The links like !NoStupidQuestions@lemmy.world.
I have had a pretty bad time making those work. I have tried searching for them at the communities page, and removing the exclamation mark and pasting them on my instance (lemmy.world/c/NoStupidQuestions@lemmy.world).
Some times one of those works, other times my instance finds nothing. And if I go directly to the home instance of the community, it doesn’t bring my login.
What is the recommended way to use those?
I have no answer for you but just wanted to say thanks for posting this - I’ve been SO confused and I think I understand how to do this now. This thread should honestly be stickied somewhere for us folks who are still trying to figure this out lol
Canonical names (the ones starting with !) are broken prior to the 0.18.0 release of Lemmy (check bottom of page to see what version your instance is on). Names seem to be working well in 0.18.1 release candidate 4. In a post they’re relative links and don’t direct away from your login instance. On the sidebar they are absolute links and direct to the home instance of the community.
Community searches are pretty broken on 0.18.0. I’m seeing it fixed on the rc.4 release candidate and canonical names are properly recognized in searches.
Those names can’t be used in the address bar of a browser, that will never change. In a browser address bar you use a format like lemmy.ml/c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world where lemmy.ml represents your sign-in instance.
They are only really useful for getting an instance to federate an off instance community- you paste that form in the search box, and usually a few minutes later you can access the community.
If you want to have a link to a community, use just ‘/c/community@instance.tld’ - even if the instance is the one you are on. That way it will work wherever you are logged in. example is a link to ‘/c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world’
I haven’t found a way to link posts or comments that are instance portable- if anyone knows of a way, I’d love to hear it.
That way it will work wherever you are logged in. example is a link to ‘/c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world’
Yeah, those don’t work from kbin. None of the links I’ve found in c/newcommunities works for me. Am patiently waiting for whatever the problem is to be resolved.
Unfortunately that link doesn’t work on kbin, which uses /m/ instead of /c/
Hopefully we’ll get patches in the future that will link the ! format correctly no matter what software or instance we’re using.
You want to go to the search bar at the top and search NoStupidQuestions then limit to communities/local, at least for communities on your instance.
You can also search !NoStupidQuestions from there and it should work, but you have to give it a second to show the search results. A weird, silly issue is that if you try to search from the communities page, it automatically narrows your search to communities, and for whatever reason that doesn’t recognize the !NoStupidQuestions style nor urls from what I’ve found.
You have to switch the search settings to search all for it to recognize either of those styles.
I’m interested on how I search for specific communities in other instances.
I guess my question could have been more clear on that.
Similar idea as what I wrote, but instead of limiting to communities/local, you leave both as All when using the search bar at the top. For specific remote communities, if someone on your instance has searched for them before, then you may just need to search as community@remote.tld, for example: asklemmy@lemmy.ml.
If someone on your instance hasn’t searched for the community yet, then you would need to copy the url for the community into the search (with it set to all both in type and scope) and do it that way, for example: https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy
Unfortunately, to know of these at all, you typically have to go to the remote instance itself and look through the communities there are on their community page, or someone from a remote instance has to post to a community in your instance telling you about them. Otherwise unless someone else in your instance has done so & subscribed to them, I don’t think they’ll show up in the all feed of your instance.
I may be mistaken on this last part, but that’s how the community connections work to the best of my understanding.
Does this work? (if yes, I used the link markdown thingy).
No. This is what I’m seeing your link as:
https://lemmy.world/post/lemmy.world/c/NoStupidQuestions@lemmy.world
First, /post doesn’t work. The FQDN is:
https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
However, that will always take you to the lemmy.world website, which if you are a user of lemmy.one (for example) you don’t want - you won’t be able to comment or post there. If you use a relative path:
/c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
It tells the browser to go to that location on whatever server you are currently on. As noted elsewhere, this doesn’t work on kbin because they chose to use /m instead of /c. I expect that one or both of Lemmy & Kbin will automatically convert URLs in the future, and will ultimately support the !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world form.
Yes, but links on lemmy.world will work for me. (Your link doesn’t exactly work, but that’s only because the lemmy.world is duplicated.)
Is that the expected way to use the names? Should I expect communities from other instances to work the same way?
I edited the link I posted myself as code because when posting an FQDN (fully qualified domain name) Lemmy may do a relative transform, at least that’s what rc.4 is doing. Names starting with a ! are internal Lemmy shortcuts to save users the trouble of typing out the FQDN and dealing with relative versus absolute. They’re not working right everywhere yet, but they should be on the next official version release.
