1y ago

Discoverability of communities across instances

If the spirit of the fediverse is to spread everything across small instances, then i think it would be really important to make communities, especially niche communities, easier to discover across instances. Since it is not planned to crawl federated instances community catalog, i think instance admins, or maybe even the lemmy software itself, should point more obvious to services like https://lemmyverse.net/communities to search for communities instead of the lemmy (or mbin, piefed) internal search. It's been a while since i have seen someone talk about these community crawler services.

Instances that don't federate a remote community won't even list this community in the user profile of a moderator.

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As more people use https://lemmy-federate.com more niche communities will show up in most large instances by default
Imo its the ideal solution since it populates the posts in the all feed for people who don't know about the site to still see
- Yeah, disabled accounts means the instance doesn't have a bot from the site on their instance so the site can't federate them. Usually this would be not accepting the user application
  Lemmy.world isnt in the site but most other large instances are
I subscribe to !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl which I find rather nice
mbin also has a sidebar "random communities" which is quite useful and I moderately often click on stuff from it
It feels like maybe there should be a federated-community option like !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl that's a little less awkward to make use of; IDK what that would look like though
- Thanks for the trendingcommunities tip, subscribed it. It uses the lemmyverse crawler, so that is really good.
  The problem with the mbin "random C's" is, i guess, that it'll only ever show c's which are already being federated, so already discoverable from the internal search.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951
Since it is not planned to crawl federated instances community catalog
Isn't that issue about crawling content?
Also, the devs have mentioned fetching community lists before, unless I remember wrong.
- Isn’t that issue about crawling content?
  I don't think so. Dessalines even suggest one should rather use f.e. lemmyverse to search for not-yet-federated communities, but how does a lemmy user even find out about services like this?

12 comments