submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by to c/fediverse@piefed.social
 

I'm the maintainer of Catodon, which offers both microblogging and forums (Lemmy-compatible communities), and we noticed that discoverability is not the threadiverse's strongest point: Our server only showed forums/communities that it "knew" because someone from the server already followed them. In Reddit it's easy to see if there is a community for a subject you care about; on the Fediverse it's not that easy.

So I looked at what indexes there are, and most were focused in Lemmy - lemmyverse.net has added MBin and PieFed explorers, but I was looking for something that covers more platforms, and is a unified directory, rather than per-platform only. Maybe there is something that I missed, but I didn't find what I was looking for: a directory for the threadiverse. So I decided to build it.

The Threadiverse Catalog lists forums/communities from Catodon, Discourse, Friendica, Lemmy, Mbin, Mobilizon, NodeBB and PieFed. It hasn't been online for many days, so it hasn't indexed everything, but we already list over 20.000 forums/communities. If there are any bugs or other issues, please let me know.

We built this primarily for Catodon, and on our latest release (26.10.0 "Bongo Cat") users have access to its results through the in-app Search and Explore features, but it's open for everyone to use. It's open source and written in Go. Other projects are also welcome to use it.

Cheers =)

#threadiverse #fediverse #catodon #discourse #friendica #lemmy #mbin #mobilizon #nodebb #piefed

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[โ€“] [S] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

We do! But private forums only federate with other Catodon servers atm. I will look into Hubzilla's communities again - I think I saw they had some incompatibilities and that's why I left them out, but I may remember wrong. Will check it out later today, thanks for the suggestion.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    hubzilla is a fork of friendica so the differences shouldnt be too many.

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  • [โ€“] [S] 3 points 1 day ago

    It's more complicated than that: Hubzilla was forked from Friendica in 2012; Friendica adopted ActivityPub in 2018. So they have different implementations.

    I re-checked, and not listing Hubzilla by default has valid reasons. The main one is that, unlike other platforms, hubzilla servers do not declare their communities, so our crawler can't see them. Also federation is opt-in, so many of the communities in that directory are not reachable.

    We will include Hubzilla communities, but only after specific suggestions through the form we have on the site.

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