Hi all!
So, I’m assuming everyone has seen links like https://beehaw.org/c/news and clicked through to find it doesn’t work right because it’s a different site (I’m assuming a different instance here).
Well, I just stumbled across an interesting feature: if you enter a link in the following format, it works for everyone regardless of instance of origin:
[News](/c/[email protected])
[My User](/u/[email protected])
You’re welcome!
Seeing the rampant confusion this causes when trying to subscribe to remote communities makes me wonder if the full community list could be shipped on initial federation, and community creation/change events could be eagerly shipped network-wide.
I get that in federated/peer-based systems you need to be choosy about eagerly propagating messages network-wide, but the list of extant communities seems like it would be fairly small even on a big server. Like hundreds would be common, and tens of thousands of communities on a big server could still compress down to a message-size of a few KB. Having the
/communities/search and all-communities page do something useful from the moment of federation seems like it would reduce a lot of confusion.Or fetch it when a link is followed for the first time.