Hello,

Quick video to demonstrate the things that happen when you access a community that your instance has no prior knowledge of.

  1. WebFinger the account @community@instance to get it’s url - turns out it’s at instance/c/community but it could be anywhere really.

  2. GET the details of the community

  3. GET the details of the site

  4. GET the contents of the community’s outbox (typically the original Announcements for the last 20 posts)

  5. GET the user details for the uploader of each post (you can see it get /u/admin from lemmon.website, but it would have to get the details for the other 19 posts too)

  6. Get the list of moderators and their user details

  7. Get the subscriber count

You can see that lemmy-ui gives the backend about 1 second to do this, but - for this case - it took about 12 seconds to be ready.

So the ‘error: unknown’ message is really unhelpful, but you’re likely to get it if you click on link in these lists, and your instance hasn’t heard of the community before. It’s not ideal, but if wait 10 or so seconds and press refresh, it should have come through.

Once you get to the community and press Subscribe, the UI is actually a bit more useful in indicating that it’s not an instant process. It’s maybe about 30 seconds for the Accept to come back (because the remote community has to get your user details first), and a few more seconds for lemmy to process it, so you have to do a dance of Subscribe, wait a minute or 2, Subscribe again if it’s still at ‘Pending’.

Hope this helps, freamon.