I've had a few questions about trouble accessing other communities from here.
First and foremost, I request you to be patient, lemmy is...alpha software at best imho. There's 200+ issues on github right now and very few maintainers. No one expected things to take the turn they did within a matter of days, but here we are :)
Biggest known issues:
Websocket support is being reworked
This is out of my hand and I can confirm that its busted. I tested locally and the current main lemmy backend branch is incompatible with lemmy-ui branch. Can't even login if you set everything up locally.
Accessing communities from other instances is flaky
Good news is that there is shoddy workaround. Say you want to access c/gaming
from beehaw.org. Enter the full url https://beehaw.org/c/gaming
in your search, it won't show up, click search ~~a couple times~~ then wait a sec, then enter just gaming
and it pops up magically.
No high quality mobile apps
There's jerboa
for Android and mlem
for iOS. Both are under heavy development. Thankfully the website works fine on mobile...mostly.
PS: I'm not a lemmy maintainer, just a hobbyist self-hoster and professional Rust developer trying the fediverse as much as y'all are :)
It's quite likely that your subscribe went through, mind sharing your findings by looking at the network tab in developer console on your browser.
It simply makes communities on other instances show up in your subscribed feed. Similar to how you join a subreddit (the difference on lemmy is that the subreddit aka community is hosted on a separate instance).
My suspicion is that its websocket related, I've seen similar behavior when testing locally. The best you can do is maybe browse github for potentially relevant issues and see if you can help, otherwise please just be patient while things get more stable :)
Today seems to work better. TL;DR: to fix subs, unsubscribe, wait 20-60 seconds, subscribe.
I tried un- and re-subscribing to [email protected] (no pause) and grabbed the websocket messages.
Unsub
Sent:
Received:
op: FollowCommunity
response withdata.community_view.subscribed
=NotSubscribed
Resubbed
Sent:
op: FollowCommunity
msg withdata.follow
=true
Received:op: FollowCommunity
response withdata.community_view.subscribed
=NotSubscribed
Then I tried on a small sub (to test a theory) and I got two responses, the second being shortly after the first but saying
.subscribed
=Subscribed
.Then I retired for !rust with a delay between unsub and resub and this time I got the two responses, the first being the normal
NotSubscribed
response and the secondSubscribed
coming 22 seconds later.I'm wondering if there's some batch processing or something that I was falling foul of by being too quick.