Anyone know why I keep getting this message when I try to access a community/magazine through kbin?
I have simple goals trying to migrate from reddit: find and join communities, and see and participate in the content of those communities. So far the fediverse has been broken on both aspects, there are communities that are invisible to the search engine, by design, and content that is invisible to any other instance.
On kbin.social, a lot of communities should be available since it’s a big server. Which ones are you trying to find?
Yeah, i started on some lemmy instances and it was a problem there, so far i havent run into it on kbin yet. But then, theres content in lemmy communities that dont show up on kbin
Which lemmy instances were you on? It could be you were on smaller instances? Kbin.social is a large instance, so most of the forums are already added there. They can improve by making the UI more clear hopefully in the future, but for the smaller instances, you have to do a search for the link of the forum you want, then subscribe to it. Thats the only way it becomes searchable on the instance. Since kbin is working for you, stay on kbin. I’m using kbin.social too and a small instance called lemmy.studio. If you have more questions about adding the community/magazine, make sure to ask :)
What kind of content do you mean is missing?
This is a great question and certainly confusing for those not used to the federation aspect.
A quick explanation:
If the magazine has a domain name at the end of it that isn’t the same as your kbin account, then it means that the magazine’s “home” is on a different instance.
Example:
technology@fedia.io
That means that all the instances (servers) will push content and updates to the “home” instance and receive updates and content from the “home” instance.
When an instance (server) subscribes for the first time to a magazine on a different instance, it will start to receive new content from that moment forward. However, older content isn’t pushed out to the newly subscribing instance. You can think of it as subscribing to a newsletter or something. You won’t automatically be sent copies of all the older content but you will get new things moving forward.
You can have older content show up by manually entering the direct link to the older content into the search bar on your home instance (in this case kbin.social) but it’s a manual process.
That why the message shows up about “may not be complete” since it doesn’t know how much total content there is on the remote instance.
This topic (called “backfilling posts/contents”) is one that has been discussed on the Fediverse for some time.
Thank you for the explanation! Interestingly, older content is showing up for me but not newer content. Your explanation makes it seem like older content would be “delayed”, but is the same true for newer content?
It’s because kbin hasn’t fully imported all the content that would be displayed on that page in the actual instance.
It’s not local community, and as the federation in kbin is still spotty, you’re gonna keep seeing until it improves.