@Blaze@reddthat.com Do you know why people on startrek.website cannot see certain communities on e.g. hexbear.net?

I did not think it was even possible to block specific communities from an instance. I thought what Farid might be referring to is a change where some communities are allowed to be set to “local-only”, so that only those with an account specifically from that instance can make posts there. Then again, hexbear.net/c/chapotraphouse says that its Visibility is set to “Public” (even though I thought they said that they looked forward to changing it - did that never happen?).

Various methods of linking that I’ve tried - explained in this guide post (btw @abfarid@startrek.website that is a neat community to subscribe to!:-) - such as startrek.website/c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net does not work for me, and the bang syntax never auto-completes it? Even this kind of searching startrek.website/search?q=!chapotraphouse&type=Co… for the community name does not work either (despite ChapoTrapHouse specifically saying that it should in its sidebar), nor clicking Communities, select All rather than Local, and type e.g. “chapo”. So it is not merely that nobody has subscribed yet - this instance seems somehow to really not be aware of that community?

Perhaps this is a (new?) style of “partial defederation”, where not the users but the communities on an instance are excluded. But that cannot be right either, b/c e.g. startrek.website/c/Technology@hexbear.net works (it has no visible posts, though that is normal behavior whenever nobody has ever subscribed to it before from a particular instance, in this case star trek, but if one of us subscribed then roughly a day later the posts should be there - for comparison, startrek.website/c/Technology@lemmy.world also works and shows the posts). Though neither startrek.website/c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net nor startrek.website/c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net work. So some communities on hexbear.net seem to be selectively excluded from federation on startrek.website.

To be clear I am not complaining - this is actually a helpful protection against users going into those unawares, as in: if they refuse to mark their communities as local then they should not be surprised when others make that choice for them - though I am curious.:-)