Rules
The rules may be more established as time goes on, but it's important to have a foundation to work on.
1. Follow the rules of Lemmy.world - These rules are the same as Mastodon.world's rules, which can be found here.
2. Include a community title and description in your post title. - A following example of this would be New Communities - A place to post new communities all over Lemmy for discovery and promotion.
3. Follow the formatting. - The formatting as included below is important for people getting universal links across Lemmy as easily as possible.
Formatting
Please include this following format in your post:
[link text](/c/community@instance.com)
This provides a link that should work across instances, but in some cases it won't
You should also include either:
or instance.com/c/community
FAQ:
Q: Why do I get a community not found message?
A: At least one user in an instance needs to search for a community before it gets fetched. Searching for the community will bring it into the instance and it will fetch a few of the most recent posts without comments. If a user is subscribed to a community, then all of the future posts and interactions are now in-sync.
*Q: Why isn't the link working on kbin.social?"
A: This is a community for Lemmy, there is a universal link for Lemmy, but when this universal link works on kbin. It turns out like the below.
https://kbin.social/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world/
Simply replace the c with an m for kbin.social like shown below.
https://kbin.social/m/newcommunities@lemmy.world/
*Q: When I try to create a post, the circle just spins forever. Why is that? *
A: (This may be removed soon as it is seems to be happening less often now.) This is a current known issue with large communities. Sometimes it does get posted, but just continues spinning, but sometimes it doesn't get posted and continues spinning. If it doesn't actually get posted, the best thing to do is try later. However, only some people seem to be having this problem at the moment.
Cross-Posting
On Lemmy you can use the the built in cross post function to link viewers of one post to another. This lets users quickly see what people in other communities are saying and also has the potential to expose someone to something new. For community owners this is a great way to go about seeding discussion in new communities.
Example:
Thanks to this post and creator for this tip!
I tried doing that with a previously unsearched/unsubscribed community as a test on my own instance, and I got a
404: couldnt_find_communityerror when clicking the link. As you stated, it seems like in most cases that special link will not work unless someone has previously manually searched for the same community in your instance.I think I'd rather link directly to the instance for the community than get a 404 error. For most people, getting the 404 will just deter them from proceeding further.
Perhaps it would be best to include both links in a post?
Yes, it would best to use two links, that is why I said you should include the following format in the post, then said it gets a 404 sometimes, and to include one of the other formats too that you can use while searching, if it wasn't searched for already
Sorry, I must have missed that point in my first read through. I think we will see a lot of changes with Lemmy as development proceeds. It seems like that particular 404 is being generated in the Lemmy software rather than the webserver portion because that is not a standard 404 message. So instead of generating that message it could probably be fixed to kick off a "manual" search instead of generating an error. We will have to leave that to the Lemmy devs though.