AtomHeartFather

I’m just an old guy with a lot of opinions. I am a sysadmin by trade. I like Linux, cool gadgets, Sci-Fi, DC comics, bass guitar, prog rock/metal, and annoying my kids with dumb dad jokes.

  • 7 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I hope to see this community take off and take precedence over the one on lemmy.ml. I have been disappointed the past couple of days because most of the IT related subs seemed to be there and they have only been intermittently available and they seem to be having some trouble with federating their content to other instances. It’s not their fault, they are clearly being hugged much too tightly.

    Also I know its just the nature of things to have competing subs, even on Reddit it happened. But I’d prefer not to have a split-brain situation with a sysadmin community nor do I want to be forced in to cross posting everything to both communities to increase my chances of engagement.


  • I tried doing that with a previously unsearched/unsubscribed community as a test on my own instance, and I got a 404: couldnt_find_community error when clicking the link. As you stated, it seems like in most cases that special link will not work unless someone has previously manually searched for the same community in your instance.

    I think I’d rather link directly to the instance for the community than get a 404 error. For most people, getting the 404 will just deter them from proceeding further.

    Perhaps it would be best to include both links in a post?


  • Having some additional messaging about how communities work, and how to subscribe to them would help. I’m sorry that I assumed you didn’t know how to do that. I meant no offense but there’s no harm in providing free information that you (or someone else reading this post) might not know about.

    There’s no way for an instance to know that you have an account on some other instance so the subscribe button assumes you are a local user. Maybe that could be addressed in the future, I don’t know what the plans are.

    At a minimum I would think the subscribe button could have some logic that can detect whether you are logged in or not and then give you some options. Like, log into your account if you have one on this instance, or if you don’t here are instructions for adding this community to YOUR instance.


  • Yes you can subscribe to and read/reply to that community from any lemmy instance. You just need to add it if the instance doesn’t already federate with it.

    Go to ‘Communities’ at the top of your instance homepage then in the search bar put the url of the community you want to add. (example: https://beehaw.org/c/programming)

    This next part is undocumented, and might just be a bug. But this is the magic part.

    On the next page, change the top search dropdown from Communities to All.

    You will see the community you want to sub to in the results. It will say something like.

    Programming@beehaw.org - 0 subscribers

    Click it, then on the top right pane click “Subscribe”

    Done


  • Making specialized instances does not in any way make hopping around necessary. If you join a specialized instance that doesn’t already sub to the communities you want, you just add them.

    Example: I join a Star Trek themed instance that has a bunch of locally created star trek communities. I want to sub to all those, but i ALSO want to sub to the homelab community on beehaw. I just subscribe to !homelab@beehaw.org FROM the star trek instance I am a member of. That star trek instance will then start syncing the homelab content from beehaw and you can read and reply from the star trek instance.

    Conversely, if someone has an account on beehaw.org and they want to read a star trek community based on that star trek instance, they just need to sub to it FROM beehaw.org.