How does this work on kbin at the moment?

My understanding is that, at least on Lemmy, you should be able to search for a full community name, wait a while, and have it show up and start federating. I’ve been searching for two communities (in the format name@instance.tld) on kbin since yesterday and it still shows no matches.

Both are small (<20 subscribers) and currently inactive (no new posts in a week). Do I need to wait until there is new content in them?

  • pb2004@fedia.io
    5·
    1 year ago

    If a search for a particular magazine, e.g. name@instance.tld in the magazines section, does not yield a result, it means that you are the first person to search for it. In this case, search for name@instance.tld in the general search (magnifying glass icon on the top right). Then a federation with that magazine will be created.

    • exscape@kbin.socialOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Huh! That seems like an oversight, I expected it to start federating when you search for magazines, even when you’re the first to look for them; I expected the main search to search for threads/posts only.

      Doing what you said worked immediately, but it says the (local versions) were created 31 minutes ago, so I don’t think I was the one to fix it for these two particular communities.

      • Kichae@kbin.social
        6·
        1 year ago

        When someone searches for an off-site community for the first time, two things happen: One, the local site sends a query to the remote site, asking of that community exists, and two, if it does, the local site creates a local space for that community that links back to the original.

        If you’re doing this on a lemmy-based website, it’ll also, I believe, pull in the 20 most recent posts from the remote community.

        But that’s it. Thta’s as far as it goes. The back catalogue doesn’t come with it, and new posts don’t show up until someone on the local site subscribes to the remote group. Someone needs to actively signal that they want the future content, otherwise it’s just taking up bandwidth and CPU cycles and disc space.

        • exscape@kbin.socialOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          Right, but that’s what I did maybe 15 times before it finally worked today. I have no idea if kbin did send any queries, or if it didn’t get any replies, or if I did something wrong (such as searching under /magazines and not the main search icon – I only tried under /magazines until today), but there were no hits and it didn’t create the local space.