Do you have a friend who has joined a different server and you want to follow them, but their account doesn't show up in searches?
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Do you have a friend who has joined a different server and you want to follow them, but their account doesn't show up in searches?
The surest way to find each other's profiles is to exchange account addresses with your friend and paste these into the search box in your app or server. You can find your account address on your profile page:
Pasting an account address causes that account's profile to show up on your server, you can then just click "Follow".
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Do you have a friend who has joined a different server and you want to follow them, but their account doesn't show up in searches?
The surest way to find each other's profiles is to exchange account addresses with your friend and paste these into the search box in your app or server. You can find your account address on your profile page:
Pasting an account address causes that account's profile to show up on your server, you can then just click "Follow".
@FediTips I do wish the standard user search function would force a query on the remote server if the username looks like it belongs on another server. E.G. I enter "user@brandnewserver.net", search says "I don't know about that user, but let me reach out to brandnewserver.net and see if the user exists", rather than failing. Little pain points like these feed into the mainstream narrative that the fediverse is complicated. I want to be able to say "No it's not", with conviction.
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@FediTips I do wish the standard user search function would force a query on the remote server if the username looks like it belongs on another server. E.G. I enter "user@brandnewserver.net", search says "I don't know about that user, but let me reach out to brandnewserver.net and see if the user exists", rather than failing. Little pain points like these feed into the mainstream narrative that the fediverse is complicated. I want to be able to say "No it's not", with conviction.
"I enter "user@brandnewserver.net", search says "I don't know about that user, but let me reach out to brandnewserver.net and see if the user exists", "
If you're entering the full account address, that's exactly what it does do. Even if your server has never heard of the other server, it forces your server to contact the other server straight away and check for such a user.
Do you mean searching for a partial account address?
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"I enter "user@brandnewserver.net", search says "I don't know about that user, but let me reach out to brandnewserver.net and see if the user exists", "
If you're entering the full account address, that's exactly what it does do. Even if your server has never heard of the other server, it forces your server to contact the other server straight away and check for such a user.
Do you mean searching for a partial account address?
@FediTips I deployed this Mastodon server so I got to watch it start with 0 known users. If I enter https://brandnewserver.net/@user, it works. But some clients don't seem to support this. If I enter "@user@brandnewserver.net", that doesn't work because it's performing a search of known users. I wasn't able to enter a profile URL into Mona or some of the other clients I've seen, so had to go to the web interface to search for users. That's not intuitive at all. Has this improved / am I wrong about how it works?
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@FediTips I deployed this Mastodon server so I got to watch it start with 0 known users. If I enter https://brandnewserver.net/@user, it works. But some clients don't seem to support this. If I enter "@user@brandnewserver.net", that doesn't work because it's performing a search of known users. I wasn't able to enter a profile URL into Mona or some of the other clients I've seen, so had to go to the web interface to search for users. That's not intuitive at all. Has this improved / am I wrong about how it works?
If your instance is configured correctly and federating, it should work with any valid account address ( @ user @ example.com ) as long as you haven't defederated that account's instance.
Usually it should work on the first go with a slight delay, but sometimes it takes a few repeated attempts.
It also works with the web address of the account, I'm not sure why your instance would be working with one address format but not the other?
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If your instance is configured correctly and federating, it should work with any valid account address ( @ user @ example.com ) as long as you haven't defederated that account's instance.
Usually it should work on the first go with a slight delay, but sometimes it takes a few repeated attempts.
It also works with the web address of the account, I'm not sure why your instance would be working with one address format but not the other?
@FediTips Interesting. It's possible that the way my various clients are searching is just unusual. I mostly had this problem before I imported my own followers, at a time when my instance wasn't federating with other instances yet. I imagine that was a big part of the problem.
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@FediTips Interesting. It's possible that the way my various clients are searching is just unusual. I mostly had this problem before I imported my own followers, at a time when my instance wasn't federating with other instances yet. I imagine that was a big part of the problem.
Yeah, I can't speak on behalf of every client
The web client is maybe the best reference point for testing Mastodon features as it supports (almost) all of them. If it isn't working at all in the web client then there may be a configuration issue.
Having said that, sometimes it won't work at all if the other instance isn't responding. Some instances are very slow or go down often, and these may not respond to requests for accounts. In such cases you have to try again later.
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Do you have a friend who has joined a different server and you want to follow them, but their account doesn't show up in searches?
The surest way to find each other's profiles is to exchange account addresses with your friend and paste these into the search box in your app or server. You can find your account address on your profile page:
Pasting an account address causes that account's profile to show up on your server, you can then just click "Follow".
@FediTips This doesn't work if one of our instances blocked the other's instance, right?
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@FediTips This doesn't work if one of our instances blocked the other's instance, right?
Yeah, it doesn't show any results if the other instance is blocked. (Even if it did show results, you wouldn't be able to follow them if there's an instance-wide block in place.)
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