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.
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.
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.
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…
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!