Are you testing from there? I'm surprised any link works, local subscriber or not. I went to Moist, and could see that 'The Onion' community had been resolved, but when I tried the link from a 'trendingcommunities' list on Moist, it didn't work, because mbin puts everything at '/m/' rather than '/c/'.
If you're testing from lemmy, I made a video the other day of what happens when you click on a link that doesn't already have a subscriber. It errors at first, but if you wait for the backend to complete everything required, a refresh will bring it through.
I can't test what happens with mbin, because instances don't typically resolve remote objects if you're not logged in, and I don't have a mbin account. It's possible that a 'wait-and-refresh' brings it through, but - like I say - I'm surprised any link works on there.
things may have changed recently, but the /c /m thing is kinda of irrelevant if the links are crafted the right way
communities dont 'just exist' in every instance they are created as they are 'seen'. if a user clicks on a link with the expectation it exists (direct to /c/%com, /m/%com) it will fail with 404 if it has never been seen
if the link is crafted to push through the search of the instance, the user can get to the community regardless if the instance has ever 'seen' the community.
if the link is crafted to push the the search function, it works no matter what:
For lemmy, the links are already crafted the 'right way'. It's what I was testing for when I made the video I linked to (the instance I was on was brand new, so it had never heard of the community link I clicked on, but it still worked).
I don't think crafting all links to point to a search endpoint is the correct solution. It'll do what's required for mbin, but I suspect the vast majority of users are on lemmy. For them, it's an extra step to get where they want, from a page that's either filled with extraneous info (every time TIL has been mentioned for your link) or will say 'no results' until the backend has completed its tasks.
Oh, well, I don't know when lemmy changed then (and presumably diverged from mbin) - this community's been running and using the same link format for about 7 months.
Fediverse communities don't really exist - lemmy has communities, and other apps have things that are similar in some ways but not in others (e.g. mastodon groups, peertube channels, and mbin magazines). There's lots of little differences that limit full interoperability, meaning that lemmy doesn't have as much connection with the wider Fediverse as perhaps it should. This is more a subject best addressed by app developers than me. I can't solve problems like that with a list of links.
In other areas, I've done what I can - I made a virtual lemmy community that natively features posts from mastodon accounts that haven't even heard of lemmy. Pretty cool, I thought, but no-one gives a fuck. So I resent the idea that lemmy being closed-off in any way is something I'm indifferent to.
I just clicked the 'search' link I just made from lemmy.world, btw. The link to the actual community is 4th from the top, buried between cross-posts and mentions. Moreover, the likelihood that 'search' post work on every lemmy app is pretty low. Right now, these list work on any of the multitude of front-ends or mobile apps you can get for lemmy, which is a minor triumph in and of itself. Changing them to work for mbin would just break something else. Even if it didn't, they'd work on lemmy and mbin, and then they'd be some new app (who haven't hard-coded search in the same place) that they wouldn't work for, and we'd be back at square one.
I suspect that ActivityPub is too broad and too permissive for that. For every post on lemmy, it already sends out two different activities - one for lemmy, one intended for mastodon. On lemmy, a new post is a 'Page', on mastodon it's a 'Note', on PeerTube it's a 'Video'. Lemmy understands all 3 (more or less), but my feeling is that if Fediverse apps are inter-acting well together, it's largely because someone hacked it.
The thing the Fediverse most reminds me of is DLNA (aka uPnP Video) - it's supposed to be universal, but if you ever saw the config for a DLNA server, you'd see it had to do different things for every different brand of client.
communities dont ‘just exist’ in every instance they are created as they are ‘seen’. if a user clicks on a link with the expectation it exists (direct to /c/%com, /m/%com) it will fail with 404 if it has never been seen
On Lemmy, it will just exist when you reload that 404 page.
I happened to see on another post that mbin will resolve links beginning with a '!' - I signed up to moist to check, and they go to the '/search?q=' link. This is an mbin specific thing, so maybe I misunderstood when you mentioned crafting links to go there.
I changed all the links today to use these ! links. This is how the very first post was on this community incidentally, and the very first comment was someone saying they don't work on Jerboa. This is the official lemmy app, so I changed to the /c/ version. Since then, Jerboa has changed to support them, and I tried the links on other apps, and other front-ends, and they all work.
Future posts in this community will use this link format, so they'll be compatible with lemmy, mbin, and whatever other fediverse apps support it (I tried with Mastodon, but I don't think they like relative links of any kind).
(shit, sorry, replied from the bot account - freamon)
i love these posts, and using them to find new communities to subscribe to.
im really just rooting for the most universal access method, which this seems to be. i specifically requested mbin be modified for this reason as it used to utilize the @comm@host instead of !comm@host, eliminating a differentiating pathway.
again, thank you for helping us all link together!