I’ve found any. :S
Thank you, boss. Ultimately I'm hoping that there's more of popular, general-FV search place in which PF communities can be discovered by non-PF users.
I'd like to see the PF side more discoverable, for fairly obvious lessons, eheh.
You need to switch to the "Piefed explorer" on the top left corner.
Here's a direct link: https://lemmyverse.net/piefed/communities
Thanks!
I don't think Mbin and PieFed were search options as of my last-use attempt. That's some good news.
That said, it doesn't look like the query box does anything just yet in PF-mode. Perhaps it's in progress? I poked around the GitHub a bit, but couldn't find anything obvious. (couldn't even find a change-log or equivalent, for that matter oO)
Yep. Seems like the implementation is not fully done yet. Might be a good idea to open a new issue in their github repo.
That's probably not going to happen
I think I'd make an offspin of this project, as the current project is centered around only Lemmy, I don't think I'd be willing to build in global search as a thing in this project.
https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/issues/284
This kind of explore features should be built in the software the way Piefed does it with https://piefed.social/communities
Relying on external tools is always going to create this kind of issues
Oh, I realised just now that you'd commented further:
This kind of explore features should be built in the software the way Piefed does it with https://piefed.social/communities
Relying on external tools is always going to create this kind of issues
Hell, yes.
It seems to me that while this might only be a 'lurking' issue for now, in the larger sense it's a huge, honking issue for our beloved, imperfect Fediverse. That is-- the smaller the FV-entity, the greater the need to be easily discoverable by larger FV entities, particularly as the 'little guy' passes a certain threshold of longevity, quality content, good general behavior, etc.
I do wonder how much this issue is on peoples' minds across the FV...
Piefed has multiple ways of pulling in comms an instance doesnt yet know about. The newest version for example pulls in comms that have been posted on !newcommunities@lemmy.world
Awesome. Now is there any possibility of reciprocation across the FV?
Particularly the smaller the instance / server producing quality content?
I assume he's referring to as seen from piefed.social, which should have a lot of coverage now.
But how can I subscribe to new communities if they don't show up in my feed? I'll never know about them otherwise.
I sometimes use search, trying to guess what names interesting communities might have.
And then, I sometimes just open the other instances' pages in a web browser and view their Local. If there's something interesting going on, I click the "Subscribe" button that asks for my instance's address and adds that community for me on my instance. Or, if the community is on Piefed or on a Lemmy instance not using the default theme, I copypaste the URL into the relevant search on my home instance.
If you want to see communities hosted on suppo.fi, write suppo.fi on your browser's address bar and view their Local.
There are 2 ways to fetch new communities your instance hasn't seen before, which are also talked about in the join-lemmy.org docs
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html#following-communities
- Using the community identifier
You can fetch new communities by searching for its identifier, clicking on an identifier or directly entering it into the URL bar.
Community identifiers look like this:
!<community name>@<domain.tld>
For example: !asklemmy@lemmy.world
- Searching for the full URL in your instance.
Say you found a new community in sopuli.xyz named cats, you can input the full URL for it directly into your instance's search bar.
e.g. an URL: https://sopuli.xyz/c/cats (I don't know if this is a real community or not, just as an example)
The fedecan guide is also good:
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/how-to-find-communities
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/how-to-open-in-my-instance
I am also surprised that you didn't already know this by now. You have been here for a year.
Can't you also just use the search tool? The names and descriptions of all communities on an instance are known to all instances that are federated with it, aren't they?
If you want to find a community about adhd, you write "adhd" on the search (click "communities" as the tab when searching!). It shows every community that has "adhd" in their name. You then subscribe to a community and it starts showing in the All of everyone on your instance.
Yes. That seems to be the case in Piefed as Blaze said. The one I was responding to uses Lemmy.
I've been doing the same on Lemmy (sopuli.xyz), as well.
I don't know if sopuli.xyz has a custom patch or they use lemmy-federate.net, but that is not a normal feature of Lemmy just yet.
Sopuli is an old, reliable and established instance, thanks to its usebase and lemmy-federate, you can expect 99% of the active communities to be federated there
Yes. But Lemmy itself does not federate new communities itself just yet.
Yes.
You see on all what everyone on your server has subscribed to.
If the Lemmy instance has been around longer and is larger, you'te going to see more varied communities in their all than you would see on a Lemmy instance with less communities its users are subscribed to. Its not a piefed thing, just a fediverse thing.