this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024

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Discoverability of communities across instances (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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

[+] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's not even 50 instances on there though, and almost half of them seem to be disabled. Not just .world, also .ml, slrpnk, feddit.de - that is a huge chunk of the lemmyverse. I don't know if that is the solution, certainly not as it is now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Even with the disabled instances, communities that get added onto there reach a much larger section of people than external community browsers do as casual users that just check the site once a day or something and don't pay attention to external sites can still stumble on them without knowing the federate site exists or needing to know explicit community names

Ideally more instances would get added onto there but its still fine like this. Been getting some nice interactions and starting activity on new programming.dev communities

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, it is certainly better than nothing, that is absolutely fair, and probably makes a lot of sense to use for people who can.

Sadly i can't, because "my" community is on .world. I used a similar "relay" type thing some time ago, but not sure how well it worked.

[+] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, i also don't think it's pointless.

Those instances opting out (if they did) probably has a good reason.

I just think it would be good to point users to some kind of crawler that knows all the communities. Searching communities under "all" from within lemmy is almost misleading. I feel like it mainly also affects smaller instances and communities.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I subscribe to [email protected] 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 [email protected] that's a little less awkward to make use of; IDK what that would look like though

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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?