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.

  • Ategon@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    7 months 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@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      7 months 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.

      • grgr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        Since lemmy.world is disabled - but on the site - I guess it was a deliberate decision by the instance admins, right? So starting an initiative here would not be that successful I guess.

        That’s a pity, because more big instances taking part would be key and the fact that they actively decided against instead of just not being aware does not give a positive outlook…

        However, I agree with @ategon@programming.dev that this does not mean the whole thing is pointless but on the contrary is very useful for the communities on the instances taking part.

        • AchtungDrempels@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          7 months 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.

          • grgr@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            7 months ago

            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.

            Absolutely second that! However, if not incorporated in the lemmy landing page as tip with different links, I don’t see that info spreading much…

            • AchtungDrempels@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              0·
              7 months 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!