With the refrigeration, which do you consider the canonical community to follow now? You mod both, right? Are you going to keep the bit posting to both?

… advertisement and push they did on sites like reddit…

The lemmy world admins advertised on Reddit? Can you link an example?

… their listing on join-lemmy.org…

Until recently EVERY lemmy instance was listed on join-lemmy.

And with the name Lemmy.world they did nothing to dissuade anyone from thinking that.

They run a family of servers under the world tld, including at least mastodon, lemmy, and calckey. They’re all named similarly.

I also saw nothing from .world not claiming to be the bigger instance(super lemmy)

They ARE the biggest instance, but that happened organically. It’s not based on any marketing claims from the admin team about being a flagship/super/mega/whatever instance. People just joined, and the admins didn’t stop them (nor should they). It’s not a conspiracy to take over lemmy. It’s just an instance that… until recently… happened to work pretty well when some were struggling.

I think the issue is that .world has put itself forward as some sort of super lemmy.

Citation needed. All the admins of lemmy world ever purported to do was host a well-run general-purpose (aka not topic-oriented) lemmy instance. It was and remains that, and part of being a well-run general purpose instance is managing legal risk when a small subset of the community generates an outsized portion of it.

Being well run meant that they scaled up and remained operational during the first reddit migration wave. People appreciated that, but continuing to function does not amount to a declaration of being a super lemmy.

World also has kept signups open through good times, and more recently bad. Other instances at various times shut down signups or put irritating steps and purity tests along the way. Keeping signups open is a pretty bare-minimum bar for running a service though, it is again not a declaration of being a super-lemmy.

Essentially lemmy world just… kept working (until recently when it has done a pretty poor job of that). I dunno where you found a declaration that lemmy world is a super-lemmy, but it’s not coming from the lemmy world admins, it’s likely randos spouting off.

I have to wonder if NLNet has some process for amending commitments made in light of new lessons learned. By a wide variety of metrics, the impact of the project has been increased beyond all imagination and ambition that people could have had in January. And the technology and quality of the project has improved way way faster as its accrued new contributors. This is really a case where the the right milestones to measure by have changed.

One might also hope that a call for help from contributors on these specific milestones might just get them back on track.

But speculation aside… yeah your description of their funding challenges is accurate.

If you’re serious about this, there’s a post up calling for sysops: https://lemmy.world/post/2769245

It’s somewhat of a commitment, rather than drop-in drop-out… but that’s what it takes to make a difference here. There are already several sharp and experienced database engineers working on the Lemmy world team. The problem is that the site is under repeated denial of service attack, and there isn’t one bad query to fix… each time one query gets addressed, the attackers move on to a new one.

While it’s always possible that someone has missed a silver bullet, it’s much more likely that a a series of ongoing independent mitigations and optimizations are needed to achieve a tipping point where lemmy is more or less protectable with some hidden dos-able bits rather than more or less trivially dos-able everywhere.

I thought that was the first rule of rendering web content? Or was it protocol parsers?

I remember, it was first rule of video game character creation screens:

Sorry, that password is already in use.

Who’s using it? I’ll just use that account.

It’s nice to see this officially hosted for lemmy.world users. I’ve been curious about wefwef but there was no way I was going to enter my creds into a third-party proxy. It feels much better to do so via an instance hosted by the world admins where my Lemmy account is though.

FYIW, when you save this as a PWA via Firefox mobile, the name is just “voyager”, which I assume makes it hard to distinguish from the voyager instance hosted by its devs. I don’t think this can be changed as a user (unless I’m too dumb to figure it out). If the PWA app name can be changed server side, might be good to call it Voyager World or something.

The customer using the feature:

Don’t ask how they uncooked it, support was trying to help them get the cheese off.

What version of Jerboa?

I had no idea how new this instance was when I joined it a few days ago. I picked it semi-randomly because it had a low-ish user count but seemed to be associated with mastodon.world, which seems pretty big, so I figured it must have admins behind it that were experienced with biggish federated instances.

I think the difference is one of them auto filters to only communities and one searches for all types…

Yeah, that’s true by default. But in both cases, the search results page includes a dropdown of types. The header version defaults to all and the communities version defaults to communities. But they’re the same search results page, and you can filter the types however you want on either if you change the value of that dropdown once you arrive at the initial search results.

