Searching for communities in Lemmy Demistified (version 0.18.0)
The release of Lemmy 0.18.0 has brought many welcome improvements and bug-fixes. Searching for communities through the software has been improved, but it is still a bit tricky. This article will help you understand what you're seeing when you try to find a community using Lemmy 0.18.0.
By now you have probably created an account on a Lemmy instance somewhere (like lemmy.ninja, for instance!) and you're now ready to start subscribing to communities that interest you. So you head off to the Communities page and decide to search for a science fiction community.
New in 0.18.0, when you search from the search box in the Communities page, you will get search results that include comments, posts, communities, users, and URLs. You now need to filter your search results to communities.
When you do that, you may see something similar to the search results below. Only one result, with only two subscribers? What's going on?
First, you're only seeing the communities that have been previously searched for by other users of your Lemmy instance. There may be more science fiction communities out there, but if nobody has searched for the specific instance URL from your instance, you won't see them in these search results.
Additionally, you're seeing 2 subscribers in the image above because only two users from this instance are subscribed to that community. At the time of writing, Science Fiction@lemmy.world is estimated to have 2,000 subscribers from all Lemmy instances, but only 2 of those are from Lemmy.ninja, where that screenshot was taken.
If you don't see the community you're interested in, you will need to get its URL from another source, like lemmyverse.net or browse.feddit.de. You can use either the direct URL or a shorthand URL. (There is a third method which involves constructing a long-form URL, but I will skip that because it's the most complex method and doesn't seem to give any advantage over the others.)
For this example, we will add a new science fiction communiy. According to lemmyverse.net, there is a good candidate, also called Science Fiction, hosted over at Lemmy.ml.
If we visit that community, we will see that the direct URL (copied out of the URL bar of the browser after visiting the site) is https://lemmy.ml/c/sciencefiction. We can also see from the output from lemmyverse.net that the shorthand URL for this community is !sciencefiction@lemmy.ml. I will use the shorthand URL when searching for the community at lemmy.ninja's communities page.
When I do this, I will momentarily see "No results," because !sciencefiction@lemmy.ml hasn't been added to Lemmy.ninja before. But now we see one of the important bug-fixes of Lemmy version 0.18.0 at work: a few seconds later, Science Fiction@lemmy.ml appears in the search results! Now you can click on the link and subscribe to it from your instance, and all posts from that community will arrive in your subscribed feed.
There's one last thing I want to point out about searching for communities. If you look carefully at the images above, you will see that the name of the community is Science Fiction, but that the direct URL and the shorthand URL use sciencefiction (without a space). Once a community has been added to an instance, you could use either Science Fiction or the direct or shorthand URLs to find it. But if it hasn't been added to your instance before, you must use either the direct URL or the shorthand URL to find it.