Discoverability of communities across instances

ginerel, 1 month ago

lemmyverse.net/communities also aggregates Lemmy only.

Die4Ever, 2 months ago

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951

Bezier, 2 months ago

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.

AchtungDrempels, 1 month 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?

Ategon, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

As more people use 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

grumpy_graph, 2 months ago

deleted_by_author

Ategon, 2 months ago

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

AchtungDrempels, 1 month ago

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.

Ategon, 1 month ago

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

AchtungDrempels, 1 month ago

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.

grumpy_graph, 1 month ago

deleted_by_author

AchtungDrempels, 1 month ago

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.

grumpy_graph, 1 month ago

deleted_by_author

AchtungDrempels, 1 month ago

I just saw that at least lemmy.world and lemm.ee actually do actually point users to a crawler from their “Getting started / Lemmy guide” which is cool, but also quite easy to miss. Anyway, good job .world and lemm.ee!

mozz, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I subscribe to /m/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 /m/trendingcommunities@feddit.nl that's a little less awkward to make use of; IDK what that would look like though

AchtungDrempels, 2 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.