For what it’s worth, as someone participating in communities I’m likely to gravitate toward the most established one irrespective of what instance it’s on. If there’s a problem with an established community (bad moderation policies, bad moderators, lots of posts I don’t like, or whatever) then I’ll look for alternatives.

But generally, I’m more interested in more communities covering new and niche topics than I am in local copies of communities that are healthy on another instance.

URL searches exhibit the same behavior as bang-searches. Is it documented somewhere that the bang-syntax is deprecated? If you visit any community on lemmy.ml, the bang syntax is how it recommends to search for the community on a remote instance, like in the upper right box of https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy.

Are they not the same? They both take you to https://lemmy.world/search/. At any rate, I’m visiting https://lemmy.world/communities and using the default type constraint on that page to search for communities.

Ok, I’ve been setting up a bunch of remote subs and I think I have a better idea of the behavior we’re seeing here. I should note, I don’t know what’s SUPPOSED to be happening and I don’t know what happens on other Lemmy instances. But I can now see what’s happening here on lemme.world and it’s consistent but complicated enough to be confusing.

Basically, it seems like the community list at https://lemmy.world/communities is some kind of local cache and it seems to get populated whenever someone searches for a sub with the bang syntax, like !mastodon@lemmy.ml. So you end up with a confusing sequence of events like this:

• Time 0:
  • James visits https://lemmy.world/communities to look in the ALL list for mastodon@lemmy.ml, but it’s not listed.
  • James does a keyword search for mastodon in the community searchbox, the mastodon community is not returned because it’s not in this instances community list yet.
  • James gives up, reports that the mastodon community is missing.
• Time 1:
  • Janet visits https://lemmy.world/communities and searches for !mastodon@lemmy.ml using the bang syntax. No results are returned.
  • In the background, Janet’s search causes our instance to discover the community and silently add to the community list. I don’t know why this happens, but it happens reliably.
  • Janet gives up, reports that the mastodon community is missing (even though she actually just added it to the list, she didn’t check again to realize that).
• Time 2:
  • Tom visits https://lemmy.world/communities and sees mastodon@lemmy.ml is already there. Reports everything is fine, other people must have been confused or that replication kicked in on its own (even though Janet JUST added it to the list, he didn’t see the timing correlation to realize that Janet’s search triggered the community being added to our list).
  • Tina does a keyword search with mastodon, and it returns the community she’s looking for.
  • Janet searches using the bang syntax like !mastodon@lemmy.ml, STILL gets no results even though the community is in our community list. Edit: Since writing this I’ve been told that lemmy searches that return zero results may actually just not be finished. Maybe I/Janet would have gotten a result here if we waited long enough. Or maybe would have eventually gotten a result even at Time 1.)

So you can see that you’ll observe different behaviors based on whether you do a keyword search, bang-syntax search, or browse the community list… and you’ll see different results depending on whether ANYONE has searched using the bang-syntax yet.

So the reliable way to subscribe to a community is first to search by bang-syntax, then scan the community list (or keyword search) AFTER the bang-search… and then you’ll find your community.

No idea if this weird behavior is by-design, a bug in Lemmy itself, or a problem with the lemmy.world setup. But I’m pretty sure it explains all the weird behaviors we’ve seen around communities sometimes being easy to find and other times being hard to find.

I don’t have insights into how the communities get discovered, though I’m new to the ecosystem too. If I find anything as I’m reading around I’ll pipe up. In the meantime I’ll try other ways of searching as you’ve described. Get some rest, cheers.

Resubscribing fixed many but not all of my pending subs, for what it’s worth.

Edit: Eventually re-re-subbing fixed all my pending subs. Resub and eventually you’ll get through.

I’m not sure if we expect improvements to be immediate here, or if they require time for replication to kick in, but some observations that suggest things are still a little funky:

• There are only two pages of communities listed: https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/2 and not a full two pages. Given the number of federations defined, I’d expect the communities list to be extensive, similar to what we see at https://lemmy.ml/communities/listing_type/All/page/4, though obviously with all the big lemmy.ml communities being listed as remote here rather than local.
• Searching for communities still fails. Like https://lemmy.world/search/q/!mastodon%40lemmy.ml/type/Communities/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1 should return https://lemmy.ml/c/mastodon and https://lemmy.world/search/q/!matrix%40lemmy.ml/type/Communities/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1 should return https://lemmy.ml/c/matrix but both searches are empty.

Maybe this will self-resolve if replication is churning… but community searches seem not to be sorted yet.