Usually, when you open a website, that site might be pulling live data from somewhere, but it’s from a database on the same server. If you click a Fediverse link, and no-one else from your instance has already done so, it seems like your instance has to contact a remote site, pull the data and render it, in the same timeframe it would have to do so with local data.
To illustrate with some possibly-new-to-you examples:
!cyberpunk@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
!badrealestate@feddit.uk
!sideoftheroad@possumpat.io
!todayilearned@chat.maiion.com
!rpgmemes@ttrpg.network
!grenoble@jlai.lu
!relationshipmemes@lemmyis.fun
What’s your experience like clicking these? Does it go through first time?
I realize they’ll be people for whom these work first time no problem, and they’ll wonder what I’m complaining about. I’m not really complaining about anything really, I’m just wondering if my instinctive reaction has any validity.
I’m fine with things not always loading immediately
I recently started a Kbin account and noticed that a few of the communities I searched:
- were empty, and
- had, in their info, the claim that they had started right when I searched them.
Which tells me that the Kbin instance only stores local information about a community after the first of its members searches that community.
You got it.
This is a limitation of the ActivityPub protocol so similar kinds of behaviour / problems shows up in mastodon, etc as well. Until someone subscribes, it doesn’t exist locally and posts don’t start to flow unless there is a subscriber.
Until someone subscribes, it doesn’t exist locally and posts don’t start to flow unless there is a subscriber.
So does this mean that if I’m browsing “All” I’m not actually seeing “All” but “All from the communities/instances members of my instance subscribe to”?
Yes
That explains a lot, then. When I was on Vlemmy before it was deleted “All” seemed a lot more populated, now I moved to a smaller instance and it seems a lot more repetitive.
It’s a shame it works that way since everyone says the “ideal” is a ton of small instances rather than big ones.
Thanks for the clarification!
Yup. You need to use a third party service like https://lemmyverse.net/communities and then subscribe.
There’s no reason why this functionality can’t be built into lemmy/kbin in future. It’s on the feature wishlist for the lemmy/kbin clone that I’m building.
All of the links work fine except the 6th one, that resulted in an error.
Edit: loading it a second time works
Edit 2: It seems like my instance’s version is out of date compared to viewing it from another instance. Seems like no one from my instance subscribed to it.
What you’ve described is exactly how it’s supposed to work. Once a user has subscribed to an external community from your instance, it should load immediately for any users afterwards.
I realize this. How well it works for User 2 isn’t super-relevant for User 1’s experience. And if you’re from a small instance, you’ll always be User 1. To me, it seems like the answer to if the page will successfully load for User 1 is ‘maybe’, and I guess I was questioning whether this is good enough.
I see, well I guess the real question is whether it can be improved at the server/protocol level and my answer is I don’t know. There’s some handshaking that clearly has to occur between your instance and the other instance to load the initial community state and I don’t know where that process can be optimized. I think I’ve seen people mention tools that have been created to automatically subscribe a dummy account on your instance to all the communities on the largest instances to kind of bootstrap the process for other users, but I don’t have a link to such a tool handy.
Edit, and there’s never going to be a guarantee that your server can talk to their server until you try clicking the link because the other server could be overloaded, down, or blocking your server.
I think I’ve seen people mention tools that have been created to automatically subscribe a dummy account on your instance to all the communities on the largest instances to kind of bootstrap the process for other users, but I don’t have a link to such a tool handy
They have a bot at lemmings.world that subs to the most popular communities. It’s mostly to benefit their ‘All’ feed I think, but I imagine it’s good for this circumstance too.
